Reaching Out: Christian Appalachian Project tries to expand its fundraising base

To keep fulfilling its mission to help people living in some of the country’s poorest and most underdeveloped regions, the Christian Appalachian Project knew it had to modernize its direct response fundraising.

The charity, based in Lancaster, KY, raises $16 million a year, almost three-quarters of it through direct mail and telemarketing. It has an active donor file with 750,000 names, including 30,000 major contributors. But it realized that to grow at all, it had to move beyond its core donors – women age 60 and above.

CAP is a social service agency serving people in Kentucky and other Appalachian states with a variety of programs, ranging from community development to crisis intervention to education.

Its housing program was set up to rehabilitate homes with inadequate plumbing and other deplorable conditions, similar to what former president Jimmy Carter’s Habitat for Humanity does in blighted urban areas across the country.

CAP also provides adult education, services for the disabled and elderly, summer camps for youth and other programs. Many of the counties it serves are considered among the top-25 “most distressed” counties in the United States by the federal government, with huge concentrations of people living below the poverty level.

CAP was founded in 1964 by Father Ralph W. Beiting, a Roman Catholic priest who decided he had to do something about the grinding poverty he first observed as a seminarian in the mountains of eastern Kentucky. He personally designed the group’s first direct mail program in 1975.

Those early efforts were crude by today’s standards. Essentially, Beiting sent appeal letters to presumed Catholics – people with Irish- and Italian-sounding last names – in the white pages listings of telephone directories in New York, Philadelphia and Boston. But that was only the start.

“Between 1980 and 1990, our income from direct response fundraising increased by nearly 200%,” says Sue Sword, CAP’s director of national direct response.

By 1998, the charity realized that its fundraising program was stagnant, in large part because of the aging of its core base. At that point, it began overhauling its mail and telemarketing efforts, and refining their tone, all with an eye toward reaching a new target group – baby boomers.

“We’ve tried to take a more positive approach with our appeal letters,” says Sword. “Instead of stating how bad things are, we try to concentrate on telling people about the positive results we’ve gotten and the accomplishments.”

To do that, notes Sword, CAP began “tracking our participants and what actually happens with our clients and what kind of successes we’re having with them. And we’re trying to relate that not only to our donors but to our acquisition prospects as well.”

The reason, she explains, is because baby boomers and similar donors “are more interested in results.”

In a letter to members late last year, Beiting questioned his own work. “As I look back over half a century,” he wrote, “I can’t help but think to myself, `What have I accomplished?’ After all, there is still poverty, still abuse, still neglect in Appalachia. Has my work been in vain?”

Further down, in the 7-by-11-inch letter on plain white paper, he wrote, “Remember Henrietta and her dream of a college education? She’d been trapped in the all-too-familiar cycle of poverty, abuse and loss of hope. Thanks to you, we restored hope to her heart and helped her achieve her dream.

“There are so many others I’ve written to you about this year. Together we’ve changed lives and fulfilled dreams.”

The same letter contains an issue of CAP’s single-sheet newsletter “Appalachian Mountain News” in blue ink on white paper.

CAP typically sends out about eight donor mailings per year, all in the range of 500,000 to 600,000 pieces. On top of that, it mails out about 250,000 acquisition letters each week to lists it exchanges with other organizations. “We try to target people who we think will be a specific match for what our appeals are all about,” explains Sword. CAP donor mailings pull in about an 8.3% response, with an average gift of $14.

“We’re a premium-type mailer and we’ve tried to make sure our premiums are more useful,” Sword continues.

In acquisition mailings, CAP sends out return address labels. In donor mailings not only does it send out name labels but also books about the charity’s mission.

“Appalachian Reflections” – a new book scheduled to mail Feb. 11 – is a 120-page publication recounting the personal experiences of agency volunteers in the field and how their experiences in Appalachia have changed their lives, as well as testimony to the work CAP has been doing.

“We have gathered enough stories to do several issues that Father Beiting has written,” says Sword. “He has about 11 under his belt now.”

On top of its regular donor mailings, CAP also sends out a high-dollar mailing to 30,000 of its top donors, which raises about $1 million and completely funds the organization’s home repair efforts.

In fact, the remainder of CAP’s donations come from in-kind gifts of educational supplies, housing materials, safety supplies and the like from a handful of companies.

To a lesser extent, the agency is upgrading its telemarketing efforts, which it primarily uses twice a year to bring new donors into its donors’ club. This summer, CAP will make its first-ever telemarketing effort to try to win back expired donors.

Like most other direct response-based charities, CAP is both enthusiastically and cautiously approaching fundraising through the Internet.

“We’re just about ready to make our Web site into a second-generation Web site and implement some fundraising,” says Sword.

CAP’s current Web site (www.Chrisapp.org) is a first-generation educational tool whose only fundraising component is a form donors can download and mail in.

“We’re going to put appeal letters on our Web site,” says Sword, “and we’re also we’re going to be using some e-fundraising. We’ve captured about 500 e-mail addresses from our donors and we’re going to be a sending our newsletter via e-mail.”

At this point. CAP is actively considering hiring an employee to specialize in electronic fundraising, says Sword.

“During the past four months we’ve made a big effort in this area,” says Sword. “We just began a plan that initially involves capturing e-mail addresses from our donors and we’re going to use those e-mail addresses to try to establish a more personal relationship with them, and have our appeal letters on it and notification of upcoming premiums.”

She adds, “Our Web address is put on every piece that goes out of here and we have made a concerted effort to capture e-mail addresses.”

She does admit, however, that the agency may be a little behind the curve when it comes to the Internet.

“You can sit down for one day and you’re behind,” she quips.

“Two years ago, nobody was even looking at the Internet for fundraising,” she says.

“But now, it’s just taken off tremendously and everybody is looking at what’s going to be happening in 10 years.”

“And,” she notes, “with the [expected] increase in mail costs, it will be a nice complement.”

CAP is putting its own spin on permission-based marketing, on which so much e-mail marketing relies.

“The general word,” from Sword’s vantage point, “is that if a donor has given you their e-mail address, then they’ve opted in. What we plan to do is notify donors of our intention and give them the opportunity to opt out.”

While CAP is still researching online fundraising, the charity has already begun reaping some benefits from the emerging type of Web sites that sell merchandise and then donate a portion of the proceeds to charities that are specified by the site’s shoppers.

“Throughout the holiday season we got checks from iGive. com [www.iGive.com], and recently we got a check from America Online’s new charitable site [www.helping.org],” says Sword. “It was a sizable one, too.”

Just the same, CAP isn’t rushing to jump onto the online bandwagon – at least not yet.

“Every day, two or three sites pop up and we’re trying to make some determinations of which direction we want to go,” she explains. “And we’re going to be safe and do some testing of our own before we actually pull someone from another Web site to our Web site.”

At present, CAP is in discussions with iGive, based in Evanston, IL, along with other sites. iGive went online last fall and has so far raised nearly $600,000 for all the charities it carries on its site, says iGive’s chief marketing officer Paul Bryant. An agreement with iGive could presumably expose CAP to a larger potential donor pool than it normally attracts, since the site generally caters to women between 20 and 49 with annual incomes starting at $50,000.

Against this backdrop, CAP has been researching not only what’s out there but also what other charities are doing on the Internet. Just the same, it hasn’t signed any deals deal yet with Web sites.