11 Nonprofit Groups Win Honors for Direct-Marketing Efforts

The Direct Marketing Association, in New York, announced the winners of its 78th annual International Echo Awards, which honor businesses, charities, and other groups for creative and successful direct-mail and interactive marketing campaigns. Eleven nonprofit groups were among the winners, including several groups that received silver awards, or second place:

• American Leprosy Missions, a Greenville, S.C., group that offers care to people around the world suffering from leprosy, Buruli ulcer, and other related ailments, won for its campaign to increase awareness of leprosy and to attract gifts of $100 or more to commemorate the group’s 100th anniversary. The group focused its appeal on donors who in the past gave at least $100. It sent packages designed to make people understand what it is like to be afflicted with leprosy, which causes people to lose feeling in their hands and feet. The appeals included clear polyester bags with a single sock; an instruction card asked recipients to make a fist, place the sock over it, and try to perform simple tasks such as opening envelopes without using their fingers. The package attracted gifts from 9.5 percent of recipients and the average gift was $277.86.
• Save the Children, an international organization that works to alleviate child poverty, won the silver award for a campaign by its London affiliate called Rewrite the Future, which sought to garner support from previous donors for an effort to protect eight million children living in war zones from injury and sexual exploitation.

• For its appeals, the charity created mock school-exercise books riddled with bullet holes. It applied the same technique to its magazine inserts, which featured a class photograph taken in South Africa covered with bullet holes.

  Save the Children created a section on its Web site, that features drawings by Sudanese children that recount their experiences with warfare, often showing machine guns and planes. When people click on the illustrations, they see short stories about the children who produced the drawings.

  The campaign produced $124,000 in revenue, and 6 percent of the people who visited the Rewrite the Future part of the site donated online. Save the Children said the campaign triggered many emotional responses, and one schoolteacher requested 120 exercise books to use for his classes.

• World Vision, another group that focuses on fighting child poverty, won for its effort to persuade donors to give money to pay for the shipping and distribution of drugs that treat intestinal worms. The organization, in Federal Way, Wash., said it focused the appeals on older women who had given in the past and were conservative in their political views.

• Looking to reverse disappointing rates of response to its past campaigns to attract such donations, World Vision created a striking letter with a bright orange side flap that displayed a photograph of a small boy with a distended stomach.

  On the other side of the flap were pictures of different types of worms and brief descriptions of the illnesses caused by them.

  Bold pullout quotes on the letters said, “WORMS. They can consume a child’s body, causing terrible pain, a swollen belly, malnutrition, and death,” and “Your gift of just $14 multiplies 13 times to provide $182 of lifesaving medicine.”

  The letter attracted donations from nearly 7 percent of the people who received it, nearly twice the share of responses garnered by similar efforts. The appeal collected $49.10 per donor on average, a higher average than all but one other campaign, and generated $550,326.