February 7, 2008 | Read Time: 2 minutes
For people who received one or more of the 19 billion catalogs mailed in the United States last year, a Web site called Catalog Choice now offers a way to request that their names be taken off particular catalogs’ mailing lists. The site, started in October, has already attracted more than 500,000 people who have requested that they stop receiving catalogs.
Catalog Choice is a project of the Ecology Center, in Berkeley, Calif., which runs the Web site, with help from the National Wildlife Federation and the Natural Resources Defense Council.
The Overbrook Foundation, in New York, started the project after several board members expressed interest in reducing the number of unwanted catalogs sent annually, says Daniel Katz, director of environmental programs at the foundation.
The Catalog Choice project has received roughly $700,000 in financial support from the Kendeda Fund, the Merck Family Fund, and the Overbrook Foundation.
Consumers who wish to receive fewer catalogs set up an account on the site, and select which catalogs they wish to stop receiving. Catalog Choice then passes that information on to the companies.
Some companies, such as Anthropologie and Office Depot, not only agree to remove customers from their lists, but also have an online merchant account with Catalog Choice, so that requests to unsubscribe from a catalog list can be integrated more easily into their own mailing programs.
But not every company acquiesces to the requests.
The Direct Marketing Association, with more than 3,600 business and nonprofit members, sent an e-mail message to its members in November instructing them to “just say no” to the forwarded opt-out requests.
In an attempt to put more public pressure on direct-marketing companies, Catalog Choice recently started to encourage people to speak out about which companies have refused to follow their opt-out requests.
As a result of the negative publicity, including quite a few heated blog comments, some retailers, such as the Potpourri Group, have started to explore ways to work with the program.
Mr. Katz says that while internal projections of public participation did predict that hundreds of thousands of people would sign up, “we did not project that they would come so rapidly and continually express interest.”
To get there: Go to http://www.catalogchoice.org.
