In the non-profit world like-minded organizations often share their mailing lists. Some people are unfamiliar with this process and may be upset about it. They think that one group gives its supporters’ contact information to another so that the second group retains those names and addresses, and maybe even passes them on. Sometimes people worry that their contact information will be spread like a virus to innumerable institutions. This is not the case.

I’d like to clarify what happens. Typically, one group provides another with the “one-time-only” use of an address. Only those who contribute to the second group are added to that organization’s list. This makes sense because what good would it do a group to have people on its list who do not support it?

At the RFC, we’ve gained many contributors at house parties and speaking engagements, at the large public events we’ve staged, and through personal contact. But during the early 1990’s I built the RFC mailing list primarily by sending letters describing my new effort to those whose names were on the mailing lists of other progressive projects. We reached at least two-thirds of our supporters for the first time via this method. Simply put, if we had not engaged in direct mail outreach there would be no RFC.

The RFC’s address list peaked at about 8000 contacts around 10 years ago. Since then we’ve struggled to maintain our list, but only a few of the “Old Left” generation of the 1930’s are still with us, and we’ve lost others to the recession. We strive to replace every address we lose, but during the last decade our list has shrunk to its current size of 6600.

Such relatively modest attrition is actually something to be proud of, but in hard times people can’t give as much, and the needs of our beneficiaries grow. So it is critical for us to expand our base of support now. Direct mail outreach remains far and away the most cost-effective method to do it. Therefore, we’ve participated in more mailing list exchanges recently, and even allowed one group to send to a portion of our list a mailing that explicitly stated the RFC was the source of the addresses.

Some of our supporters have gotten upset with us for doing list exchanges and I don’t want to keep secrets from our constituency. I want our entire community to know why we are engaging in this activity. We are doing this to meet the needs of our beneficiaries, and for the RFC’s survival. I hope you will understand if one of our own “outreach” packets trying to attract new contributors comes to you by mistake because your address is listed differently enough on other groups’ lists to slip by our computer program that removes duplicates. You could even do a good deed for us by passing it on to a friend.

However, I respect the wishes of our supporters. We already have a couple hundred donors who have asked us not to share their names with other organizations.

If you don’t want your address to be exchanged with other groups

please let us know by emailing us at info@rfc.org, calling 413-529-0063 or writing us at: RFC, 116 Pleasant St., Suite 348; Easthampton, MA 01027. We will honor your wishes.