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There have been many great animal stars in the pantheon of television history — Lassie, Rin Tin Tin and Flipper, to name a few. The American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA) hopes to add Applesauce to those esteemed ranks. The brave mother dog is one of the stars of the ASPCA's first long-form DRTV spot, slated to launch nationally at the end of this month. The program is designed to acquire new monthly donors — a.k.a. “sustainers” — for the New York-based nonprofit, says Jo Sullivan, senior vice president of development. Sullivan oversees all of the association's fundraising efforts. For her, this is a dream job. Her background was in the agency world, working for firms like Moore Communications Group on packaged goods accounts like Life Savers candy and No Nonsense pantyhose. After spending a few years in Poland — where she did brand consulting for companies like Coty, Dannon Yogurt and R.J. Reynolds — she relocated to New York and campaigned to work for the ASPCA. “I harassed them for over a year with resumes until someone finally said ‘Bring her in for an interview,’” laughs Sullivan, who has two dogs of her own, a basset-beagle mix named Flash and a Lab mix named Mickey (both of whom made the trip to Poland). Direct talked with Sullivan recently about the ASPCA's foray into DRTV and the nonprofit's online and offline fundraising.

DIRECT: Why the leap into DRTV?

SULLIVAN: A couple of reasons. Our ‘Animal Precinct’ show — a sort of weekly docudrama that tells the stories of our humane law-enforcement officers in the Manhattan area — is one of the top-rated shows on [cable TV channel] Animal Planet. It's got tremendous visibility and has allowed the ASPCA to really put a face on animal cruelty. I can't even express the value that's had. We started finding that law-enforcement officers across the country were looking to us to figure out how to investigate an animal crime correctly. So we found we were truly making an impact in our own movement and we thought now was probably also the time to raise funds across that medium. We've also made a shift internally so that sustainers have become a pretty big part of our fundraising efforts. The next evolution of the sustainer program is alternative acquisition, and we thought we were set up correctly [to try] DRTV. [We've created] one 30-minute program. We're also doing 30- and 60-second spots.

DIRECT: What's the long-form program like?

SULLIVAN: We've got three stories of actual animals that have been rescued by either our humane law-enforcement officers or good Samaritans and have found themselves in need of long-term support from the ASPCA because of medical issues. In one, a dog named Applesauce was hit by a car. She dragged herself back to her doghouse and continued to nurse her puppies. Her owners didn't call or have anyone come care for her for over a week, and finally a neighbor called. Our humane enforcement officers found this poor angel of a dog with a broken spine. We were able to fuse it together and she's walking and doing wonderfully again. We brought she and her puppies back to the ASPCA. It's the story of how we were able to help her and the courage of this dog. She was in tremendous pain, unable to walk for over a week, and yet continuing to nurse and care for her babies. That story doesn't yet have an ending. It happened a month ago. There are two other stories, [including one about] a cat that was a victim of a grease fire in a kitchen and how we worked with her for over a year, [doing] skin grafts and a million other things to make her healthy. Now she's in a happy home in Pennsylvania. We follow those stories all the way through.

DIRECT: What will be the call to action in the spots?

SULLIVAN: We're talking about how monthly support will help us with these unpredictable cases we deal with every single day. We never know when a burn victim is going to come in, or an animal like Applesauce. The care can take three months, six months, a year. Having a sustainable, monthly, predictable amount of income allows us to not even bat an eye. There will be 800 numbers and there's also going to be a dedicated Web site for the DRTV special (www.myaspca.org). It will vary from our normal Web site a little. We will have follow-ups to the stories in the DRTV spots and continue to update people about animals that have long-term-stay needs at our shelter. There's always going to be a steady stream of information about where your money is needed today.

DIRECT: What percentage of your fundraising efforts are online?

SULLIVAN: We've had a successful year. We're hoping to end 2003 at between $550,000 and $600,000 [raised online], which is tremendous. It's still around 1% of our net income, but what we've found is a higher level of engagement with folks. More people are joining our legislative action team, where people are contributing stories of animals they've rescued. From a fundraising perspective it's an extra source of income and an alternative way to give. But more importantly, it's helping us build a community and keep people up to date on what we're doing with their money.

DIRECT: Do you find that a lot of people who donate through other mediums go to the Web site?

SULLIVAN: I do. We have a little over 150,000 e-mail addresses. What we're finding is people [who've shared their] e-mail addresses give us higher average gifts and give more frequently than those [who haven't]. My question is, are they giving us their e-mail addresses because they were already engaged and they want to share in a different way, or is the e-mail communications we're sending them driving their average gift and frequency? I'm not sure. But we do find our online donors are more valuable from a financial perspective.

DIRECT: How does the average donation online compare with offline?

SULLIVAN: Online we're hitting $36 to 38. Offline re-solicitation efforts [average] $26 and acquisition is about $19 or $20.

DIRECT: Are you doing e-mail newsletters to connect with members?

SULLIVAN: We do them once a week. We're starting to test taking the folks that aren't opening [e-mails] on a weekly basis and put them in test cells and mail them bimonthly. [We're also testing] dedicated URLs in renewal [mailings]. We have seven in our series. In the first renewal you get www.aspca.org/renew. The second is ‘renew2,’ the third ‘renew3.’ We encourage people offline to log on and give online and they can make their money go to work faster and harder. That's been very successful.

DIRECT: Do you see significant pass-along rates on any of your e-mails?

SULLIVAN: Yes. We have a campaign running online right now [called] ‘Sponsor a Shelter Pet for the Holidays.’ The forward rates on e-mails like that are tremendously high. We also featured our calendar as a sponsorship gift in lieu of membership and those things have been successful.

DIRECT: A few years ago, most of the ASPCA's online donations were unsolicited. Is that still the case?

SULLIVAN: No. We've been really successful at converting a decent portion of our house file to online giving. We're hoping to end the year from a net perspective at about $9.1 million. We'll raise about $4.7 million in renewals for 2003, and $50,000 of that came from offline donors logging on to the Web site and giving their gift to a dedicated URL. It doesn't sound like a lot of money, but we've really opened up the avenue for members and donors to have an alternative for giving. Of all the donors online, about a third are probably existing donors choosing to give in an alternative medium.

DIRECT: Offline, is your primary direct marketing medium still direct mail?

SULLIVAN: Definitely. We'll mail about 23 million pieces this year. We've held pretty steady. We had made changes early in the year due to the economic situation and the U.S.'s involvement overseas, but in the end we mailed as originally projected because we found we weren't directly affected by either event.

DIRECT: How many direct mail campaigns do you do each year?

SULLIVAN: We mail a lot. We have a renewal series that has seven mailings, an appeal series that has six mailings, and then our three premiums, which have three mailings each. We have a reinstatement program that goes hand in hand with acquisitions to try and reinstate lapsed donors. We're in the mail at least every other week.

DIRECT: What percentage of your mailings are for acquisition vs. retention?

SULLIVAN: From an acquisition perspective, by the end of [2003] we will have mailed 12.7 million pieces and we're going to renew at about a 1.4% response rate. In contrast, we mailed about 2.9 million total renewals and will renew at a 5.27% response rate. Once we acquire donors they are loyal and renew at very high rates. Our donors may not give their second gift until they've been on the file 16 to 18 months, so when I look at my 12-month attrition, it never looks as good as I'd like it to. But when I look at 24 months on the file, I really see the donors coming back in very steadily.

DIRECT: A couple of years ago the ASPCA switched over to doing calendar-based renewal mailings. How is that going?

SULLIVAN: It's very successful. What we've done is front-load the year so our renewals start in January. We omit anyone who has given a gift in the last quarter of the previous year and they go into a different delayed cycle. But basically anyone who has given a gift from January through September of any given year gets their next renewal Jan. 1. Anytime we have questions about it [from members], we explain the cost efficiencies of maintaining a calendar-based renewal system vs. expires and the ability to more efficiently talk to our members and donors, and we've had no problems. We increased our renewal income by 60% the first year we switched the program. It's really made the program much easier to manage.

DIRECT: How large is your membership file?

SULLIVAN: [For 2003] we'll end with about 785,000 active members. We count actives as anyone who has given $10 or more [over the last 24 months].

DIRECT: How does that compare with previous years?

SULLIVAN: It's about the same. We're not seeing tremendous growth. We're not growing the file by huge leaps and bounds but what we're doing is working hard within the file to increase average [gifts] and the number of gifts a donor gives. So we're not heavily investing in increased acquisitions but we're cleaning up the file and making sure the segments that are there are as profitable as possible.

DIRECT: Who is your typical donor?

SULLIVAN: Female, 65-plus. Seventy percent have a pet in their home and three in seven have a shelter pet, which is kind of nice. Most are college-educated and have a household income of $55,000 or more.

DIRECT: Do you have any special programs for high-end donors?

SULLIVAN: We do. We have a Founders Program mailing for high-end donors. It's just a little different language treatment. The program is mailed on cream linen with its own dedicated logo. These are folks who give $500 and higher — all the way to $10,000. We mail them a little less during the year. We don't send them premiums. But what you start finding is those folks really came from the low-dollar portion of the file through upgrades and they don't want to hear from you much differently. They really liked what they heard before, which is why they ended up giving us the $500 in the first place. So we've worked kind of hard to make sure the language we use doesn't change much.

DIRECT: Do you think the current economic climate has been difficult for nonprofits?

SULLIVAN: I really do. The ASPCA has been really blessed. For some reason, we just haven't seen the downturns some of my colleagues in other nonprofits have experienced. We're managing to hold our own in animal welfare.

DIRECT: Is brand confusion with other animal-related nonprofits an issue for the ASPCA?

SULLIVAN: It's tremendous. We go around and around about this all the time. We've gotten to a point where we've decided that the only way to stop the brand confusion is by spending millions and millions of dollars on a comprehensive advertising campaign to say, ‘This is what the ASPCA is. This is what your humane society is.’ And that's not efficient. That's not a way to help animals. So we're looking at other ways to better brand ourselves, to keep our message straight and consistent. We recognize the confusion is out there and when it's applicable and when we can do it we will try to eliminate it. But overall, the animal welfare movement understands there's confusion and we understand the donor dollars are better spent helping the animals. We'll do our best not to propagate that confusion, but we're not going to spend a fortune breaking it down either.