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New York City Big List
Overview and Background
The Big List is a powerful marketing tool for music and arts presenters, organizations, and artists in New York City. We invite the participation of your institution.
This project originated in the spring of 2007 when GEMS met with Enertex Marketing to discuss ways in which our direct mail efforts could be more effective. Enertex is based in New York, and has been a direct mail list broker and marketing consultant to such organizations as Carnegie Hall, the New York Philharmonic, and the New York City Opera, among hundreds of others, for over twenty years. We asked if there was some well-organized, inexpensive, and fair way we might share mailing lists in our early music community of performers, presenters, and advocates.
It turns out that assisting local non-profit arts organizations like ours in the development and creation of such master mailing lists is one of their specialties. Such lists are commonly referred to as “Big Lists.” They had already developed Big Lists for a number of arts communities in other cities in the country, including Boston, New Orleans, and San Francisco. We thought it was time that the New York City music and arts community collaborates to develop a similar Big List of our own! This year, we are expanding the concept for the coming season by including some of the City’s larger presenting organizations including BEMF, as well as other non-music arts organizations. Our goal is that the Big List can help all kinds of arts communities expand their audiences and outreach.
In a nutshell, here’s how it works:
1. Annually, each group transmits its current mailing list to Enertex, a bonded, professional list brokerage house. You may submit as many or as few names as you wish, including or suppressing donors, prime subscribers, family, etc. as you wish. There are no restrictions on your continued use of your own, in-house list. You should maintain your list throughout the year, adding and deleting names as your audience expands or contracts, to re-submit to the Big List the next year.
2. Enertex assembles all the lists, and runs a master merge/purge to identify “multiples” (names on two or more lists). You are then given a useful analysis report of your list compared to the other lists.
3. Enertex then processes the combined list against the National Change of Address (NCOA) database, and purges undeliverables, duplicates, as well names on anyone’s “Do Not Mail” list. Once compiled, you are then free to use the Big List for your mailings.
To provide an incentive to contribute as many names as possible, and to fairly accommodate large vs. small organizations, the number of names you may use is equal to the number of names you submit, times the number of participating groups. For example:
If you contribute 1,500 names, and there are 20 groups in the consortium,
you are entitled to 20 * 1,500 = 30,000 names.
Consequently, you can do one mailing of 30,000, or three mailings of 10,000,
or 6 mailings of 5,000, etc. to the Big List.
The Big List is available to all participating groups for one full year, at which point each group can either opt out, or again submit their own updated mailing lists for the following year's Big List.
Financial considerations:
1. There is an initial Big List set-up fee for input, merge/purge, address verification via NCOA, etc. As part of its mission, GEMS will fund a major share of this effort, and act as coordinator for the List (we do not receive or store any names). A small contribution of $150 is required of each group.
2. Once the list is compiled, costs associated with output (i.e. list extraction, printing, postage, etc.) will be the responsibility of each individual organization. The fees are $125 (for extraction and conversion to typical mailing house formats) plus $2/per thousand names extracted, although fees may vary depending on the size and complexity of each extraction. These are “market rates” for any professionally-managed mailing.
Our goal is to have mailing lists from participating organizations in Enertex’s offices by July 15th, and be able to use the 2011 New York City Big List by early August.
Big Lists have been very successful. Arts organizations are reporting higher rates of return as compared to prior “competitive” environments. Further, your overall costs go down since an efficient, professional firm is doing the list maintenance and periodic NCOA checking, and you’re not paying postage for undeliverable mail.
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