Nonprofit professionals share insights into acquisition-list selection strategies.

By Alicia Orr Suman

FS: What are your plans for testing in the future?
KC: We’re staying pretty conservative. Rarely have we found many of our test lists that work well. We have tried lists such as Time magazine; Smithsonian [magazine]; parts of the Reader’s Digest [file], etc., but with minimal success.

That’s not to say that we won’t try something out of the box again. We certainly could be more aggressive, but this seems to be what’s working for us; our file’s been growing about 9 percent to 10 percent a year for the past couple of years, and we’re pleased with that.