The Check Is in the Mail

By Michael Kinsley

After the 1988 election, in a rage at George Bush's conduct, I was particularly susceptible to liberalish junk mail. What I hungered for was a group called something like Patriotic Americans for Flag Burning and Prison Furloughs. What I settled for was the likes of the American Civil Liberties Union, Handgun Control Inc. and my local public-television station. In the past few months, they have all been hitting me up for renewal. What's more, they have generously shared my name and address with other groups willing to gamble that a tender concern for the First Amendment or a fondness for British soap operas will tend to accompany a sympathy for elephants and dolphins or a passion to deny a raise to members of Congress.

Now, despite my best efforts to stoke them, the fires of rage have cooled. Was Roger Ailes the prisoner and Willie Horton the political strategist or the other way around? And what does it all have to do with starvation in Ethiopia, anyway? Yet, thanks to the peculiar economics of the direct-mail business, a heart that bleeds only sporadically and selectively is worse than a heart that doesn't bleed at all.

Here's why. Suppose Patriotic Americans for Flag Burning, etc., actually exists and sends you an invitation to join up for $25. The "package" will be full of goodies: a letter, a reply envelope, a card (too big for the envelope, with a pointless perforation so that half of it can be torn off and thrown away), a brochure and perhaps a little Taiwanese-made American flag to burn in the privacy of your home. Why all this stuff? Because you demand it. While trying to appeal to you with flattery for your intelligence and compassion, direct-mail packages are designed on the assumption that you're a self- indulgent idiot. Even environmental groups destroy thousands of extra trees, sating their members' hunger for superfluous paper.

As a result, even an inexpensive package will cost 10 cents to produce. Buying your name from Citizens for Massive Federal Subsidies to Decadent Art (which you joined last year) might cost Americans for Flag Burning another 6 cents, and mailing the package at bulk rate will be about a dime. Total: 26 cents. But if one person out of 100 responds to the package, that's considered an adequate return. So it's cost them $26 to extract your $25. Unless you send more, they're out a buck. Of course, the money spent finding you is lost whether you respond or not. But that's just the beginning. After waiting a decent interval -- though considerably short of the year you thought you signed up for -- they will begin trying to renew you. (When I did my taxes last year, I discovered I'd paid my annual public-television dues three times.) Renewal notices don't require buying the name (they own you already) and tend to be thinner on party favors, but they usually are personalized, which is expensive. They might cost 40 cents each. And it would not be unusual to send out ten of these before writing you off as a deserter. That's four bucks.

Worst of all, Americans for Flag Burning will have shared their false hopes of your generosity with other groups perhaps 30 times during a year. Not for free, of course. But the income to the name supplier is a cost to the name buyer, so from the general ideological perspective, it's a wash. And this might go on for three years before the computers figure out that you're not the soft touch they took you for. That's 90 more letters at 20 cents each (not counting name-rental costs), or $18. By sending in $25, you have cost groups to which you are generally sympathetic something like $22 ($18 plus $4) -- on top of the $26 they spent finding you in the first place.

The same loss-leader economics applies to all direct mail -- for magazines, delicious cheese products, whatever. In addition to the solicitation costs, commercial operations actually have to supply you with the product after you've signed up (and often a calculator or telephone or small sports car as a premium as well). These businesses, too, usually make money only if you reorder. But knowing that the money you send in doesn't even cover the cost of discovering your propensity to send in money grates more in the case of fund raising for charitable or political causes.

Other things grate as well. At their worst, some of these "cause" groups are totally the creations of direct-mail mills, which invent them for the very purpose of swallowing up most of the revenues in fund-raising costs and generating lists of contributors to sell. Even legitimate groups distort their agendas to emphasize "hot button" issues that will produce a better direct- mail response.

Direct-mail fund raising also leads groups to create or exploit bogeymen, to personalize the issue. Ted Kennedy's dream may have died, but it lives on in the nightmares of thousands of conservative donors. Liberal causes have lost Ed Meese and Robert Bork, but are trying (a bit desperately) to make do with David Duke, the former Klansman in the Louisiana state legislature.

And even the most admirable groups -- dedicated to honesty in government, high cultural standards and civic virtue in general -- seem to think most standards of integrity are suspended when it comes to raising money. Fake telegrams, phony opinion surveys, duplicitous "deadlines" and so on are almost universal in the business. The "emergency" that forces Citizens for (or Against) Dirty Rock Lyrics to ask reluctantly for more money, just two months after you signed up, was built into the group's budget all along.

What I may do, after renewing Handgun Control, is send five bucks to the National Rifle Association and a few groups like that. Then I'll lean back and let them spend many times that amount trying to squeeze more out of me. On the receiving end of the direct-mail business, torturing the opposition may be the way to get the most bang for your buck.