The entrepreneurial spirit of one Lackawanna priest arguably created America’s direct mail fundraising model.
When Father Nelson Baker took possession of his assignment as superintendent of St. Joseph’s Orphan Asylum and St. John’s Protectorate in 1882, the institution faced massive debt.
For almost forty years, these two charitable entities had been run roughshod in the Limestone Hill (later Lackawanna) area of Buffalo, then a growing factory town that faced all the social ills that characterized the Gilded Age. Creditors were demanding payment, immediate and in full, and public sentiment—already wary of Catholics—eyed the boys’ home and orphanage with suspicion.
For more than fifty years, Father Baker gave his all to the Lackawanna institutions. The result was close to miraculous: At his death, the combined assets of his Institutions was an estimated $25 million (over half a billion dollars today, adjusted for inflation).
They had also ballooned in services, becoming a federation of nonprofits—Our Lady of Victory Charities—with support from everyone from unwed mothers and their babies to unhoused adolescents.
“I haven’t the slightest idea how it was paid for,” Fr. Baker reportedly said. “It was the Mother of God who did it one way or another.”
Marian intercession notwithstanding, the success of Baker’s enterprises came from one practical development. Namely, an entrepreneurial spirit that arguably created America’s direct mail fundraising model.
Father Baker stanched the initial demand from credits using a mixture of his own capital — both monetary and social, from his time running a local feed store. With some time bought, Father Baker realized he needed funders. He had a name for his proto-giving society, the Association of Our Blessed Lady of Victory, but he had no donors. And so, he made a list.
More accurately, like many modern day fledgling direct mail programs, he acquired one. He wrote directly to every postmaster general in the United States, asking them to send him the names and addresses of any Catholic woman in their jurisdiction.
To this segment of prospective donors—identified by their affinity both to the Catholic religion but also assumed maternal instinct—Baker mailed an initial letter campaign calling for 25 cents annually. In response, donors would receive the intangible benefit of prayers and Masses said on their behalf, as well as regular updates on the orphans and life at Our Lady of Victory.
Donations flowed in, and stewardship mailings flowed out. As time drew on, these mailings morphed into the Annals of the Association of Our Blessed Lady of Victory, a quarterly newsletter for donors that mixed Catholic devotional articles with stories of charitable works and, unabashedly, calls for donations.
“The new building and all its improvements and accommodations will cost nearly $50,000,” read one of Baker’s Annals appeals from 1894. “We hope our good friends will not lag in their zeal but continue to assist us as generously in the future as in the past.”
Though not quite as direct as modern appeal language, the effect was similar. “His power to raise money was miraculous,” recorded Brother Stanislaus, one of Baker’s associates at the Institutions. “The institutions had no endowment or direct source of income, but the money came somehow in steady streams of contributions.”
While the Association continued its now-familiar work of solicitation and stewardship, Baker added an additional segmentation to his growing mailing apparatus: his fellow priests. “Rev. Dear Friend,” he wrote in a generic appeal tailored to men of the cloth. Like his “Catholic women” mailer, the priest letters saw success in growing his Association of donors.
Not even the dead were spared from Baker’s enthusiastic fundraising efforts. During a donor growth push, he encouraged existing donors to pay for memberships for their deceased loved ones.
“We are often asked if the dead can be enrolled as members of the Association and participate in its many spiritual advantages,” Baker wrote, “and in reply [we] will state that certificates of membership may be taken out in the names of the deceased, and they will participate in the many prayers and Masses offered for them.”
The result was not just increased revenue, but the creation of a direct mail apparatus firmly in place before the turn of the twentieth century. In the intervening years, the philanthropic landscape has certainly changed and yet these instinctive practices of a Buffalo priest endure: list generation, cycles of solicitation and stewardship, donor segmentation, memorial giving.
Our Lady of Victory, indeed.
