I am looking for ideas on how we might efficiently increase the percentage of our existing constituents, mainly our alumni, for who we have email addresses. Obviously, we're looking to avoid doing business with spammers but it could be useful if we could find a reputable firm that could somehow provide these in bulk, perhaps serve as a mediary if necessary to email the individuals and ask them if they'd like to opt in. Thanks, Mark Mark F. DeWitt, Database Manager College of Engineering University of California, Berkeley [Email Removed]

Let me know how it works out with buying lists of email addresses. Our strategy to collect email has been to ask for it every time we collect addresses and to collect them from our site. Also, we've persuaded our staf to use RE as the source of their contact information, and that pulled in loads of email addresses for those donors who are quite close to the organization. I'm looking forward to a time when our donors prefer to receive online newsletters and to make their donations online, but it's going to take a while to get to that point! Gavin Gourley Global Partnerships 206-652-8748 [Email Removed]

Blackbaud offers this service and additional ones such as finding deceased records in your database.