More Than a Tool: What the History of NOW Teaches Us About Direct Mail
There’s an old line, often attributed to Upton Sinclair: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
My recent piece in The Giving Review got a mix of reactions with more applause than I expected. And the pushback followed a familiar script: “Direct mail is just a tool. How can it possibly be more than that?” In other words: how could a tactic become an ideology?
I’m not here to shut down anyone’s direct mail program. That’s not the point. What matters, especially for younger fundraisers, is naming the deeper logic at work. Because direct mail didn’t just raise money. It shaped expectations. It redefined how organizations think about donors, communication, and belonging. And we can’t keep pretending that shift was incidental or ignore the history that’s already being written about it.
As I have shared before, Claire Dunning’s Nonprofit Neighborhoods helped me see how the grant application became a mechanism of governance. It showed how neoliberal logic crept into everyday nonprofit life, not through big declarations, but through ordinary systems and procedures. Katherine Turk’s The Women of NOW did something similar. If Dunning exposed how government-funded nonprofits became arms of public policy, Turk revealed how the other half of the sector, those more reliant on the support of everyday donors, were shaped by the same underlying logic — different funding streams; same invisible ideology.
When people talk about direct mail they usually focus on mechanics, acquisition, segmentation, response rates. What often gets overlooked are its long-term structural effects — how it becomes more than a tool. Historian Katherine Turk sees those effects more clearly than most. A professor at the University of North Carolina and a scholar of women’s history, labor, and law, Turk has spent her career studying how institutions shape feminist movements and how movements, in turn, shape institutions.
Turk’s October 2023 article in The Atlantic, “How Financial Strength Weakened American Feminism,” stopped me in my tracks. It’s what led me to her book, The Women of NOW, and sent me down this path. Turk isn’t writing about fundraising. She’s writing about how power works, how it moves, how it hardens, and how even good tools can quietly shift a mission when no one is looking. Her history of how the National Organization for Women built a national force, and how the very structure behind that growth began to limit its vision, should be required reading for anyone trying to understand the deeper legacy of direct mail.
Direct Mail as a Tool of Inclusion, at First
At first, direct mail just made sense. For groups like NOW, it was a workaround — a way to reach people without waiting for media coverage, foundation grants, or wealthy backers. All you needed was a mailing list and a message. A letter could find its way into the hands of someone in a small town who might never join a rally but was ready to be part of something bigger.
And those letters weren’t just asking for money. They were invitations. They said you matter, you belong, you can help. To send a check wasn’t just to fund the fight; it was to step into it. Early on, direct mail acted more like a membership card than a marketing pitch. It created connection across distance. At its best, it stitched together a movement.
And perhaps that’s still possible. I’ll concede that mail can create belonging. But the real question isn’t whether a tool has good intentions—it’s whether the system wrapped around it will let those intentions through. Because once metrics, scale, and market logic take over, the tool stops serving the mission and starts shaping it.
And, in Turk’s telling, that shift doesn’t start with a rupture. It starts with a mailing list.
The Shift from Mobilization to Management
While reading Turk’s book, I didn’t expect direct mail to become the hinge point in a story about feminist organizing. It enters quietly, initially as a tool for growth; and then, without much fanfare, it begins to redirect the current. Not because the tool itself changes, but because the logic required to sustain it starts to shape everything downstream.
NOW’s story, as Turk tells it, is a case study in how infrastructure reshapes a movement’s priorities over time. Founded in 1966 as a feminist counterpart to the major civil rights organizations of the era, NOW was built to be broad-based and locally rooted. Its early years emphasized pluralism, participation, and an understanding that feminist politics had to address a wide range of interconnected issues. Local chapters were central to this model, surfacing concerns that spanned economic justice, racial and gender discrimination, and reproductive rights. Membership was intentionally accessible; and members were expected to contribute through involvement, not just financial support.
But, in the 1970s, NOW adopted the then-novel strategy of direct mail. The tactic worked. It dramatically expanded the national office’s capacity and provided steady funding for large-scale campaigns like the push for the Equal Rights Amendment. But the growth came at a cost. Direct mail shifted power away from the chapters and toward the center. The national office began defining the agenda, often based on what resonated with donors rather than what emerged from the grassroots. “At-large” members — supporters with no chapter affiliation who gave more and meddled less — became the majority, turning participation into consumption. Over time, what had been a movement grounded in collective deliberation became a centralized advocacy brand, reinforced by the logic of the market and mass communication.
Turk shows how this shift narrowed not just the structure, but the mission. The ERA, highly fundable and broadly appealing, became the organization’s defining issue. Other complex concerns, some of which had become single-issue platforms for other organizations, were determined ill-suited for NOW’s donor file. As Aileen Hernandez, NOW’s second president, observed, the funding structure began to homogenize the organization’s makeup. It tilted toward straight, white, middle-class priorities, not by decree, but by what generated the best response rates.
Turk doesn’t tell this story as one of ideological betrayal. She presents it as institutional evolution driven less by principle than by infrastructure. It’s a case of a tool having the kind of influence many still want to deny is possible. The question wasn’t just what NOW believed. It was what the system it built allowed it to say.
This wasn’t mission drift. It was an evolution by design. The tool didn’t just deliver the message. It started deciding which messages could survive. Direct mail helped build a mass movement, but it also embedded a logic that favored stability over challenge, growth over complexity, performance over participation. No one had to enforce that shift. The organization absorbed it on its own.
When the Medium Shapes the Mission
One of the clearest takeaways from Turk’s account is this: over time, how you communicate starts to shape what you can say. As direct mail scaled, it didn’t just help NOW reach more people. It started to shape the kinds of messages that would survive. If an issue couldn’t be boiled down to a headline or an urgent appeal, it began to fade, not from belief, but from view.
This shift doesn’t happen overnight. It creeps in through that ever-so-pragmatic question: what works? The mailings that perform get repeated. The ones that confuse donors or don’t convert quietly disappear. Bit by bit, complexity gives way to clarity. Nuance gives way to narrative. And the organization narrows its focus to what fits inside an envelope. The broader the reach, the narrower the voice.
This is classic Foucauldian power. No one needs to rewrite the rules. The infrastructure teaches the organization to regulate itself. NOW didn’t just react to donor preferences, it absorbed them. It reshaped its message, not to reflect the work as it was but as it needed to appear. That’s the deeper shift: not from one tactic to another, but from participation to legibility.
As the fiercely independent heterodox economist Joan Robinson once put it, “Ideology is like breath: You never smell your own.” That’s what makes these shifts so hard to detect. Once the logic of a tool becomes embedded in our language, our metrics, and our sense of what’s possible, it stops feeling like ideology at all. It just feels like common sense.
What Fundraisers Need to Consider
Fundraisers often ask: What works? What scales? What converts? Those are fair questions. Budgets are real. Pressure is constant. But history doesn’t hand us tactics, it gives us perspective. Turk’s book isn’t a strategy guide. It’s a mirror. It shows how a movement’s internal structure started to reshape its direction, not through bad decisions but through habits no one stopped to question.
The point isn’t that direct mail is bad. It’s that infrastructure is never neutral. The systems we build to sustain our work eventually start shaping it. They define what counts, what fits, and what gets repeated. And, over time, we stop navigating the system and start thinking like it.
Everyone knows that deep community-building is harder to measure and slower to show results. That’s exactly why it keeps getting sidelined. But the logic of what works isn’t just a bias. It’s a framework. It trains us to value what’s legible, scalable, and familiar. Unless we name that logic for what it is, we’ll keep mistaking structure for strategy.
Who Benefits from This Logic
Every system creates an industry. Direct mail didn’t just change how nonprofits raise money, it built an entire economy around itself: brokers, consultants, vendors, data services. Today’s digital platforms are doing the same thing. Predictive tools, pre-built workflows, plug-and-play fundraising systems: what started in the mail now runs on software.
And this is where Sinclair’s warning echoes loudest. We can’t expect people whose income depends on the system to critique the system. Most consultants and vendors aren’t acting in bad faith. But they’re deeply invested in optimization. Their business model depends on keeping the machine humming. Efficiency becomes the goal. Complexity becomes a problem. Anything that slows things down gets rebranded or left behind.
This is what Foucault called panoptic power. No one needs to issue a command. The structure teaches everyone how to behave. Fundraisers adjust to what the system rewards. Consultants show them how to do it better. Platforms track it all in real time. And, before long, the question isn’t: “Is this right?” It’s: “Will this show up well on the dashboard?”
That’s not a bug. That’s how the system was built to function.
Participation or Performance
At some point, we have to be honest: What are we really asking people to do? Do we want them to participate or just write a check? The more we optimize for speed, scale, and segmentation, the more we confuse gestures with relationships. And the more we chase efficiency, the more we erode the one thing fundraising is supposed to protect: trust.
Turk’s story makes this shift plain. In the early years, NOW’s mail built real membership. But, as infrastructure took hold, the relationship changed. Donors weren’t seen as partners. They became targets and segments. The ask became less about joining and more about responding. The organization adapted, as did its supporters.
We’re still living in that loop. We talk about community, but we optimize for conversion. We praise engagement, but we only measure transactions. Real participation is messy and slow. But writing a check is tidy. It fits in a CRM. It looks good in a report. But if fundraising is ever going to mean more than endless acquisition, we have to stop chasing what’s easy to track and start thinking about more than just what raises a lot of cash.
The System Was Working, Just Not the Way We Thought
The history of NOW isn’t a story of failure. It’s a story of survival and what survival quietly costs. Direct mail worked. That’s the catch. It worked so well that it started calling the shots. What was measurable became what mattered. What performed became what persisted. At some point, the mission didn’t drive the system. The system started driving the mission.
That’s the hard part to admit. We want to believe that tools are just tools and that we can use them without being changed by them. But tools teach. They reward. They discipline. And, eventually, they normalize. Today’s CRMs and AI-driven platforms aren’t changing that pattern. They’re accelerating it.
If we don’t ask what our tools are teaching us about donors, about power, about what social change really demands, we’ll keep perfecting systems that convert, scale, and optimize. But those aren’t the systems that build trust. They don’t cultivate membership. And they don’t remember what this work was supposed to be about in the first place.
What we need now isn’t another upgrade. As I argued in the previous piece, what we need is a renewed commitment to the messy, proximate work of active participation. We need something that can’t be confined to a mailing list; we need something slower, sturdier, and more human than anything a dashboard can track.
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, Founder, Responsive FundraisingWriting Projects
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Jason. Thank you for this thoughtful and insightful analysis. It is so true.