The Ad Council is a private, non-profit organization with a rich history of marshalling volunteer talent from the advertising and media industries to deliver critical messages to the American public. Having produced literally thousands of PSA campaigns addressing the most pressing social issues of the day, the Ad Council has effected, and continues to effect, tremendous positive change by raising awareness, inspiring action, and saving lives.

In April of 2004, the Ad Council partnered with SKYLIST to further leverage email marketing as part of it multi-channel efforts to increase the visibility of its four-part Earth Day awareness campaign, focused on the environmental efforts of the Ad Council's Energy Efficiency, Environmental Defense, Wildfire Prevention, and Earth Share partners.

Following the inaugural campaign, Ad Council Executive Director, Tim Davis, stated that the organization was "- thrilled with the results.", citing that SKYLIST's "ability to work with us to develop a targeted program with wide appeal generated significant interest in Earth Day and was a key factor in broadening our reach."

Since then, the Ad Council has continued to use email to maximize press and public support of the important causes it spotlights. During the 4th quarter of 2004, one of the most creative examples of these efforts was the Ad Council's email campaign for Big Brothers Big Sisters (BBBS) . The BBBS seven-part public service announcement (PSA) was designed to increase public support of the nation's largest and most effective youth mentoring organization, by targeting radio and television outlets that received tapes of the PSAs. The campaign achieved this goal by enticing stations to play the PSAs to provide viewers with information about what they can do get involved with BBBS. By combining rich media and HTML email messages, results of the Ad Council email campaign were outstanding.

• Each of the campaign's 6 individual mailings achieved 100% delivery.
• The top performing segment of the campaign generated a 90% open rate.
• The entire campaign averaged a 66% open rate and a 24.5% clickthrough rate.

In the world of email, results like this are rare. Then again, so are the efforts of the Ad Council. In fact, the Ad Council was selected for this month's SKYLIST's client spotlight for the totality of the organization's efforts to promote positive social change as well as its brilliant use of the email marketing channel. Below are a few bullet points detailing the impact of several of the Ad Council's campaigns.

Since the launch of the AdCouncil's Big Brothers Big Sisters, Forest Fire Prevention, and Environmental Defense campaigns:

• Applications for Big Brothers Big Sisters mentors soared from 90,000 a year to 620,000 in nine months, a seven-fold increase in the number of inquiries to Big Brothers/Big Sisters agencies.
• Destruction of our forests by wildfires has been reduced from 22 million acres to less than 8.4 million acres per year, since our Forest Fire Prevention campaign began.
• The amount of total waste recycled increased 24.4% from 1995 to 2000, and 385.4% from the 1980s after the launch of the Environmental Defense campaign.