It ought to be said in this connection that we have, since the first of the year, revised our whole system of billing and are sending a different kind of reminder to renew to those who have been receiving a trial subscription, a complimentary subscription from a friend, a first year subscription for which they have themselves paid, from the one we send to those who have been taking the paper for a year or more.  With the latter, for the most part, we simply have to remind them that their subscription has run out.  In the billing department, therefore, we have six different kinds of reminders or requests to renew.

So much for that part of the work of the Circulation Department that has to do with entering, recording, billing, analyzing and studying.  We turn now to what may be called plans and advance work for making more subscriptions come in, that is, for increasing the circulation of the paper.

We have on cards the names of nearly 35,000 members of suffrage leagues who are not subscribers for the Woman’s Journal.  This large list is, roughly, only about 30 per cent of the dues-paying membership of the suffrage leagues of the country.  An effort is being made to get the total dues-paying and non-dues-paying membership of the leagues and organizations in order that we may send each member who is not a subscriber a sample copy of the organ of the movement and ask her to subscribe.

Besides the league lists, we have the names of over 1300 prominent men and women who believe in equal suffrage but are not subscribers.  In addition we have other lists totaling about 32,000 suffragists whose names are not on our books.

This makes over 68,000 suffragists who, so far as we know, have never seen a copy of the organ of the movement, and have never been asked to subscribe.  Each week scores and sometimes hundreds of such suffragists, who are not subscribers, write letters to our office, to the offices of the National Suffrage Association and to other headquarters and offices, asking for information which the Woman’s Journal publishes from week to week.  Think of the waste!  They have the faith but not the knowledge to make converts, to answer objections, to write “copy” for the newspapers, to make addresses, to take part in debates, to write articles for the magazines, and to do the thousand and one things that suffragists must do if the present generation of women is not to go down to the grave unenfranchised as their mothers and grandmothers did.

Think of it!  Nearly 70,000 known suffragists who do not subscribe.  In the interest of efficiency they ought all to be constant readers of the paper.  But how are they to be reached?  There are two ways:  First, by the officers of the organization to which they belong; and second, by means of letters, sample copies, and follow up letters until the last one of them has enrolled as a regular reader.

But advance work requires funds.  No matter how necessary to the cause of equal suffrage it may be to enroll those 68,000 suffragists as readers, the United States Post Office will not sell us stamps for writing to them unless we can make cash payments.  Funds for other parts of the work of increasing the circulation are equally necessary, and the work halts for lack of that which reformers always lack.