Direct Mail Recruitment to a Potential Participant Registry

Recruitment registries are novel tools to accelerate Alzheimer disease research accrual. Optimal methods to populate such registries remain largely unstudied. We sent postcards with 3 unique taglines (Alzheimer's Prevention Research, brain health research, general research) to 100,000 local residents aged 50 years and older to assess the effectiveness of recruiting to an online recruitment registry by mail. The postcard campaign recruited 273 new registry enrollees (0.27% overall response rate). Neither the response rate nor the demographic characteristics of recruited participants differed by the postcard tagline. These results suggest that direct mail may not be the most cost-effective approach to recruit participants to online registries.