A goal of many surveyors is to convince the general public to respond over the Internet when contact can be made only by mail, as is the case for address-based sampling. Research has shown that the combined use of token cash incentives with an initial withholding of a mail response alternative can increase Internet response rates significantly. Two recent experiments using this design found that approximately 31 – 41% of all households responded via the web and an additional 14-18% responded to a mail questionnaire offered late in the implementation process (Smyth et al. 2010, Messer and Dillman, 2011). However, these studies were limited to regional and state populations surveyed by a university located in that region or state that was likely to be recognized as a legitimate source of the survey request. More recent research now suggests that when survey designs include geographically distant populations that are less familiar with the survey sponsor, the proportion of respondents willing to respond over the Internet declines. In this paper we report a new  experiment fielded in January 2012, in which we compare the effects of survey sponsorship by a local (in-state) university vs. distant (out-of-state) university on Internet response rates. Our overarching purpose is to gain a better understanding of this issue as a potential obstacle to building national study designs for web+mail survey implementation systems using address-based samples of the general public.