Award Winning Blog

Important Email Marketing Lessons

Return Path, an email marketing consultancy, offers some excellent recommendations about managing your email marketing (donor and activist) files. Their report, based on studying 61 leading commercial email marketers, is called: Keeping the Subscriber Experience Positive After "Unsubscribe Me" (you’ll need to register at ReturnPath to download). Some interesting factoids: 30% of these companies never […]

Learn More December 5, 2008

Who’s Learning From Whom?

In a recent article titled, Marketers Reach out to Loyal Customers, the Wall Street Journal reports what nonprofit fundraisers (at least the direct marketers) have known for decades … retention and repeat sales (gifts) are the foundation of profitability. Here’s how the article begins … "With the critical holiday-sales season at hand, there’s a new […]

Learn More December 4, 2008

Time To Strengthen Your Online Fundraising Presence?

YES! Emphatically, argues Convio’s Founder Vinay Bhagat in this timely article, Strengthening Your Online Presence: Now Is the Time. Now of course we wouldn’t be expecting Vinay to be championing direct mail or telemarketing! Nonetheless, he makes a well-articulated case for nonprofits to move aggressively to expand and refine their online fundraising and engagement efforts. […]

Learn More December 3, 2008

Simply Inexcusable

In this extremely valuable study of giving by wealthy individuals, Indiana University’s Center on Philantropy reports this astonishing finding … The #1 reason wealthy individuals stop giving to a charity they have supported is (pick one): They can no longer afford to give They were dissatisfied with the charity’s performance They were being solicited too […]

Learn More December 2, 2008

Staying on Message

For the past several months we’ve stressed the importance "messaging" and making the fundraising case for your organization as powerfully as possible in these troubled times. Creative consultant and copywriter Bob Levy weighed in again over the Thanksgiving weekend with a piece titled Staying on Message. In it Bob sets forth ominous insights on structural […]

Learn More December 1, 2008

The “Giving” in Thanksgiving

Here in the United States today we celebrate our annual blessings and give thanks. The Canadians got the jump on us a month ago. And we’re celebrating not a moment too soon. With jobs shrinking, money and savings drying up, and with global economic horrors rising, it’s frankly a relief to have a moment to […]

Learn More November 27, 2008