Award-Winning Blog


Monthly Giving: How’s Your Organization Doing?

There’s a chapter in my book Retention Fundraising devoted to “Five Easy Retention Wins.” Among the top 5 actions that will improve retention is Monthly Giving. By whatever name –monthly giving, recurring giving, sustainer giving—almost every organization, regardless of size, should already have, or at least should have plans to immediately launch a monthly giving […]

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Cluster Analysis or Cluster F***k?

Don’t shoot the profane messenger.  If you ever think about or talk about or actually perform donor segmentation, you’ll want to read this post about a statistical technique called cluster analysis. It is time to sound a warning bell for what might be a largely unnoticed, but no less severe,  epidemic of shoddy cluster analysis […]

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John Haydon (1967-2020): The Courage to Continue

John Haydon, 53, beloved and inspirational fundraising missionary, teacher and coach is dead. A familiar and enthusiastic presence at conferences and online, John offered practical and always-helpful advice and insights on digital marketing and fundraising.  From improving a website to making the most of monthly giving and everything in between he never lost focus on […]

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The Zero Party Future is Already Here – Proof.

Canvassing is the number one method for acquiring sustainers (according to Target benchmarking).  There is a lot of money being spent and a lot of donor loss occurring, especially in the first few months. What to do about it?  A lot of forward-thinking brands (e.g. TNC, ACLU, No Kid Hungry, Special Olympics) have been using […]

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“Zero Party” Data is the Best Party Data

To recap our previous post, zero-party data draws a distinction between first party data (i.e. data you have based on direct interaction with your supporters) that is voluntarily, willingly shared and that which is passively and (often) unknowingly collected.  The latter requires inference and assumption, the former is knowing and understanding. There are three types […]

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The Key To Curing Your Fundraising Ailments

Retention concerns?  Privacy concerns?  Opt-out/opt-in concerns?  Regulatory concerns?  Making content relevant concerns? All of these concerns can be effectively addressed—and solved whether you’re in a small organization or a large one– by First Party Data and it’s little known sibling Zero Party Data. Too good to be true?  Nope.  What we’re going to cover in […]

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