Urgency and Crying Wolf

The Boy Who Cried Wolf, a cautionary tale of urgency messaging.  If I’ve read it once, I’ve read it a million (ish) times.  Urgency is critical to get donors to take action now.  Is it really that simple?   When might urgency messaging backfire?  Or maybe there is just a better motivator than urgency to prompt […]

Open, Keep, Convert: Mastering the Charity Mail Journey

The DonorVoice Behavioral Science Team is calling for applications to participate in a direct mail innovation project.  Details are below. Simply Click here to express interest and the team will follow up accordingly. Overview Your best “digital” donors are your direct mail recipients.  And still, almost all your charity mail goes directly in the trash, […]

The Doom Loop

If it bleeds it leads.  This media cliche begs the question, is the media feeding us negativity we swallow like bad medicine or are they giving us a spoonful of our preferred elixir? The Russian news site, City Reporter, did an experiment for an entire day publishing nothing but positive stories.  The result?  They lost […]

6 Minutes and 46 Seconds To Be Reminded and Inspired

Jerry Cianciolo is Dead

Jerry Cianciolo, ground-breaking Co-Founder and Chief Editor of the publisher Emerson & Church is dead The news reached us via an email from Jim Hilborn, head of Civil Sector Press, the global nonprofit publisher that in 2022 acquired the Emerson & Church backlist and continues to publish and update their books. (See Keeping the Soul […]

Human vs. Machine

We humans built the machines so the “vs.” doesn’t properly credit our maker status bona fides.  Having said that, machine is often much faster and yes, better. Here’s another instance that feels pretty close to home.  This experiment used professional copywriters to draft ad campaign copy, 100 words or fewer, for an NGO for four […]