Award-Winning Blog


Giving Tuesday 2023: Tips and Hacks

            Over the years we’ve offered many tips (as in Try Dying for Giving Tuesday) and many admonitions (see Avoid the Snoringly Generic Approach to Giving Tuesday)             Most recently, Kevin’s 2023 entry weighed in with Livng Dusday our study of 573 Giving Tuesday emails scored on meeting (or not) […]

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Livng Dusday

Over the last two years we’ve collected 573 Giving Tuesday emails.  Here’s a lexical analysis that categorizes email subject lines and assigns Autonomy, Competence and Relatedness scores.  Why do those scores matter?  These are our core, psychological needs. If my brief interaction with your brand leaves me feeling need satisfied then you’ve created an internal […]

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How Do Donors (Not) Open The Mail?

Like everyone, I’ve got a habitual, auto-pilot process for managing the physical mail. And since I, like many a reader, am on a million and one seed lists and donate to charities I receive a #$@% ton of charity mail. Plus, my family has what seems a daily supply of last-mile delivery from online, consumer […]

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It Takes A (Personality) Village

The goal of diversity is better ___________.   There are lots of ways to fill in that blank; one option is business success. And there are lots of ways to define diversity, one of which is how we see the world, our innate traits.  This first bar chart shows companies broken out by number of […]

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The Donor’s Experience Matters But Not Equally

Word of mouth is an interesting phenomenon because it’s inherently organic and somewhat unpredictable and impossible to turn off.  If you have an online presence you’ll get word of mouth whether you want it or not.  And even if you could erase your online presence, there’ll forever be ‘offline’ WOM. And while charities aren’t purpose […]

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Kevin and My Fundraising Death Cleaning

The only time I think much about death is when I lovingly  write an obit for one of our long-time colleagues. Sadly, an incidence of increasing frequency. Kevin’s post Is Your Direct Mail Funnel All Bookends did however bring forth some thoughts on preparing for death.  More accurately, some direct mail insights gathered while implementing […]

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