Award-Winning Blog


Should You Drop Me From Your Email List?

I get fundraising emails regularly from nonprofits to whom I haven’t contributed in years … in one case, about 6+ years. From their perspective, when — if ever — should they give up on me? Since I give mostly to advocacy groups, perhaps I confuse them. I’ll respond to the occasional action alert, if I […]

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Vanity Metrics

What are you measuring? This article from Huffington Post — Are Vanity Metrics Making Your Organization Sick? — argues that too many organizations measure the wrong things … and when they do, they are “bound to get sick.” Vanity metrics are “metrics that only look at the surface performance and don’t relate to the actual […]

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Thank You For Real Data On Thank You’s

Hallelujah! Actual test data on the efficacy of thank you’s. In case you’ve haven’t noticed, here’s is a bit of testing information just posted on The Agitator website by Angel Aloma at Food For The Poor … “Thank you letters have been very effective fundraisers for our organization. On average, we get more than one […]

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Won’t Make A Difference

Grey Matter Research has put out some survey findings regarding why people don’t support nonprofits. Most of you have seen research like this, and overall the findings don’t contain any surprises. Nevertheless, one finding did stand out to me, even though I’ve seen it replicated numerous times … Four out of ten non-donors agreed with […]

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Why Donors Tune You Out

Mark Phillips at Bluefrog has written an excellent post called Why donors don’t want to hear from you. I heartily commend it to you. He cites survey data that shows donors are quite sensitive to charities using inaccurate personal data in their communications. For example: 20% of respondents would stop giving to charities that used […]

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Mobile Money

Pew Internet Research recently asked a variety of pundits how they saw the future in terms of consumers paying for purchases via mobile devices such as smartphones. They cite comScore reporting that 38% of smartphone users have used their cell phone to make a purchase of some kind. And a US Federal Reserve study reporting […]

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