Award-Winning Blog


Cashing In On The Chasm

In the case of many non-profits the much-vaunted “Fundraising Pyramid” too often resembles an hourglass.  Fat on the ends, skinny in the middle. So I was particularly pleased to see Nicole Wallace over at the Chronicle of Philanthropy recently tackle the subject of middle donor or mid-level donor programs. As the name implies, Mid-Level or […]

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The Risk of Cooperation

The catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico has intensified the never-ending debate over just how close non-profits should get to corporate benefactors whose behavior is sometimes the antithesis of everything the non-profit seems to stand for. Although The Nature Conservancy has never hidden the fact that it has received  $10 million in gifts of cash […]

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Can’t Fight The Demographics

Yesterday, in the course of making some comments about raising money from Boomers, I published this chart estimating the number of individuals in each cohort prepared by The Boomer Project. Today I want to make a different point about this chart. Today there are already more than twice as many Gen X and Gen Y’ers […]

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Boomers: Love ‘Em Or Leave ‘Em?

I love these reports from The Boomer Project … they’re the Agitator’s agitator. While they almost never address fundraising directly, one need only scratch lightly to discover some implications. There are some great nuggets in this one. For example, I’ve just learned that the latest crisis in France is over raising the retirement age from […]

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Report To Me

I was reading this article on effective email messaging, the gist of which was … make it relevant via personalization. Now there are a variety of ways to personalize, especially in (but not limited to) the online environment — using the donor’s location to tailor content, keying off of actions taken (completed a survey, signed […]

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Managing Your Online Reputation

This report from Pew Research on managing personal online profiles is timely as a follow-up to our posts regarding donor privacy last week (here and here). As Pew reports, individuals are becoming increasingly aware of and sensitive about their online profiles, with many restricting access to personal data and/or editing material posted by others. Pew […]

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