Award-Winning Blog


Why You Need Personalized Matching

Do you select, segment or do personalized matching?  A definition is probably in order to answer that accurately.    A big part of the distinction is whether you treat people differently or not. Selection is who is in/out for a communication.  This is almost always tied to behavior data – e.g., RFM, hasn’t opened an […]

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Biases and Nudges Work Differently for Different People

Do we sound like a broken record?  People are different and yet we treat them all the same. I’m desperate to understand why this is as it’s been this way a long time and maybe that’s both the issue and the reason.   A long time means a lot of well-worn habits and resistance to change […]

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Only a Week?

I was struck, again, at how behavioral science is simultaneously everywhere and nowhere in the nonprofit world. If you look at the program side of our sector you’ll see lots of examples of behavioral science at work.  Hell, the UN has a behavioral science committee and a working group and a subcommittee and a steering […]

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What Makes You Tick? What Makes Other Fundraisers Tick?

Back in 2013 the landmark study,  Underdeveloped: A National Study of The Challenges Facing Nonprofit Fundraising, a joint project of CompassPoint and the Evelyn and Walter Haas, Jr. Fund  sounded the alarm about the development and fundraising profession. The study presciently warned that instability in the nonprofit sector would result in 50% of the development […]

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Think Locally, Act Locally

How do people think about and organize their giving?  Do people have a favorite charity or two for each sub-sector that matters to them?  The pie-chart of giving method? What about the stacked bar chart method where folks are single-issue oriented and give to 5-7 conservation charities, for example? I expect most readers would bet […]

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Digital Donor Abuse

With another batch of primary elections behind us and more still ahead…with the future of Roe v. Wade and reproductive rights hanging in the balance…with heartbreaking scourge of mass shootings at schools and shopping centers…there’s barely time to ponder the ultimate fate of life as we know it either by pandemic, famine, flood, locusts, or […]

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