Award-Winning Blog


Arriving Soon: A Choir of Christmas Angels –Update on Supply Chain Woes

These days the first thing Dutch fundraiser John van der Vlies of Keystone Consultancy does each morning is check the GPS coordinates of shipping container packed with 400,000 Christmas angels and bound for Rotterdam.  . When I Skyped with John two days ago to check on supply chain and delivery issues in Holland he showed […]

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We Are Our Digital Footprint

We are our Personality.  Our behavior regularly reflects who we are as we make choices in keeping with how we view the world. For example, if you smile and have a background picture with human interactions and sports activities listed on your LinkedIn profile there is a near 100% you are extroverted.  And that means […]

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Monkey Business

Headline: Breakthrough study finds subjects do more tasks if they enjoy it and the quality of the work product differs greatly across subjects.  And in other news, water is in fact, wet. The details of the study are a bit more interesting, if still obvious. The scientists discovered major individual differences in preferences – reflecting […]

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Chip Craver: A Kindly Presence Dead at 77

My younger brother, Forrest “Chip” Craver, is dead.  He would have turned 78 this week on the 26th.   Covid-related pneumonia got him. Forrest E. Craver, III earned his living as a copywriter and fundraiser.  But he was so much more. Chip was that rare and kindly presence whose outrage at injustice never dimmed, never gave […]

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First Aid for Giving Tuesday

We don’t need analysts or fortune tellers  to predict the two greatest self-inflicted injuries on Giving Tuesday. The first will involve stupidly or fraudulently executed matching gift offers. The second,  equally stupid and inexcusable failure to meaningfully thank donors for their participation. Here are simple steps you still have time to take to avoid unnecessary […]

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Lazy Labels

We write about Identity but how do we best write to an Identity?   Does invoking the label help show we know who they are?  For example, “as a dog lover…” What about those health charities out there whose entire approach to ‘tailoring’ of appeals to supporters they know have the disease is tweaking the lead-in […]

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