Award-Winning Blog


The Case for Netflix-ing Your Fundraising

Netflix’s ‘Play Something” feature is a roulette wheel selecting among algorithmically personalized shows the service thinks you might like. Why did Netflix develop it?  Because their subscribers often experience a certain amount of anxiety and mental pain from choosing among the seemingly endless and growing choices.  This is a user experience problem that translates to […]

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Science of the Supporter Experience Summer Series

This Free Summer Series is brought to you by DonorVoice, the Behavioral Science Fundraising Agency, register here. Are you ready to come out of lockdown? Not personally (who isn’t?), but professionally? Will your pre-pandemic plan do, or could you benefit from a re-think? If you’re open to re-thinking and re-imagining your fundraising you’ll want to […]

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Double Good News

Good news.  In fact, I bring you DOUBLE GOOD NEWS. ONE.  Just as he did 30 years ago with his revolutionary Relationship Fundraising: A Donor-Based Approach to the Business of Raising Money, Ken Burnett has once again delivered a wealth of advice.  This time in the form of advice-by-classic examples. Ken’s new book The essence […]

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Seize This Moment

The M+R 2021 Benchmark Study is now out.  And it’s a winner.  In fact, it carries news of lots of winners in the pandemic year of 2020. I hope you’ll read the entire report packed with charts and editorial insightful commentary covering digital advertising , email messaging, text messaging and peer to peer, email metrics, […]

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Easier is Better

Easy things make brains happy.  Happy brains do the things we ask them to (like donate).  The easier something is, the more it convinces.  Simple stocks go up more; simple named people become president. We often forget this. So here’s a simple post about keeping it simple. (The hard data are in links.) Image credit: Boston […]

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“Just One Damn Thing After Another.”

The headline quotation, attributed to British historian Arnold Toynbee, pretty much summarizes the worst approach to teaching or slearning history. Lists of battle.  Names of great men. “Just one damn thing after another.” In fact, to seriously study history rather than memorize lists, is to look into causes of and relationships between people and events.  […]

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