There’s no question in our minds that the fundraising trade relies heavily on myth and is a bit light on innovation. Often the myths masquerade as ‘best practices’ and go empirically unchallenged for years and years. When challenged there is usually quite a dust up as folks move to defend those ‘best practices’ –even in the face of factual evidence to the contrary.

When it comes to innovation — an especially essential virtue in our fast-changing world — all sorts of reasons are marshaled against it. The need to ‘meet the numbers … not in the budget … we simply don’t have time … you name it.

Two of our 2015’s Agitator Top Ten involved myth and innovation and, as you can imagine, plenty of opinion from Agitator readers. If there’s a less fun, but more productive way to spend New Year’s Eve, we can’t think of it.

Roger and Tom

THE YEAR-END GIVING BONANZA IS A MYTH. Few posts in our 10-year history have raised more comment and controversy than this heaping helping of controversy served up by Rob Mitchell, the founder of The Atlas of Giving.

“It’s time to stick a fork in the year-end giving myth”, says Rob. And that’s exactly what he’s done with a review of giving data going back to 1948. For example:

• The perception that year-end giving is more robust is based on “observed tradition”. In reality there is only “a slight increase” during this period.

• This “observed tradition” leads to thousands of nonprofits filling mailboxes, airwaves and the Internet with very aggressive solicitation activities in the year-end window.

• This flurry of year-end asking takes place at the very time when competition is most intense. Thus Rob concludes, “Most nonprofits would find that they get a better return investing in solicitation activities at times other than year-end.”

A tsunami of both howls and hallelujahs from Agitator readers roared forth. See what readers Rebekah Basinger, Mary Cahalane, Denisa Casement, Judy Levine, Steve MacLaughlin, Ken Miller, Rob Mitchell, Gail Perry, Kathy Swayze, Danielle Johnson Vermenton and David Wilkins had to say about this myth-buster.

For years we’ve pondered and reported on innovation or the lack of it in fundraising. So, mid-year we went into The Agitator Archives containing past posts on innovation and then produced a five part series on key aspects of innovation as it relates to nonprofits.

Tom shares his Innovation Quotient ( one-third desire, one-third mandate and one-third means) and illustrates it with his own — and fortunate — experience in being recruited for the top marketing & communications slot at Environmental Defense Fund.

INNOVATION SERIES #2: WHAT CAUSES INNOVATION?

Guy Kawasaki of Mac marketing fame is interviewed by Scott Berken, author of The Myths of Innovation. Find out what ‘epiphanies’ and ‘magic moments’ really consist of and the truth behind the label of ‘creative person’.

Roger notes that a significant barrier to true innovation stems from most nonprofits’ fixation on minutia that simply doesn’t matter. This fixation does however provide plenty of excuses, principal of which is: ‘I simply don’t have time’.

INNOVATION SERIES #4: FAILURE TO INNOVATE

From failure to innovate in the testing of direct mail to a failure of mindset (‘our work is simply too important to risk failure’) Tom invokes Seth Godin’s admonition: “Go fail. And then fail again. Nonprofit failure is too rare, which means that nonprofit innovation is too rare as well.”

Examples of innovation applied. Tom sorts through scores of ‘top innovation ideas in fundraising’ and picks his own Top 5. He even throws in a Bonus #6. See which ones you agree with.

Enjoy your New Year’s Eve and we’ll see you in 2016.

Coming Up: Fundraising Failures to Motivate NEW New Year’s Resolutions