Welcome to Mount Stupid—the place where half-baked ideas go to thrive and untested ‘best practices’ become gospel. Fundraising isn’t immune to this phenomenon. In fact, it’s a breeding ground for overconfident tactics that crash and burn when they meet reality.

You’ve seen it before. Someone declares, “We must offer premiums!” Or a consultant insists, “Match offers always triple revenue!” Some of these claims may hold truth in certain contexts, but the real danger comes when they’re treated as universal laws—never questioned, never tested, and applied blindly. So when these so-called “best practices” fail, everyone is left scratching their heads, wondering what went wrong.

This is the Dunning-Kruger Effect in action—a cognitive bias where people with low knowledge or experience overestimate their ability. It’s why someone with a surface-level understanding might feel overconfident in their beliefs, while true experts—who’ve spent years testing, failing, and refining—tend to recognize just how complex things really are. The more you learn, the more you realize how much you don’t know.

How Fundraisers Get Stuck on Mount Stupid

Someone hears a fundraising tactic at a conference, reads a blog, or listens to a consultant and—boom!—suddenly, it’s the silver bullet. No testing. No questioning. Just blind confidence. This can afflict fundraisers, consultants, or even leadership teams. Mount Stupid does not discriminate.

Example: “We just need a match offer, and our revenue will skyrocket!”

The problem? They don’t yet understand the nuances; how a match offer might create a short-term revenue boost but fail to build lasting donor commitment; how overusing matches can train donors to only give when there’s an incentive, weakening genuine engagement over time. With zero testing and no context, these “truths” get treated like laws of physics. So they roll out a generic match offer, see a temporary spike, but when the dust settles, donor retention drops, future giving weakens, and they’re left wondering why the magic didn’t last.

Fundraising has been stuck in a time loop

The same ‘proven’ tactics—match offers, premiums, deadlines, bounce-backs—have been recycled for decades with little scrutiny.

Has fundraising fundamentally improved? Not really.

• Charitable giving in the U.S. has hovered at just 2% of GDP for over 40 years, despite countless innovations in fundraising tools and technology.
• Donor retention rates remain stubbornly low, with nearly two-thirds of new donors failing to give again.
• Meanwhile, the failure rate for nonprofits attempting to grow from small to medium to large remains alarmingly high, with too many organizations hitting an invisible ceiling.

Maybe, just maybe, this isn’t a coincidence. Perhaps we’ve been stuck here for so long not because of a lack of new strategies, but because of our unshakable faith in old ones. Just because something has been done a certain way for decades doesn’t mean it’s the best way—it might just mean no one has seriously questioned it.

Our overconfidence in ‘best practices’ is holding us back from real progress.

Climbing Down Mount Stupid

The Valley of Despair

This is where reality slaps you in the face. The ‘surefire’ tactic flops, revenue doesn’t skyrocket, and now everyone is questioning everything. Panic sets in. Some throw their hands up and go back to the same tired, untested practices. Others sink into doubt, wondering if they know anything at all.

The Slope of Enlightenment

This is where the smart fundraisers separate themselves from the pack. Instead of doubling down on bad ideas or retreating, they start testing, tweaking, and adapting. They recognize that context matters. They stop treating best practices as universal truths and start using them as launchpads for real insight.

The Plateau of Sustainability

This is where fundraisers become dangerous—in the best way possible. They don’t chase easy wins. They don’t blindly copy best practices. Instead, they invest in insight-driven fundraising. They test, learn, and refine their strategy based on real data. They own their expertise.

Escaping Mount Stupid

• Beware of Overconfidence. Don’t mistake confidence for competence. If someone insists, “This always works!” or “That will never work!” without testing or data to back it up, raise an eyebrow. Real experts don’t talk in absolutes. They say, “This worked in X situation, but let’s test it for yours.”
• Test Before You Trust. A best practice is not a magic spell. It’s a hypothesis. Treat it like one. Just because something worked for another nonprofit doesn’t mean it will work for
• Measure What Actually Matters. Who cares if open rates go up if donations don’t? Who cares if a match lifts revenue today if it tanks retention? If a tactic isn’t delivering long-term value, why are you still doing it? Don’t just keep doing something because “it’s what we’ve always done.”
• Stay Curious. Human behavior is messy. Don’t assume— explore, test, and adapt.

From Overconfidence to Competence

The most dangerous place isn’t a bad idea—it’s blind confidence in an untested one.

The best fundraisers don’t cling to what they think they know. They question their own assumptions, embrace complexity, and challenge the status quo. They’re not just avoiding Mount Stupid—they’re building smarter, more effective, and more sustainable fundraising programs. That’s how real impact is made.

So the next time you hear a fundraising “rule” stated as an absolute truth, ask yourself:

• Have we actually tested this?
• Does this apply to our audience?
• Could we try a different approach and learn something new?

Fundraising is hard. Don’t make it harder. Stay off Mount Stupid.

Kiki