Search Results for: ask less
Who Cares If They’re Effective?!
Over at Tactical Philanthropy Sean Stannard-Stockton relates a conversation in which a major foundation grantmaker told him it was a primary value of the foundation to not harm grantees. The context was Sean asking whether philanthropists should speak out about nonprofits they considered to be ineffective. What a remarkable position for a grantmaker to take, […]
Five Trends to Heed and Benefit From in 2008
Tom and I aren't in the crystal ball business, but we do take some pride in spotting significant trends with the potential to help or harm our readers and the causes they serve. Here are our top five trend picks for 2008: 1. Donor acquisition and retention will continue on a downward spiral. An uncertain […]
I Was Master Of The Philanthropy Universe, Until …
I screwed up bigtime. This is probably how Holden Karnofsky, prime mover of the Give Well blog is feeling today. For a couple of weeks in December, HK was the darling of mainstream media coverage of philanthropy. A brash young hedge fund manager, turned instant philanthropy savant, prodding establishment philanthropies on issues like transparency and […]
Is This Bait & Switch? – II
Last week, I described this email marketing scenario … League of Conservation Voters (whose e-list I'm happily on) sends me an email introducing an embedded call-to-action from Defenders of Wildlife. I respond to the Defenders appeal, but opt-out of further contact. Defenders backs off awhile, then hits me with a succession of e-appeals. I asked […]
Who Wants Holden Karnofsky’s Money?
I confess to having a schizophrenic reaction to Holden Karnofsky's Give Well website and blog. Karnofsky is a 26-year-old hedge fund expatriot who decided he wanted to give away some money (his own and some friends), but had serious problems with what he saw as the lack of credible metrics on the program accomplishments of […]
Ethnic Marketing — Focus On Niche or Need?
Nonprofits — unless specifically focused on servicing or mobilizing a particular ethnic population — increasingly must communicate with an ethnically diverse audience. And a real trap when marketers and communicators begin to plan how to reach this diverse audience — especially when all the planners are the same color — is to break it down […]
Update: Verizon Hits Redial … Damn!
The only thing we like less than a company that screws up big time, is one that has the sense to reverse course before their roof caves in! Just as we were licking our chops, relishing the spectacle of a few hundred thousand cell phone customers canceling their Verizon Wireless service to protest the idiotic […]
Cell Phone Users, Unite!
In his recent piece in the Stanford Social Innovation Review, Peter Manzo urged issue advocates to make better use of cell phones as a tool for citizen engagement. (He also took the US telecommunications biz to task for lagging behind the rest of the world in providing state of the art services.) He concluded: “To […]
Low Budget Online Video
The other day we urged our readers to dive into online video, and pointed out that big budgets weren't required. We've received some useful comments on that post from Humane Society of the U.S. and from See3 Communications, which I urge you to read. But here in its entirety is a mini-case study sent by […]
WARNING: Here Comes the Direct Mail Temperance Union
No sooner had we filed yesterday's post reporting that online fundraising may account for only 1% to 5% of total non-profit contributions than our inbox revealed the latest attack on a major fundraising workhorse — Direct Mail. On top of our stack was a piece by Laura Novak in the New York Times titled “For-Profit […]