Memorandum

To: The Book Launch Committee
From: Department of Applied Fundraising Nonsense
Re: Promotional strategy for The Volume Trap
Classification: Sensitive, because the author is becoming difficult

The committee has reviewed The Volume Trap and identified several promotion challenges. First, the book argues fundraising has scaled activity instead of understanding.  Second, it suggests more asking doesn’t reliably create more giving and may, under certain conditions, create irritation and attrition that only shows up after everyone has already declared the campaign a success.

Third, it’s openly hostile to faux urgency, premium dependency, matching-gift theater, one-size-fits-all messaging, attribution fiction, and the practice of calling motion strategy because the calendar has more boxes filled in.

Fourth, the author appears to believe donors are human beings with identities, values, motivations, preferences, memory, emotion, and some limited desire not to be treated as a walking reply device.

This creates a launch problem as the standard promotional toolkit includes a matching-gift deadline, a member card, three sheets of address labels, a nickel glued to something vaguely official, and at least one sentence beginning with “For a limited time.”

Under normal conditions, we’d recommend:

• A matching gift provided by an anonymous funder who is oddly passionate about doubling the impact of book sales before midnight.
• Member card certifying the reader as a Founding Member of the Anti-Volume Machine Society, renewable annually through a twelve-part notice series beginning four days after purchase.
• A nickel taped on the front to trigger reciprocity, guilt, confusion, or tetanus.
• An ASK MORE, MAKE MORE tote bag, despite this being in direct contradiction to the book, its evidence base, and several decades of research.

This contradiction adds to the awkwardness of the promotional plan.  But it does not make the plan impossible.

After several rounds of discussion, the committee has concluded the best path forward is to keep Kevin the dark about the promotional strategy.

This will allow the book to be promoted with the appropriate mix of urgency, repetition, social proof, contrived scarcity, shallow personalization, and premium-based confusion while preserving the author’s ability to claim, publicly, he had nothing to do with it.

This is especially important because the book took six months to write and fourteen years to earn, and the committee has been advised that immediately wrapping it in a fake deadline may create reputational drag.

Therefore, the campaign may proceed under one constraint:

• Do not tell Kevin.

Recommendation approved, provided the author is not allowed near the reply device.