Gaining donations or shifting them? Today is Amazon Prime Day, the day where we celebrate things being moved earlier in the year.  Because Amazon isn’t alone — Salvation Army’s year-end red kettle campaign started almost a month ago.  More than ten million Americans have already voted (and still with over 40 game-changing, earth-shattering political developments...

I fear the Greeks, even those bearing gifts The new Fundraising Effectiveness Project data should have me doing cartwheels, or at least my poor middle-age imitation of cartwheels. In the first half of the year, nonprofits have seen, year-over-year: A 7% increase in total donors and donations A 12% increase in new donors A whopping...

Beyond the transaction Do non-transactional data help predict whether people will give?  This was the debate we unwittingly touched off when talking about SimioAudience, our new co-op that takes such data into account.  Enter Dr. Russell James III, whose Inside the Mind of a Bequest Donor, set the standard for planned giving research.  (We’ve written...

Retronyming your fundraising When something new comes along, it goes through four stages of linguistic evolution: 1. We don’t know what to call it.  To use the example of a car, the early contenders for the title included autokenetic, autometon, buggyaut, motorig, and truckle.  (“Dad, can I borrow the buggynaut?” “Sure, but make sure you...

We have a new free white paper called Death to Buckets, While segmentation buckets are convenient ways about thinking about your donor or acquisition audience, this way of thinking can exclude more effective ways of reaching donors. Here’s an excerpt from the white paper for your reading pleasure: You’ve probably used the bucket analogy to...

What the nonprofit brand means and what it doesn’t Nonprofits talk about brand differently from our for-profit brethren and sistern.  For-profits often talk about brand as the totality of the impressions that customers and potential customers have of a company and its products.  This is its more correct usage. In the hands of some at...

Get what Mick Jagger can’t Satisfaction is often a tricky business for nonprofits.  There is no physical good that you are providing that either gives you five stars of enjoyment or breaks upon opening.  Thus, we rely on a few key things—acknowledgments, reporting back, future solicitations—to create that warm feeling that you hope donors want...

What is blockchain and how could it help nonprofits? Many of us have heard about blockchain, or at least its most famous application in cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin. But what exactly is blockchain, and what are its applications for nonprofits? Blockchain made its first appearance in a whitepaper published in 2008 by Satoshi Nakamoto, the alias...

Messaging out of the nonprofit starvation cycle Overhead ratios aren’t just a suboptimal way of evaluating charities.  If that were the case, you could say stand them being part of the mix as people evaluate nonprofits.  In reality, they are actively negative ways of evaluating nonprofits — to a point, the nonprofits that do the...

The silicon-based fundraiser Deduplicating databases.  Proofing letters.  Selecting the donors who will receive a communication.  Data entry.  Everyone has a fundraising task (or tasks) they wish had been automated by now.  We were promised Rosie the robot maid and hoverboards and things that do the things we don’t want to do.  Or, depending on your...