How did giving to Haiti compare to previous emergencies?
CAF have recently updated their disaster monitor research which looks at long-term patterns of giving to emergency appeals. All figures are for the UK. The key findings are: Just under half of people surveyed gave to Haiti (in comparison to 81% of people who gave…
New research on text giving
I picked up on an interesting stream of tweets from @seanpowell last night. He was attending a US benchmarking presentation from M&R Strategic Services and MobileActive on text messaging. Following the American Red Cross's Haiti text campaign – which resulted in more than one million…
You really should write to your grandmother more often
One of the first tasks that I give to trainee copywriters is to write an appeal letter to their grandmother. Not people like their grandmother. They write the letter to their grandmother – by name. It doesn’t matter if the appeal is for overseas aid,…
Are your donors simply paying spectators?
There’s a great video on Social Hallucinations produced by David Gauntlet from Making is Connecting. David looks at everyday creativity and writes about seeing a cultural shift – from a sit back and be told one to a making and doing one. So what’s this…
How do donors choose which charity to give to?
I’ve just read a very interesting piece from Beth Breeze in Civil Societylooking at how donors decide which charities to support. As we’ve seen in other pieces of research, donors continue to struggle to distinguish one organisation from another. They feel restricted by the lack…
Fundraising is child’s play
Few of us (in the UK) will have not picked up on Charlie Simpson, the 7 year-old boy who raised over £200,000 to help people in Haiti by doing a sponsored cycle round his local park. But Charlie isn't the only child from whom fundraisers…
This is the good stuff
What part of communication actually matters? I’d suggest, What you’ve achieved by giving to us, might fit in the overlap quite neatly. Thanks to Social Hallucinations, MisEntropy, fffound.
What really satisfies a donor?
Adrian Sargeant found back in 2000 that about half of all cash donors give just once to a charity. Even those people who do give again, fall off the donor file at the alarming rate of 30% a year. The figures look even worse in…
You no longer control the message. And that’s OK
This is a very short talk (3 minutes) from Alexis Ohanian (one of the people who set up Reddit) about a Greenpeace campaign aiming to stop humpback whales being hunted by Japanese fishermen. To engage people, Greenpeace put a tracking device on a whale and…
January Twitter round up
Apart from the posts on here, I also share loads of other useful and interesting things on Twitter. If you haven't yet signed up, perhaps because you think it's a load of rubbish, can I ask you to read this and think again. To show…
The Essentials
‘Tis Halloween. Keep to the light and beware the Four Fundraisers of the Apocalypse!
Why do people give? The Donor Participation Project with Louis Diez.
A guide to fundraising on the back of a postcard
What does the latest research tell us about the state of fundraising?
How do donors manage their philanthropic budgets?