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...

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...

Featuring huge numbers of people in need in fundraising materials serves to make the reader feel helpless. Research shows that people who feel helpless give less money. The Disasters Emergency Committee (DEC) didn't follow the standard route of focusing on the magnitude of the recent...

I've just seen a piece of research undertaken by nfpSynergy that looks at the impact of using different ways to describe charitable expenditure. The study compared spending on fundraising and service provision, asking donors how impressive they found a range of descriptive options... Our charity...

When it comes to creating appeals, there is a natural assumption that high numbers generate high levels of income. If many thousands of people are at risk or in danger, logic would dictate that donors will give more money than if just one person is...

I wasn't that impressed with the old lady using her special vomiting power to fight the giant spider of injustice that featured in Oxfam's Be Humankind campaign last year. The huge distance from their cartoon to the real world was a big jump that I...

The donation form is the last great wilderness in the world of fundraising. Too often it has been seen as an administrative document that serves little purpose other than ensuring a gift can be added to a database record and thank you letter dispatched with...

When I was a child, I wanted to be Batman. And by that I mean the Adam West variety, not the johnny-come-lately versions played by Val Kilmer, Michael Keaton and others. I begged my mum and dad for the T-shirt, cape and mask and even...

Anyone who has followed this blog over the last year will know that I re-engaged (and re-started my direct debit) with Amnesty International UK through reading the tweets of @SusanneUre from Amnesty Canada. Yesterday I received the following in the post. One poly bag contained:...

First off, let's define what we mean by Social Information. Put simply, it's just a name for knowing what other people are up to. But I don't mean gossiping about Katie and Peter. It's more about the economic impact of knowing what's going on. I...