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...
What should you do with newly recruited Haiti emergency donors?
There have been a number of posts in the blogosphere offering advice about what charities should do with donors recruited in response to Haitian earthquake appeals. Traditionally, emergency donors are very hard to retain, often only surfacing during the next high-profile disaster. So any advice...
When should you use suggested donation levels?
A short while ago, Google shared details of a test they undertook on "one of the disaster relief donation drives on Google.com". The goal was to discover the ideal suggested donation level at times of an emergency – $20, $50, $100 or no prompt at...
Social networks don't seem to be driving extra traffic to help Haiti
Bill Tancer of Hitwise has reported on some fascinating data on his blog. The earthquake in Haiti caused a huge jump in visits to US charity websites. They were up five fold from an average of 0.02% before the earthquake hit to over 0.1% on...
The DEC tells donors what their gift will do
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...
Why people don't give
There have been a number of recent posts on various blogs looking at the reasons why people don't give to charity. Last week I added to the debate when I wrote about nine techniques that donors use to avoid giving to appeals. Reading them, you'll...
How you say you spend it is important
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...
The Essentials
Crack the Code to Regular Giving: Insights, Strategies, and a Special Giveaway!
‘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?