Strategy is a complicated beast at the best of times. Try developing one for a charity and you really start to understand the meaning of the phrase ‘a little tricky’. Most organisational strategies tend to concentrate on how the charity is going to tackle the…

There’s a handy mnemonic that’s taught to trainee journalists to help them identify a good story. Journalists, just like fundraisers, can’t just write about what interests them, they have to focus on what will interest their readers. As a result, the mnemonic works for us…

One of the problems of using face-to-face techniques to recruit donors has been the high cancellation rates. It’s not unusual to see more than 50% of all supporters recruited in this way cancel their regular gift in the first year. The fundraising industry has always…

There was a cracking post from Jeff Brooks on Future Fundraising Now last week. It tells the story of how two senior marketing people at General Motors came up with the almost unbelievable idea (now reversed) of banning the word Chevy when talking about Chevrolet…

I gave my first gift via See The Difference on Monday. If you haven’t heard of them, let me explain who they are. The people who run the organisation see themselves as being at the forefront of a revolution in charity giving.  Dominic Vallely, one…

Wear this at all times and consult it before making any decisions.

Just discovered this, which made me chuckle. It’s more a lesson in how not to do it.

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…

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…