Today's Featured Blog Posts

The massive (but fixable) problems with direct mail testing.
"See if this sounds at like your organization: The direct mail test ideas that actually make it into the mail stream are almost all incremental and rarely (mostly never) beat the control. You spend enormous amounts of time and money coming up with test ideas, producing them and managing the logistics, only to have the same poor results year over year. The more creative or innovative ideas tend to get discarded out of fear and the need to stick with the known, if lousy, results of the control and the incremental changes to it. Even if you do manage to test big ideas, the results are muddled at best since you changed EVERYTHING, instead of 1 thing, and while there may be many good ideas in the creative package they are forever lost amid the bad ones." Click here to read the full post.

Nonprofit Growing Pains. Dealing with Change.
"When your organization is going through major transition it's important to keep your supporters in the loop and address their concerns. Budget priorities may force you to close major programs, maybe you're making a strategic choice to focus on your organization's core competency and handing off part of your operations to a partner peer organization better equipped to handle certain services, or perhaps benchmarking and research have helped your team uncover a better way to handle the work and serve your community. Whatever the case, when you're undergoing major organizational and programmatic changes be thoughtful in the way you share the news. Taking a look at the ways technology companies have informed their users about product changes is instructive for nonprofits looking to announce big changes in a thoughtful way." Click here to read the full post.