Testing

This week, I want to talk about a few things I do know and how these things should impact our fundraising. Again, this isn't an exhaustive list, but rather what I recently have been grappling with.

Join us for this session as we uncover the mysteries of responsive design for your nonprofit website.

This session helps you sort through data issues and offers ideas to avoid the typical traps, such as collecting it and then wasting it.

The key message running through NextAfter's "5 Ways to Cut Through the Clutter With Your Year-End Fundraising" report (in my opinion) is that over time, when everyone adopts "best practices," they become overused. My personal beef is when a great concept that makes perfect sense for one organization is adapted — and jimmy-rigged — by another. Think about the dime used by March of Dimes; it makes perfect sense for that organization, but most of the other coin mailings seem to me to be a major stretch. Or the brown lunch bag used as the outer envelope for a food bank; it loses something when it's used by an organization that doesn't provide food, I think.

Budget management and budget cuts are never easy, but becoming stagnant and not trying to change is not the answer.

For an organization that was founded 35 years ago — specifically to build one memorial — the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund (VVMF) certainly has become a master of reinvention.

The next time you're tempted to say "I'm not interested," I highly recommend you break that down and understand what is really holding you back.

Most of the donors in our databases were acquired offline — through direct mail, events or other means. How do we target them with relevant online display ads to encourage them to take action online? Or donate online or offline? Magic? No … through direct-response, cookie-based targeting.

You can learn, and glean some great ideas, from what your colleagues are testing, but you can’t assume that what worked for them will work for you.

Fundraising studies across the board continue to report the growth of online fundraising, which makes nonprofit websites that much more vital. Here are 19 A/B tests outlined by KISSmetrics that every fundraiser should run.