Matthew Gerken
While Giving USA’s annual reports fulfill a need for serious study of the charitable sector, fundraising professionals would do best to ignore all the buzz and focus on data that is more relevant to their specific organizations.
Shady direct mail tactics, like crying wolf, have diminishing returns over time.
Like cats on the internet, fundraising fads can be fun to play with. But they ultimately harm your organization by fixating on lower return strategies, implicitly endorsing false premises, and misallocating precious resources.
Until the moment of need strikes, the high costs of employee turnover are rarely dwelled upon by nonprofit leaders.
For too long, direct mail companies have been taking advantage of nonprofit leaders with empty promises, underhanded tactics, and confusing contracts that serve their interests rather than the nonprofit’s.
Philanthropists should learn from the late John Bogle’s humility and localism. Because of his selfless business decisions, we had one less billionaire philanthropist and millions more middle-class givers spread throughout the world.
How philanthropy’s obsession with metrics makes complete gibberish out of grant proposals.
Perhaps we’ve gone too far in our obsession with three-word slogans and bullet-point presentations.
As long as there are suburbs, the essential communal and civic needs that drove Austrian architect Victor Gruen to design shopping malls will remain.
