Elizabeth Pope's blog

Our pals and frequent partners over at NTEN teamed up with Charity Dynamics to conduct a survey of  donor engagement with their charitable causes. They've issued a report summarizing the results, and they came up with some pretty interesting findings. Among them was that although most donors gave to more than one organization, close to half of the donors have a "favorite" charity, which is the one to which they reported donating the vast majority of their total philanthropy dollars over the course of a year. If a donor has a preferred organization, that organization receives an average of 90 percent of that individual's giving. And most of these folks were giving at least $100 a year.

Ninety percent is a pretty jawdropping amount. So how do you become a donor's favorite charity, and how do you find the people who will fall in love with your organization's cause? NTEN recommends practices that Idealware has also found to be extremely effective. Ensure that you're maintaining a balanced communications mix when you reach out to your consituents-- not just direct mail or through a website, but a variety of approaches. But don't "try to be all things to all people," as the report cautions-- meet your donors where they are, and make smart, targeted asks to the right groups of people.

There's a lot more in the report, which you can download for free here:

http://www.nonprofitdonorengagement.com/

How will you become your donors' favorite charity?

Whether your organization needs to measure its programmatic success or expand its donor base, statistical analysis software can help nonprofits become more data-driven and accountable.

If this sounds appealing, you’re in luck: powerful tools that only five or ten years ago required dedicated servers to run can now be installed on a desktop. But these packages can require a considerable investment in up-front and ongoing costs, staff time, and training. Overwhelmed by the choices and not sure if you have the necessary statistical chops? We talked to a statistician to get the latest on some of the options available.

Low-Cost Options and Open-Source Tools

For More Advanced Needs

The Top of the Line

A Note of Caution

I came to Idealware from the library world: I earned a master’s degree in library and information science and worked as an archivist for a few years.  Archivists make sure that users can access and understand information in all formats for years to come. Not all information survives, of course. In fact, at the National Archives, where I worked, we were tasked with preserving and describing only those Federal government records deemed “permanent”, or critical for our democracy to continue to function. (That’s only about 1%-3% of all the records that the Federal government generates.)

Did we have to make sure all this important stuff was kicking around forever? Not exactly.  Even acid-free paper disintegrates eventually, no matter how much you do to preserve it. Born-digital records—e-mails, documents, video, audio, databases, photographs, etc—are proving to be even trickier.  Some digital preservation scholars think that future historians will call this era the digital dark age due to the amount of information our society faces losing.

What about your nonprofit’s electronic records—will they become a part of the digital dark age? Preserving your legacy might seem like a lofty issue, or one that only established organizations with institutional archives need to consider. But consider what would happen if all of your work e-mails vanished overnight, never to be seen again. How might that affect the health of your organization? What about all of your social media—what will happen to all of your carefully crafted posts and your network of followers if the platform you use folds? Check the End User License Agreement—the platform’s creators probably don’t owe you very much.

Chris Prom, an archivist at the University of Illinois and the brain behind the blog Practical E-Records, does a fabulous job of outlining the big-picture issues at hand in his paper “Facilitating Archives in a Facebook Era,” posted in draft form here. (Full disclosure—Chris was my boss when I was a graduate assistant at the University Archives.) Describing the problems inherent with “ensuring the preservation of evidence when people’s communication tools have, in effect, become the organization’s official recordkeeping mechanism”, he concludes that to capture e-mail, social media, and other ephemeral digital communications, “what people need most are practical tools and services.” A statement after Idealware’s own heart!

 Chris and his colleagues at Illinois are proposing to develop a tool called myKive, an open-source and customizable personal archiving software that will to capture the digital interactions of its users without affecting their daily routine and that will give them complete control over the data harvested. Like many others interested in digital records, I’ll be following the tool’s development closely in the hopes that it might have some application for nonprofits looking to preserve their digital legacy in an easy and cost-effective way. Let’s hope we can stave off the return of another dark age!