Learn more about analytics and research best practices, as well as real world examples and solutions for nonprofits.

Optimizing the Demise (Part 2)

Yesterday we posted the first of our five part series on Optimizing the Demise, if you missed it, click here to read. Today we offer you the second practical idea for how to optimize the decline in your direct mail fundraising program:

Stop direct mail testing – at least in acquisition. Look, even if you test something that doubles response (which is rarer than a supermodel on a Metro bus), lifting response rates from a 0.44% to a 0.88% isn’t going to save your organization. Better to redirect the budget and ideas set aside for testing to try new things that might have a longer payoff.

This idea won’t change the course of the direct mail trend. But it will buy you some time while we are all figuring out the next big thing.

Is the Increasing Age of Your New Donors a Concerning Trend?

by Bill Jacobs | Apr 10, 2023

Over the last dozen years, we’ve tracked the average age of a new donor for faith-based organizations. For the first three years, from CY10 to CY12, the age of a new donor was steady at 58. However, since then, the median age of a first-time donor acquired has...

Choose A1OI Rather than AI

by Bill Jacobs | Mar 12, 2023

Seems like everyone is talking about how ChatboxGPT (and AI in general) are going to transform the world. As Google CEO Sundar Pichai has said, “AI is probably the most important thing humanity has ever worked on. I think of it as something more profound than...

The Secret about Last Fall

by Bill Jacobs | Mar 6, 2023

We have been wading through buckets of data evaluating donor performance for this past fall. And while we still have a lot of data to get through, a clear narrative has been established: While fall 2022 was soft compared to the prior year, it is still way better than...