Blogs

Sometimes it pays to chase up a fake email. A journalist today forwarded me an email purportedly from the Santander Foundation, which had apparently been received by some charities.

If you are not on social media, you are missing a huge opportunity!

I see that the Charity Commission has tweaked its website recently. The Charity overview section includes more detailed information on income, expenditure, assets and grants awarded. This is useful.

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Are you a member of a fundraising consortium? How many are there and what models do they use?

It’s a simple enough premise. If your customers, supporters or volunteers ‘speak’ with you about their needs, wants or a complaint, pay attention! It’s about having good internal communications and this means putting in place both the means for your people to communicate as well as nurturing the will for your colleagues to communicate with each other for everyone’s benefit.

Vasileios Kospanos explains, using digital curation tool Storify, how he was engaged and moved to make a donation.

There are hundreds if not thousands of people online offering technical and content advice on email marketing for business as well as for fundraising or campaigning. I'm not a technical expert so can't pretend to understand detailed coding or firewall issues but I do know a thing or two about content and about engaging readers.

Why do we want to engage readers? Because engaged readers are much more likely to do what you're asking them to do! Note the implication in that last sentence... you have to have a clear and compelling 'ASK' in every email whether it's for funds, to buy something, to sign-up to a campaign, to share with a friend or just to get further information - include an action.

I received a well-intentioned and polite email earlier this week from someone telling me about a schools reading project in Wales. Here's how it broke down:

I can't believe that I have ever considered Batman and Bill Gates at the same time, far less compared them, but such a comparison has inspired this infographic by frugaldad.com of Bill Gates and his c