Care2's Digital Engagement Blog

For many people, mobile has become the default channel for accessing the internet, reading emails, watching videos and using social media. As of early 2018, 77% of the American population owns a smartphone.

Mobility has blazed a path across nearly all sectors. It has forever changed the way people consume media, shop for goods, bank, communicate and much, much more.

But nonprofits haven’t adapted to the mobile revolution as quickly as the rest of the world.  

 Many charities receive more than forty percent of their annual revenue during the year-end fundraising season. Despite their best intentions, many also wait until late in the year to formulate and initiate their year-end strategies.

Nonprofit communicators, marketers and strategists are frequently urged to be more like their colleagues in the for profit world. In fact, at a recent conference I heard a vice president of digital innovation for one of the world’s largest public relations firms condescendingly tell his nonprofit audience “you’re marketers too, you can do any thing they can do.” I’m sure anyone reading this can come up with 15 flaws in that statement in about five seconds.

I spoke at the Social Media Strategy Summit last week and heard another presenter make an interesting recommendation. “Yes all nonprofits should be experimenting with QR Codes,” he said in response to a question from the audience. Really?

I saw this great video recently about purchasing email lists and had to share. It might not be true that a puppy dies every time you buy and email list, but your open rates and email reputation sure will.

We know, you’ve just caught your breath from the 2010 year-end fundraising push, and probably still crunching the numbers, and here we are talking about preparing for this year’s year-end effort. But, we’re nearly one month in to 2011, and overachievers are starting to prepare for the 2011 year-end fundraising campaigns already.

Sometimes the hardest thing to do is be honest about worst practices in online fundraising. In fact, in almost any situation it can be hard to be honest when that means criticizing someone. We don’t like to criticize our friends and colleagues. But we’re not doing anyone any favors if we don’t tell them when they are doing something really wrong – like flunking "Online Fundraising 101."