Friday, February 1

My new column in The Nonprofit Times

The NonProfit Times asked me to write a column using my anonymous alias "a fundraiser" which will appear as a monthly feature on their website.

Apparently someone over there thinks I'm running, "one of the hottest blogs in the sector" and since I'm such a sucker for flattery - I told them I would be honored to share my thoughts.

So, a couple days ago I sat down and thought about a topic that worries a lot of my fundraising colleagues... and I began my first post by asking a scary question:

How would you feel if you discovered that 500 of your donors had created a group on a social networking Web site like Facebook to publicly discuss their experiences donating to your organization?

I suspect some fundraisers would panic with a sense of fear...
Continue reading the rest of this thought-provoking article titled "Our Donors Are Talking - What Are We Afraid Of?" on the NonProfit Times website.

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

Like it's 1999 all over again - http://cluetrain.com

Anonymous said...

Congrats fundraiser! pretty soon, I feel like you are going to start charging people a subscription fee to read your blog.

Marc Sirkin said...

Dear "a fundraiser",

Congrats! Can't wait to read what you write.

Anonymous said...

This is big news indeed.

Anonymous said...

Scenario that I have seen many times in poor countries:
1. Donor sees appalling need, wants to help
2. Charming, smooth-talking local NGO convinces donor to give money without background checks.
3. Small corruption by NGO.
4. Donor turns blind eye, not wanting to alienate small contributor.
5. NGO sees donor cowawrdice, increases corruption.
6. Donor covers up corruption from contributors' eyes.
7. NGO corruption gets out of hand.
8. Donor quietly pulls out of project - NGO gets away with theft.

Anonymous said...

Congratulations. Please push the discourse to get google finance to move beyond metrics of admin vs. program or outputs (numbers served), to lives impacted.

Unknown said...

Congratulations on the new gig. Your recent topic doesn't seem scary to any of us. If we all do the right thing our donors should say mostly good things. The question is: how can we leverage these organic networks? Can they be tapped at will, or do they become harder to reach? Does this create a donor management problem if you run campaigns through a centralized DB?