weekends fall during the holidays the pattern of the spike in giving remains constant. Be sure to acknowledge their past support and let them know what their money has done for your organization.   Year-end Giving Outlook December 2008 While the state of the economy is grim, most research states that people are still planning to give to charity this year and more than half of them in the same amount online as last year. Tags: Fundraising Researc As the Internet's largest nonprofit giving portal, Network for Good has examined our data about how donors turn to the Internet for year-end giving.

As the economic downturn took hold last fall, SCORE team examined whether their newsletter strategy was doing enough to reinforce how SCORE’s offerings can help small-business owners. Here is one of the four strategies they used to overhaul their e-newsletters: The team developed a research process to identify newsletter articles and interview subjects that were timely and relevant to their audience. The SCORE Association, relies on two email newsletters to establish the organization’s expertise, credibility and value as a business training and mentoring service. MarketingSherpa

For those social marketing and communications people who attempt to figure out who are people's trusted sources of information (or see the chart for where your own organization stands), the trends and absolute values today are pretty sobering. The Edelman 2009 Trust Barometer provides more validation of the fall of the organization: Tags: Audience Research Confidence Institutions Trus I came across data from the General Social Survey via Frank Rich's op-ed piece today in the NYT . Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight provides nice commentary on it so I won't repeat

And it confirms some scary research about the cold and inhuman qualities so common in fundraising copy. We're screwed. We can't write out way out of a wet paper bag, and we couldn't focus on our audience if they were standing right in front of us. No wonder fundraising results were already dropping more than two years before the recession started.

Looking at some research from Pew Internet on the rise of social network sites (you know: Facebook , MySpace , and other services where people hang out and chatter), we find some interesting facts about who's actually taking part. I'll bet I can guess where most of your donors fall. In the middle of the social media gold rush, a reality check over at The Agitator: Social Nets - A Fundraising Distraction? These are how many by age group who have accounts on social media sites:

Comparative Effectiveness Research (CER) is one of the buzz words in the health care reform and economic stimulus package conversations in which $1.1 hope funders of CER research, and the policy makers, will educate themselves that social marketing is more than either of those extremes , and that incentive systems coupled with better access and improved opportunities for more people to lead healthier lives are part of the social marketing mix and the CER that is eventually funded. billion is allocated for CER. CER studies offer the opportunity to evaluate social marketing

In December of 2008, we published an article showing that online giving had grown significantly between the fall of 2007 and the fall of 2008.1 Tags: Fundraising Researc We decided to take one more look at these trends—the election is over, the economic crisis has deepened and end-of-year fundraising data is available. As before, we looked at online giving for five nonprofit clients, including Easter Seals, Habitat for Humanity International, National Multiple Sclerosis Society, Oxfam America, and The Wilderness Society.

Marine Debris Research and Technology Grants Program Invites Proposals Deadline: May 5, 2008 (Pre-proposals) The Marine Debris Research and Technology Grants Program, a partnership between the NOAA Marine Debris Program ( http://marinedebris.noaa.gov/ ) and the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation ( http://www.nfwf.org ), provides grants to organizations working on projects to improve understanding of the impacts of marine debris on marine and coastal resources and to reduce and prevent debris in the marine environment. In addition, the program is accepting research proposals

Applications Invited for Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health & Society Scholars Deadline: October 12, 2007 The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation ( http://www.rwjf.org/ ) Health & Society Scholars program is designed to build the nation's capacity for research, leadership, and policy change to address the broad range of factors that affect health. To be eligible, scholars must have completed their doctoral training by the time of entry into the program (August or September 2008) in one of a variety of fields, including, but not limited, to the behavioral and social sciences, the biological

We become enamored of the "bells and whistles" of a new tool and fall in love with a solution for its own sake. Tags: research on IT big thought I came across this interesting report a few weeks ago. It was released this summer by the Institute for Nonprofit Organization Management in San Francisco. This finding caught my attention and is right on. "Less successful