Trends Shaping Fundraising in 2026
Trends Shaping Fundraising in 2026 Insights gathered from 20+ nonprofit leaders representing agencies, nonprofits,consultants, data providers, and technology partners. Whether you joined us in the room at The Bridge Conference or are reviewing these trends from afar, one truth is clear: the donor relationship is fundamentally changing. Below is a summary of the macro-trends currently […]
Reclaim Inactive Donors Using High-Recency Co-ops
How Nonprofits Can Reclaim Inactive Donors Using High-Recency Co-ops Nonprofit development and acquisition marketers face a persistent, frustrating challenge: their donor databases are quietly shrinking.Every year, a meaningful share of hard-won donors slip into “inactive” status. They supported your cause once, maybe twice, then lapsed. Traditional win-back strategies, blasting the entire lapsed file with standard […]
Precision Over Guesswork: How Custom Digital Audiences Are Redefining DTC Acquisition
Precision Over Guesswork How Custom Digital Audiences Are Redefining DTC AcquisitionFor acquisition marketers, the playbook is changing rapidly. Budgets are under constant pressure, and performance is paramount. Relying on prospect audiences based largely or entirely on inferred interest and behavior leaves marketers falling short of their acquisition goals. Legacy data sourcing models and generic targeting […]
Why Warranty and Insurance Marketers Are Doing Data Different
Why Warranty and Insurance Marketers Are Doing Data Different A 25% improvement in customer acquisition cost is the math marketers need today. We’ve all seen the marketing briefs. They usually look something like this: “Our target audience for home or auto protection plans is women, aged 35–55, with an HHI of $100k+, living in suburban […]
Solving the Publishing Paradox: Why Source Quality is the Only Metric That Matters
Solving the Publishing Paradox Why Source Quality is the Only Metric That Matters Publishing today runs on the unforgiving math of subscription economics: Subscriber Acquisition Cost (SAC) measured against Lifetime Value (LTV). Industry-wide, we are seeing a tightening vise—acquisition rates have declined for three consecutive years while the cost to find those new readers has […]
Why I Am Not Chasing the AI Trend — and Why Our Results Show It
Why I Am Not Chasing the AI Trend — and Why Our Results Show It I have been working in artificial intelligence since before most people in this industry started using the term. At NASA’s neurocomputing institute in the 1990s, I built neural networks. Real ones — not the marketing version of AI, the engineering […]
Your Next Best Customer May Be Invisible
Your Next Best Customer May Be Invisible Convert anonymous browsers into buyers and optimize your ad spend The majority of your website visitors leave without identifying themselves. No purchase. No form fill. No cookie. Just gone — taking with them every dollar you spent on SEO, paid search, social, and your catalog to get them […]
Why Discovery Is the New North Star for Donor Acquisition
Why Discovery Is the New North Star for Donor Acquisition The Comfortable System For years, we relied on a predictable formula for nonprofit direct mail acquisition: find strong lists, control costs, and use overlap between files as a form of validation. It was a strategy built for a more homogeneous market, and for a long […]
Reach with Precision: The Data Sourcing Strategy for Now
The Data Sourcing Strategy for Now Reach With Precision: The Data Sourcing Strategy for Now Why legacy sourcing models may be blocking the new audiences you want to reach Years ago, my teammates and I architected the data sourcing framework that remains the standard across much of direct-to-consumer marketing. It was built for a largely […]
Tactical Deep Dive: Data Points for Direct Mail Personalization
Tactical Deep Dive Data Points for Direct Mail Personalization The goal is to use the online behavior to dictate the offline message. This requires gathering three critical categories of data: Identity, Intent, and Context. I. Identity and Contact Data (The “Who” and “Where”) These are the fundamental data points required to deliver the mail and […]