Paul Morris

What Nonprofits get wrong about Technology — and what to Do About It Here is the number that should be on every technology vendor’s whiteboard: $1.5 trillion. That is the nonprofit sector’s annual contribution to the U.S. economy — roughly 5.3 percent of GDP. The sector employs nearly one in ten American workers. It is … Read more

The most dangerous language in the nonprofit sector isn’t hostile. It’s warm. “We’re a family” is the most dangerous lie in nonprofits. It sounds generous. It sounds human. It sounds like care. It is, more often than not, a convenient fiction. The nonprofit sector doesn’t have a language problem. It has a courage problem. The … Read more

The sector calls acquisition a growth strategy. It’s a distraction dressed up as ambition. Let’s start with the math, because the math is damning. It costs the average nonprofit $1.50 to raise a single dollar from a new donor. Retaining an existing one costs $0.20. That’s a 7.5x cost differential — and most organizations are … Read more

The sector calls it wisdom. Most of it is unexamined habit with a budget line. The nonprofit sector has a comfort problem. Certain fundraising practices have been wrapped in so much tradition, emotion, and institutional inertia that questioning them has become professionally dangerous. The sector calls this wisdom. Most of it is scar tissue — … Read more

Nonprofits call it being understaffed. Donors call it being ignored. One of those framings is accurate. The silent “no” is not a bandwidth problem. It is what happens when someone reaches out — to volunteer, to donate, to host a fundraiser, to make an introduction that could matter — and receives nothing back. An auto-reply, … Read more

The nonprofit sector taught your board to sound rehearsed and then wondered why donors don’t give again. The elevator pitch is one of the most durable pieces of received wisdom in the nonprofit sector — and one of the most reliably counterproductive. The premise is seductive: distill your mission into thirty seconds, deliver it with … Read more

Leadership thinks donor retention is a fundraising problem. It’s not. It’s a leadership problem. And confusing the two is costing your organization a fortune. Here is a number that should bother you: 43%. That is the sector-wide donor retention rate, per the Fundraising Effectiveness Project’s most recent full-year data. Forty-three percent sounds almost survivable until … Read more

Every year, many EDs and Boards look at the budget gap and decides development will close it. They write down a number. No one asks if it’s real. This is magical thinking, they call it budgeting. Annually, in budget meetings across the nonprofit sector, a number gets written down. It is arrived at by combining … Read more

Charitable giving in the United States now exceeds $590 billion annually. It is the third largest industry in the country. By raw dollars, philanthropy has never been healthier. And yet…donor retention has hovered below 50% for over a decade, according to the Fundraising Effectiveness Project. Total donors are declining. For every two donors an organization … Read more