When charities calculate the “value” of donors they have on record, they should also consider the potential to help or harm their cause through word of mouth, asks Jeff Brooks at Donor Power Blog.

Talkative and well-connected donors are worth their weight in gold – provided the information they spread about an organization is positive.

For example, Mr. Brooks, who is a marketing consultant for nonprofit groups, points to data used by the cell-phone industry to calculate customers’ “referral value” which shows that customers that praise their service provider to friends contribute a higher net revenue than the average consumer by bringing in new clients, while bad-mouthers end up costing the company more than the are worth in lost business. ...

E-mail may be an inexpensive way to solicit donations and stay in contact with supporters, but outdated or incorrectly typed e-mail addresses can sabotage any online fund-raising campaign.

At Katya’s Non-profit Marketing Blog, Rebecca Higman, a marketing specialist at the online giving portal Network for Good, offers a few suggestions for collecting active and accurate home e-mail addresses for potential supporters:

*Add a “double opt-in” feature that sends a confirmation link by e-mail to each new subscriber whenever you add a new e-mail address to the list.

*Use every opportunity to collect e-mail addresses from supporters—at special events, on direct mail, or through links at the end of personal e-mails—to reduce errors in the files and encourage followers to sign up for electronic communications.

*Create an e-mail...

Kivi Leroux Miller, the author of the Kivi’s Nonprofit Communications Blog, is deeply disappointed with the results of an experiment she calls “What I Got When I Gave.”

In November, Ms. Miller converted credit-card miles into cash which she distributed as $25 gifts to 12 different national charities through Network for Good, a nonprofit group that channels online donations to nonprofit groups nationwide.

Three and a half months later, she writes, only 4 of the 12 organizations have acknowledged her gift, even though she offered them her e-mail and and mailing address through Network for Good.

Of those four, she commended National Public Radio, which sent an impersonal thank-you not by e-mail within a few weeks of the gift. “Personalization would have ...

When it comes to fund-raising letters, longer is usually better, according to Jeff Brooks, a consultant at Merkle, a Seattle direct-marketing company, and author of Donor Power Blog.

Mr. Brooks says that over the past five years of testing various direct mail formats he has only once seen a shorter letter get better results than a longer one.

That’s because the type of donors who respond best to letters are a self-selected bunch who prefer to get their information through reading, says Mr. Brooks, adding that the content’s relevance to the donor is a far more important factor in an appeal’s success than its length.

“Your donors may be different. You may have tested into more success with shorter letters,” he writes. “But if you’re relying on short letters...

As fund raisers struggle to coax money from donors and foundations bruised by stock market losses and Madoff schemes might want to follow the lead of students at Penn State who have successfully been raising money on their feet for 30 years through an annual 46-hour dance marathon, writes Stephen J. Dubner, an author at The New York Times’ Freakonomics blog.

Known as THON, the no-sitting, no-sleeping event raises money for Penn State Children’s Hospital’s Four Diamonds Fund to help fight pediatric cancer and describes itself as the “largest student-run philanthropy in the world.”

Defying trends elsewhere in philanthropy, Penn’s 2009 THON exceeded last year’s fund-raising result for the fifth year in a row – raising $7,490,133.87...

A letter from a donor posted at Charity Navigator Blog echoes a commonly heard complaint from direct-mail recipients: Stop the incessant and costly mailings.

Don’t send gifts of T-shirts and address labels or a barrage of multiple appeals, pleads the unnamed donor.

“I give to several charities and it really makes me uncomfortable that they are wasting my money on sending me items that I do not want,” the donor writes. Particularly obnoxious are the appeals that include coins or dollar bills, continues the writer, who says charities should give donors an “opt-out” option.

As for the multiple mailings, the donor recommends that charities stop at three. After that, the donor writes, “if there’s no response, then they should take you off the list.”

What is your organization’s direct-mail policy for how...

GlobalGiving, a Web site that matches donors with community-based development projects, is encouraging its donors to play Cupid.

As part of its “Operation: Give Love” campaign, anyone who donates to one of the Web site’s many projects —such as $10 to buy notebooks for children in Sierra Leone or $100 to help a Kenyan teen mother start a business—will receive up to 20 “e-arrows” to they can send by e-mail to their nearest and dearest for Valentine’s Day.

People who receive the arrows are automatically entered in a raffle to win a bouquet of flowers, and shooters win an extra raffle entry for every “e-arrow” they lance.

Since the campaign started on Wednesday, about 10 percent of those who have donated through the Web site have used the e-arrows to tell friends about their charitable contribution and suggest they make one of their own,...

Coinciding with the institution’s 800th anniversary, a capital campaign at Cambridge University recently passed the £800 million ($1.16-billion) mark. Cambridge officials say that is more than has ever been raised by a university outside the United States.

Cambridge secured £138-million in contributions in the fiscal year ending July 31. And despite a slowdown in new gifts in the past six months due to the global financial crisis, Peter Agar, Cambridge’s director of development and alumni relations, says he hopes to surpass the campaign’s £1 billion ($1.45-billion) goal by its 2012 completion date.

When the ambitious campaign was announced in 2005, some were concerned that, with little tradition of alumni giving to British universities, it would be overly dependent on U.S. or other international support, says Mr. Agar....

At the blog Creating the Future, Hildy Gottlieb urges readers not to succumb to the “sirens song” of social media, which lures charities with the promise of raising money fast—and on the cheap.

Asking donors to contribute tiny sums toward an individual need or project through Facebook feeds and Twitter entreaties is an unsustainable method of fund raising, argues Ms. Gottlieb, who is president of Community-Driven Institute and Help 4 NonProfits in Tucson, Ariz.

In fact, she says, social-media fund raising is downright destructive because it does nothing to solve the causes of problems. As a result, the problem is never eradicated, which in the long run creates disillusioned and discouraged donors who eventually abandon philanthropy out of a sense of hopelessness.

“By asking for help for ‘just one poor boy and his family,’ we are actually creating the path to frustration, burnout...

Giving donors small tasks to complete brings them a step closer toward making a donation, explained fund-raising experts last week at the Direct Marketing Association Nonprofit Federation‘s conference in Washington.

“Always give them something to do,” advised Karen Taggart, manager of fund-raising innovations at People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. That was the philosophy behind PETA’s online campaign against Chinese fur farms, which paired donation appeals with a variety of interactive options for supporters such as links to petitions and videos and an opportunity to forward information to friends. “Every time someone clicks on a link, you’ve just increased the likelihood that they’ll do something else for you in the future,” she said. That campaign attracted 1,028 new donors to the organization, said Ms....