Experts-on-everything McKinsey & Co. issued its official recommendations to the US Postal Service at a conference in Washington this week. While they are only recommendations and are non-binding (a USPS spokesperson said the consultant was instructed to “investigate all possible options”), Bloomberg News stresses in its report that not only would it be good to eliminate Saturday mail, but also 2 other days as well. (Read on …)
Earlier today, Postmaster General John Potter began to outline a proposed overhaul of the USPS that could include cutting Saturday delivery.
More from Fox News.
Our Director of Database Marketing & Analysis, Maciej Przybylowski, handed me a great article from the Wall Street Journal this morning that, while somewhat negative about the future of nonprofits, speaks to the need for organizations to become more efficient if they are going to survive this recession. Of course, the stories of those that haven’t made it are often heart-rending, especially if they work in feeding the hungry, sheltering the homeless or paying for the education of inner-city youth.
But looking at this from a solely business perspective, maybe there are just too many non-profits right now. (Read on …)
One of the hallmarks of today’s philanthropy is the watchdog-like quality held by many donors to use how an organization spends its money as a criteria for support. Often they decide whether or not to support an organization at all based solely on the ratio of money spent on non-mission related activities.
This is partly inspired by the easy access to information the internet has brought us. And of course the biggest source of this kind of information beyond the IRS’ database of Form 990s is “Charity Navigator” who’ve made a whole industry of its rating system. The fate of non-profits often rests in their hands. And why shouldn’t donors have that kind of information? Seems fair. But is it the best way? (Read on …)
On Monday, the Wall Street Journal featured an opinion piece by Pablo Eisenberg that took foundations to task for how they support and work with non-profits. In it, he decried many things in a list of recommendations, but notably the decrease in funding foundations are providing organizations in these troubled economic times.
What stuck out to me was how that is such a good reason for non-profits to have diverse sources of funding. Too many groups – especially small ones – are either so reliant on a handful of major gifts (including from foundations) or have a full-time staffer dedicated to filling out mountains of foundation grant requests – usually without much success – yet haven’t even thought of an individual giving program. (Read on …)
In a significant departure from their strategy of the last several years, the USPS made this announcement last week:
Simply stated, there will not be a price increase for market dominant products including First-Class Mail, Standard Mail, periodicals, single-piece Parcel Post. There will be no exigent price increase for these products.
In doing so, they recognized that “increasing prices might have generated revenue for the Postal Service in the short term, the long term effect could drive additional mail out of the system.” The entire announcement is after the break.
The Management Centre, a UK-based consulting group for non-profits, has published its Global Fundraising Confidence Survey for 2009 and from our perspective many of the results they highlighted weren’t too surprising. Most notably, although half of the non-profits surveyed reported a decline in income over the past year, a third saw in an increase.
Among the reasons cited for decline was “poor crisis leadership” from the top, while — and this is what we want to stress most — the top listed factor for positive results was “increased investment in fundraising.” (Read on …)
Last month, CBA issued a report on public broadcasters’ results from our co-op campaigns in August and November 2008 to see how stations were weathering the economic storm. While November’s results were encouraging in that they showed a recovery from a soft August, the jury was still out for a sustained recovery.
The verdict is now in and the results from March 2009 seem to confirm a very positive trend. Significant improvement was seen in response rate and ROI across all major areas of fundraising: New donor acquisition, Lapsed member reinstatement and Additional Gift campaigns. Average Gift was for the most part unchanged.
Here is a summary of those results.
(Read on …)
The Giving USA Foundation’s annual philanthropy report, released yesterday, indicates that while giving was down last year, it didn’t go down as much as people thought. Specifically, it declined by just 2%. But it was the second year in a row where total giving was more than $300 billion. So, not bad, all things considered. NPR’s Morning Edition has a nice summary on their website.
Numbers from our own clients are encouraging too. Our experienced analytics team just completed a study comparing our August and November 2008 public broadcasting co-op campaigns — the first two campaigns right around the bad economic news breaking. Overall, there was definitely a dip in August, but November rebounded quite nicely. Whether that is a trend or not remains to be seen.
The Chronicle of Philanthropy released the results of their annual survey of online fundraising this week. While online fundraising continues to grow, that growth has slowed down a bit. The magazine attributes this to the economy, although it also notes that online isn’t off as much as some more traditional methods of fundraising. Other notable findings include: