15 Mistakes That Have Already Been Made for You

Mistake 8
Chasing blindly after the next big thing. The fear of being left behind can cause us to leap before we look. Protect your core revenue streams, and budget separately for research and development with dollars you can afford to lose.

Mistake 9
Making it look too easy. If people take your fundraising programs for granted, they’ll be tempted to water them down by mistakenly cutting frequency or insisting on more stories of success and less emphasis on need and urgency. Worse still, when the resulting fundraising efforts fail — they will — it will be blamed on the channel, the donors or your department, rather than on the dilution of the strategy.

Mistake 10
Forgetting to test. Why would anyone abandon a control for something new without testing? Maybe these people are afraid to be proven wrong, or because testing is difficult, or testing costs more, or maybe they just can’t imagine that their idea could fail. Always test.