70 Nonprofit Trends for 2015

3. Stop trying to re-create the Ice Bucket Challenge. Your constituents’ inboxes, walls and news feeds are flooded with solicitations. As a result, they have developed finely tuned authenticity radars. It is impossible to replicate, manufacture or plan authenticity ahead of time. The Ice Bucket Challenge was a truly bottom-up fundraising phenomenon, and everyone wanted a piece of the peer-to-peer golden child in 2014. Imitation Ice Buckets floundered then and will flounder in 2015 because they are, by definition, contrived. They will set off your constituents’ authenticity alarms.