Editor's Note: Fundraiser’s Nightmare

All of my giving was (and is) online. A particularly powerful television commercial for a charity could send me to my computer to give to a different organization with the same mission that I knew better. A banner ad on a Web site might have sparked a one-time gift, but all of the follow-up in the world wouldn't make me give again until the mood struck me. Over the course of two years, I could have given the same organization 10 gifts, and each would have been as spontaneous as the first — not the result of any well-planned strategy on the organization's part. I rarely read nonprofit e-mails, even from organizations that I supported.