Fundraising's freshest thinkers take on the sector's toughest topics

By Margaret Battistelli Gardner

What we’re seeing is that nonprofits are bouncing between two extremes — online triumphalism and offline defensiveness. And these are the people who continually circulate studies about the dominance of direct mail — you’ve seen these people, right?

So, both sides are wrong because they are incorrectly assuming a binary relationship between online and offline; it’s either one or the other. It used to be a one-channel response loop: I get mail, I write checks and I send the check back to you. And that still happens. We still see that with many, many of our donors. But gradually we’re moving into a multichannel response loop that blends online and offline.