Hire Well, Train Quickly

"It's a very competitive environment now for giving, and it is also an environment where people are tuning out faster," Ahern explains. "They sort their mail at hyper speed, and things hit the trash much more quickly.

"The difficulty of getting someone's attention, making your case and raising money is just going to get harder and harder," he adds. "I think the grassroots people are going to have a very tough time finding a donor base and developing that donor base, just because they're going to get washed out in all the noise.