Looming over everything you do, technology is making nonprofit fundraising more relevant and immediate than ever imagined.

By Margaret Battistelli Gardner

Through testing, ADL has found that depending too much on straight-forward asks doesn’t produce dollars from its supporters, so it had to look away from the traditional direct-mail mindset that dictates that the majority of an organization’s correspondence with supporters contain an ask.

“We tested some end-of-the-year fundraising e-mails [and] it became very apparent to us that simply asking for money, by itself, is not an especially productive technique,” Cannon explains. “To the real credit of our supporters, they demonstrated to us that they wanted us to demonstrate to them what we were doing, how we were doing it, what impact their support has.