Useful Truths: Apply With Care

Second, you can spend less cultivating your lower-value donors, which frees up dollars to spend on your higher donors. This can bring significant improvements in net revenue and ROI.

How this useful truth can go wrong
This is a true story: A nonprofit I once worked with (I’ll call it “Sweetness & Light”) discovered this useful truth. Sweetness & Light was a smart organization. It believed in the numbers and was always eager to act on knowledge. So it was all over this truth like kids on monkey bars. It took Sweetness & Light about three meetings to begin viewing low-dollar donors as drooling barbarians — who possibly carry a nasty virus that can spread through the mail.