Denny Hatch Associates Inc.

On her Non-Profit Marketing Blog, Katya Andresen shares a recap of and highlights from the session “The Seven Things Everyone Wants: What Freud and Buddha Understood (and We’re Forgetting) about Online Outreach,” which she and Sea Change Strategies President Mark Rovner presented at the Nonprofit Technology Conference last month. The NTC in New Orleans was full of fantastic, sparkly, shiny new technology tools. And then there was our session. No winsome widgets, no witty Twittering, no Dopplr-found Doppelgangers. And that was the point. Which is this: What makes technology tools great is not the technology. It’s the people behind them. Successful technology is about

On the See3 Communications blog See What’s Out There, See3 CEO Michael Hoffman shares these tips from YouTube’s “YouTube for Nonprofits Tip Sheet.” The basics * Reach out. Post videos that get YouTube viewers talking, and then stay in the conversation with comments and video responses. * Partner up. Find other organizations on YouTube who complement your mission, and work together to promote each other. * Keep it fresh. Put up new videos regularly and keep them short — ideally fewer than 5 minutes. * Spread your message. Share links and the embed code for your videos with supporters so they can help get

At last month’s Nonprofit Technology Conference in New Orleans, nonprofit techies and professional fundraisers met up to discuss the emerging best practices for fundraising using social networks and social media. Their conversations were overwhelmed by one small detail. Few nonprofits have succeeded in raising large amounts of money using blogs, widgets and fundraising applications for social networks. Nine months since the high-profile launch of Facebook Causes and well over a year since the first articles on Web 2.0 fundraising started to appear, members of the nonprofit tech community seemed to be turning against the new-fangled tools for online fundraising. The traditional staples

Ed note: In last week’s edition of his snarky e-letter, Business Common Sense, direct-mail pundit Denny Hatch weighed in on the online political fundraising. This article is excerpted from that; to read the whole article, click here. The campaigns of Hillary Clinton and, especially, Barack Obama have discovered the Midas touch in terms of milking political Web junkies for cash. It looks as though they will go down to the Denver Convention in late August having spent zillions to bash each other, and very possibly destroy the Democratic Party’s chance to win back the White House in what should be a slam-dunk election. How

The horrific tsunami in the Indian Ocean late last year brought instant and gratifying responses from myriad governments, private donors, the military and nonprofit organizations from around the world. Among them was Oxfam America.

Oxfam America was founded in 1942 by a group of Quakers, social activists and Oxford academics who called themselves the Oxford Committee for Famine Relief in response to the plight of refugees in Greece.

Direct mail is the only advertising medium that enables the sender to create a personal message. I did not say “personalized” — as in having the recipient’s name plastered all over the place, such as with return address labels or on a sweepstakes entry form. In this instance, “personal” means that the letter writer can make an intimate and emotional connection with the reader. As freelance copywriter Bill Jayme said, “In direct mail — as in theater — there is indeed a factor at work called the willing suspension of disbelief.”

One of the truly inspiring stories of the past century is that of a Lebanese boy named Muzyad Yahkoob. Born in 1914 in Detroit, he grew up to become legendary comedian and television star Danny Thomas, as well as the founder of St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, Tenn.

“You need a streak of outrage. You need a sense of injustice. Without outrage, I don’t know how the hell you can do this work.” — Roger Craver, of Craver, Mathews, Smith & Co.to Denny Hatch, 1993 Since its founding in 1961, Amnesty International has saved more than 50,000 lives — potential victims of murder, torture and execution by some of the nastiest regimes on earth. Considering what’s happening in the Middle East, Africa and even here in the United States, this organization’s work will never be done. If I had to pick one organization for which Roger Craver’s words are apropos, it

When I started the cranky little newsletter, Who’s Mailing What! (now Inside Direct Mail) in 1984, I persuaded America’s premier liberal democratic fundraiser, Roger Craver, of Craver, Mathews, Smith & Co., to write a three-part series on the opposition — the then-current republican efforts that were superb in terms of elegance, sophistication and power. Craver wrote:

High in the pantheon of elegant fundraisers is Mothers Against Drunk Driving, whose only business is public education.

This, in opposition to many charities that only claim it’s their business. A particularly egregious example occurred during the early 1990s, when Somali poachers were decimating herds of elephants (and occasional tourists who got in the way) in neighboring Kenya and selling the ivory.