- More on the psychology of charitable giving from Harvard Business School in a study called Charitable Giving When Altruism and Similarity Are Linked. Find out the two human tendencies in which anonymous charitable donations are rationalized. The full report is available here.
- Recently seen on Katya’s Non-Profit Marketing Blog: 5 scary strategy mistakes to avoid in 2012. She walks us through a Harvard Business Review piece, describing some very interesting big-picture pitfalls to avoid, like “Mistake #1: confusing marketing with strategy.”
- At CNN Tech, Pete Cashmore, founder and CEO of Mashable, reveals his Top 10 tech trends for 2012.
- We look to Dan Zarella, the self-proclaimed “Social Media Scientist” for 10 Words That Will Increase (or Decrease) Your Twitter CTR. Although there doesn’t seem to be a rhyme or reason as to why using a word like “via” in your Tweet can increase click-through rates by two thirds, that’s what the stats say. To learn more, see here.
- We heard a fascinating story on NPR the other day about surprising new findings on why we make charitable contributions. The piece focuses on the counterintuitive results of a couple of psychological studies – one that says people are more likely to give when asked to support one hungry child, than if they are asked to support 10 hungry children. Also, people are more motivated to give when they experience some sort of physical suffering – like running a marathon – before they make that contribution. To read more about the psychology of giving, here’s the transcript.
- A report from M+R Benchmarks Extra: Monthly Giving has some interesting things to say about monthly and one-time giving to international organizations. Monthly giving appears to be growing steadily, while one-time giving is more erratic and shifts as world disasters strike. To read the full report, click here.
- Time Magazine published its article, ICANN’s New Top-Level Web Domains Could Spell Dot-Trouble For Businesses under the heading “SCAMS.” Author Sam Gustin begins the piece: “Do you have $185,000 lying around? If so you can apply to purchase one of the web’s new addresses via the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), which runs the web’s domain-name system. The new generic top-level domains (gTLD), could be anything from .music to .baseball to .time. ICANN says it’s responding to a lack of supply for new domains, but critics charge the process amounts to a boondoggle for web registrars and could increase costs for companies that may feel the need to buy new addresses to protect their brands.” For more, here’s the full article.
- The news of Blackbaud’s planned purchase of Convio is all over —with lots of opinions about what this will mean for nonprofits. Here's one article outlining the merger. For another point of view, under the header “Now What?” frogloop.com’s care2blogger gives her opinion of the good and the bad the merger represents.
Time to wait and see...
