Doing Good.

As we developed our content series on the RFP process, we've had some thoughtful exchanges on the topic both internally and with clients. We recently asked our team:  What is one question you’d add or one change you would make to the RFPs we typically receive that you think would result in a better response?  We are sharing four ideas here as thought-starters for your process:

We launched an unscientific poll series on LinkedIn several weeks ago to tap into the nonprofit zeitgeist about Requests for Proposals (RFPs). The season for issuing and responding to RFPs is beginning to rev up, as many organizations evaluate partner relationships in the early months of the year for mid-year contract renewals.

The RFP process is a notoriously laborious and lengthy undertaking for both requesters and responders; we were curious to learn how colleagues on the client and partner sides of the nonprofit world felt about it. As 2021 came to a close, our survey series sparked lively discussions with clients and among our Account Teams internally. Here are some of the musings that could improve the experience for all parties.

Garbage in, garbage out. Or, as I like to say, G.I.G.O.

I suspect many of you reading this are familiar with this concept.

The concept is that if you input flawed information into a system, your output is also going to be flawed. It’s really a pretty simple idea.

I’m also betting that if you are familiar with the concept, there’s a good chance it’s because you’ve encountered G.I.G.O. firsthand.

What does nonprofit budgeting and forecasting have to do with “The Wizard of Oz?”

Let’s think back to the beginning of the movie, when Dorothy stumbles upon Professor Marvel, who conjures an image of Auntie Em in his crystal ball. Does he have mystical powers? I think not. A carefully adapted apparatus that provides insight and directs the subsequent actions of wayward Dorothy? Absolutely! If she had met the future dream state Wizard earlier in the day, maybe she would have made it to the shelter in time. While we’re glad she didn’t — as that would have negated one of the greatest movies of all time — in the shelter is where you need to be in real life.

A recent KPMG study found that a whopping 86% of consumers have a growing concern about the privacy of the data collected by organizations. Four in 10 worry about it being used ethically. What does this tell us? As nonprofit professionals, we need to align with the current consumer data privacy concerns that are emerging.

Before my time in the nonprofit space, I worked with large commercial B2C brands facing the challenge of housing and leveraging valuable end-user data. To be the trusted advisor my clients needed, I would regularly attend conferences to understand the challenges that marketers and their partners faced. Dreamforce, SXSW, Digital Summit. When my career focus shifted to serving nonprofit organizations, I found that by continuing to observe and learn from consumer marketers, I was able to bring novel thinking and alternative perspectives to benefit my new client partnerships.

My iPhone’s “control center” serves up a daily sampling of photos from my photo library, taking me back in time to pictures of vacations, graduations and reunions, birthdays, and weddings captured “On This Day,” sometimes many years ago. These strolls down memory lane are an invitation to revisit the past, but it’s not the oldest photos that give me pause lately — it’s revisiting photos from just one year ago. 

We can’t help it. We love making dashboards to help data-driven nonprofit organizations with their marketing and fundraising goals. And nothing is going to stop us.  

THD lens is a suite of interactive dashboards that combines a multitude of data sources to visualize your data quickly, cleanly, and in context in a way that would otherwise not be possible without significant effort.  

Today, we are showcasing our new Digital Marketing Suite, a collection of eight brand new dashboard views, which we customized based on our clients’ wish lists. Highlighted below are a few of my favorite views to give you a sense of what is possible with this next-generation set of THD lens business intelligence dashboards:

There’s never a dull moment in the world of digital fundraising. Staying on top of the shifts that have implications for your bottom line is daunting, so our Digital Team has summarized three recent, major developments in digital fundraising that need to be on your radar.

Read on, and if you want to go deeper with us, we’re standing by to take your call.