Your Donors’ Habits & Motivations Are Permanently Changing… Are You?

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. 

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Every Data-Driven Nonprofit Needs This Digital Marketing Dashboard

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:

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Digital Fundraising Update

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.

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Audience First: Recalibrating Your Fundraising Program to Meet the Moment

In case you missed the 2021 Nonprofit Federation Winter Conference hosted by the Association of National Advertisers (ANA), or are looking to refresh what you learned, we are happy to share the Thought Leadership presentation we delivered with our partner, Feeding America.

THD’s Chief Strategy Officer, Linda Williams, and Feeding America's SVP of Digital & Direct Marketing, Liz Nielsen, discussed Feeding America's growth in the last year and meeting the moment of the Covid-19 pandemic.

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My Pandemic Career Pivot: Finding More Meaning In Work

As 2020 progressed, I heard many people wishing for things to get “back to normal.” For me, last year's events were an inspiration to move forward to better, not back to normal. 

2020 shined a spotlight on the many gaps in our society, revealing opportunities to make things better. I became more aware of how each of us has just so much time and energy, and I wanted to use both more purposefully as part of a collective mood and movement that makes a positive, meaningful difference. 

That’s why I feel so fortunate to join the exceptional team at THD as Vice President of Account Management. 

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Don’t Get Left Behind in a Cookie-Less Future

SUMMER 2021 UPDATE:

Big news! In June, Google officially pushed out the date Chrome will end support for third-party cookies in its Chrome browser from early 2022 (as originally announced in January 2020) to the second half of 2023.

For many, the delay is welcome news. After all, it gives nonprofit marketers more time to adapt and develop privacy-focused alternatives in key areas like ad measurement, delivering relevant ads and content, and fraud detection. However, while the timeline has shifted, make no mistake that the end of third-party cookies still represents the seismic shift to the mechanics of the digital marketing landscape that we’ve been expecting. Like before the delay was announced, digital marketers and fundraisers need to prepare their organizations for these shifts.

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2020’s Shifting Plate Tectonics: Impact of 2020 Events on Donor Attitudes and Expectations

Recently, I’ve found myself tapping to the drumbeat of a rap poem that each of my kids performed in 5th grade about shifting of the tectonic plates (hard to forget … I have four kids so I heard it a lot) because, on so many fronts, 2020 has felt like the Earth’s plates are moving under my feet.

With so much seemingly in flux, envisioning the impacts on charitable giving (specifically) and the nonprofit sector (in general) is daunting. But as Chief Strategy Officer at a social impact agency, that’s in the job description.

To better understand the impact of the “events of 2020” on charitable giving, THD fielded research just after the presidential election. The outcome presented both immediate-term observations, as well as interesting insights with longer-term implications. While some of the data reinforces broader trends that are known to us, other data suggests new opportunities for those nonprofits whose focus is on building sustainable revenue streams from long-term donors. 

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Lions & Tigers & Attribution, Oh My!

The THD Data Nerds Take an Attribution Novice for a Trip Down the Yellow Brick Road

I’ve been working in the field of nonprofit fundraising for north of a decade now, so I’ve been around the block a few times. Even still, I keep getting hung up on something, something that everyone’s talking about. It’s a perennial thorn in my side, year after year. And that thorn is called attribution.

Don’t get me wrong, I get the concept. It’s about accurately assigning, or attributing, the value of a specific marketing touchpoint in a series of touchpoints that leads to a user taking an action, or converting. How to use it, how to put attribution into action — that’s my stumbling block.

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What Attribution Model Is Best for Your Organization?

What if I told you that you may be looking at your web analytics all wrong? What if what you see when you log in to Google Analytics was a big, fat data lie? What if Tom Brady had stayed with the Patriots? I can help you with exactly two of those questions. It all comes down to attribution and a dirty little habit called “last click.” Come closer and hear my (tongue-in-cheek) cautionary tale ... 

First, let’s get some background. So, what is attribution and why do you need to understand it? 

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A COVID-Era Diary of a THD Data Nerd

Hi! I'm Chris Hubbard. In my role as Vice President of Data Strategy at THD, I'm responsible for ensuring that our clients’ data is fully utilized to drive revenue.

Our point of view on data at THD is that it’s not enough to just collect lots of donor and giving data. That data needs to be accessible and presented in a way that facilitates insight discovery and action.                    

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