Saturday, January 22, 2005

Don't bug me.....

Sorry for the long lapse. I looked at the blog last night and was blown away to see it's been 10 days.....and I've been online for most of them. My bad.

Interesting discussion on the Nten listserv the past week or so about the number 50%. That's the percentage of current online tsunami donors who don't want to get more information about the organization, or further updates, or newsletters, or the like. The discussion has been heavily weighted to people who are shocked, just shocked that the percentage is so high...What's wrong!?!?!

Frankly, I'm amazed it's that low. As one poster noted, we really don't know what a good follow-through amount SHOULD be. It's like the regularly decried 50% of marriages ending in divorce. Awful, awful, awful say the critics. Now, I agree that divorce when there are kids IS awful, but we really don't have any baseline data to say what the divorce rate SHOULD be. After all, all of us do stupid things, and some marriages SHOULD end. So is 50% amazingly good or shockingly low? Hmmm.

Back to the Nten issue, this highlights for me again that we need to give people what they want, not tell them what they need. Many posters were whining about "people NEED to know what we do!" etc. While the cause may be just, the market says people will read/give to/ learn/attend/ buy what they want.

My suggestion to the agencies who are receiving an unprecedented number of email addresses from the donation surge is to covet them, find out what they WANT, and why they checked yes, not to bemoan those who checked no.

Markets rule. Even in charity.

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