Blog Posts

Christmas time

We created a monster

They over-promise. They exaggerate. They don’t reveal pivotal tactics. And you would never hire a baseball-cap-wielding charlatan like Miles.

But they kept cropping up in my Suggested Videos on YouTube. So instead of continuing to scroll past them with this little element of...

Somewhere along the line I lost the ability to delude myself. I can no longer pretend to know what the best headline is, for example.

I realised that nobody knows what the best headline or image or call-to-action is. They’re all just guessing. Some are better guessers than...

There’s an enjoyable scene near the start of The Martian. 

There’s an enjoyable scene near the start of The Martian. Matt Damon's character records a video log entry and outlines the scenario he’s facing.

He’s been left behind on Mars and has to figure out how to grow enough...

Charity growth has been stagnant for eight years in the UK. 

Ireland's largest 25 charities have been shrinking since 2013.

Heads of Fundraising are dealing with a conflict of expectations. Their organisations and the public no longer expect the same things.

The reconciliation,...

I had a digital marketing role for 3 years and never wrote a single line of copy.

I believed copywriting to be this semi-mystical ability that belonged to the chosen few. To me, it was a task for professional writers, because I just wouldn't know where to begin.

I started...

In short, because direct-response fundraising doesn't work on digital.

And if you're charity is large enough to even consider paying for a digital strategy, then they grew to that size by nailing direct-response.

Investing in direct mail, direct-response TV ads and enthusiastic...

I'm sure you've heard this line before. It's a bit of a cliche at this stage. "We're just asking for the price of a cup of coffee."

It's indicative of an attitude that gets fundraisers stuck in one-sided discussions with their closest colleagues, as they over-look the central...

A Gaurdian article I was reading used the term Social Capital. I hadn't heard it before. 

The article explained that economists believe that trust levels impact a country’s GDP.

This intrigued me, so I Googled Social Capital and found these definitions:

"We can think of social...