$6 Billion is one tally I’ve read when totaling up all of the dollars spent on this election. Seems like a whole lot of money spent to get a whole lot of the same. When it comes to the President and the US Congress we get more partisan gridlock.

But maybe it’s not really the same... [More]

As someone who started doing direct mail prospecting in the 1980s, I’m old enough to have been around in the “Golden Age” of direct mail, and not so old that I can't remember it. While there are lots of tales about that time, mostly true or based on things that might have been true, I personally managed direct mail acquisition campaigns in the late 1980s and early 1990s that were revenue positive, meaning that acquiring new donors actually made money. Yes, that was the “Golden Age”. [More]

The fundraising world, or at least a very small part of it, was sent into a tailspin last week when Blackbaud announced it would be closing down the Common Ground fundraising software it had acquired when Convio became part of the bulging Blackbaud empire. If you missed it, there are plenty of tweets, posts and other communications floating around the interweb. Just Google it, Bing it, or ask Siri. [More]

I was reading the paper this morning and saw an advertisement that got me thinking. The ad was for Ashford University, which I had never heard of, and featured a big picture of a tablet computer with the headline, “Technology Changes Everything™”. The subscript included the line, “Technology is the greatest populist force in our times”.

In 1998, when we started thedatabank, we came up with the tag line “Technology for Change” as a way to easily describe what we believed our software would be used for. At that time we saw the potential of our software being used by people in nonprofit organizations to help them fulfill their missions and therefore effect change. This ad moved the equation to a whole different level. What it said to me is that technology itself was the agent of change not those that used the technology... [More]

Here at thedatabank, we sell data appending services to organizations that want to append email addresses, phone numbers, census data, political data, social media data, demographic data, wealth information, and on and on.

I’ve been in the database marketing business for some 25 years. Over that time I’ve run millions of individual consumer names through various data appending services trying to gain a better understanding of who they are and how can I get them to take action, and I’ve watched how the services have changed over the years. [More]