What I’ve been thinking about since first reading your post, is how drastically fragmented our news sources are today. That these donors are out there, but as you touched on, their information is scattered throughout the web.

These prospects are likely aggregating information on their own, either just by casually browsing their bookmarks, or with a reader. So, I see the best potential method for gathering them back into a single group would be to aggregate and produce content for them. If Environmental charity A can become the go-to place for relevant news, it presents an amazing opportunity to collect donor information.

This is not the “easy” solution though. I am looking forward to hearing suggestions that others may have.

Brock

I’m in full agreement with the basic premise of your post today.

Our backgrounds differ in that mine is rooted primarily in what you call the more “mainstream” nonprofit organizations focused on health care, medicine, education, religion, historic preservation and the arts.

Because of my career-long, professional involvement with public relations, media relations, news dissemination and publicity (as much as with philanthropy), I probably have a different history and different habits in terms of the news sources I’ve sought out and fed from over the years. I tend not to have any “iconic” favorites where news sources are concerned, so it might always have been difficult for anyone to “track” me down from my footprints in media outlets (whether printed in the “old days” or online today).

In my view, it has become difficult to track down potential donors in these ways, because, for one thing, buying newspaper or magazine subscription lists just does not make sense anymore. Back in the day, one could buy an excellent, direct-response prospect list from subscription sources, particularly for the kind of advocacy-focused organizations that are your favored fare.

One clue as to how it’s all changing and how it might evolve is found in something I read recently about efforts to develop a method by which an individual might be “tracked” and identified for online postings (where and about what) and online “affiliations” (memberships in Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc.).

Back to your original question. I guess I would be very hard to find these days — by anyone “selling” something, fund raiser or otherwise. With the exception of my local newspaper and a couple of general-interest magazines, I no longer have many print subscriptions. I read online! My giving habits always have been and continue to be very widespread in terms of the types of charities in which I have a personal interest and investment (once again, not usually on the advocacy side).

Look for me online! Look for me via any of the available prospect-targeting services out there today. This aspect of fund raising has become much more challenging!