It’s Always Trendy to Be Good

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Welcome to 2012: A year in which we will elect a new President; figure out how to navigate life without Oprah; and hopefully, bring the funding of non-profits back to pre-recession levels. With a bright shiny New Year on the horizon, there were a lot of opinions shared this week forecasting the trends that will shape the non-profit industry in 2012. We’ve collected them for you here in our weekly round up.

First, Non Profit Quarterly took a stab at identifying the broader social trends that will impact non-profits this year. Some that we found particularly interesting include:

• Growing income inequity—number of those in poverty in U.S. highest ever. This will, no doubt, increase the need for the services non-profits provide.

• Even among nonprofits, the rich seem to be getting richer. Popular charities and non-profits are easier to find and therefore dominate the race for donation dollars. This means smaller organizations will need to get savvy in order to keep themselves in operation.

• The economy continues to be unpredictable in most ways and state and local budgets often increasingly stretched paper-thin. This means more cuts to critical services and an increase in the need for non-profits to fill the funding gap.

Next, we found an interesting infographic on Non-Profit Marketing Guide on how non-profits plan on communicating to their supporters this year. Most interesting was that 77 percent of non-profits plan on emailing their donors at least once a month. That is up 75 percent form last year. 51 percent of non-profits plan to send mail to their supporters at least 4 times a year. That is down 55 percent from last year. This is a clear sign that marketing efforts are shifting and taking an increasingly digital approach. We think this is a smart and cost effective move.

The final story we want to share this week, was posted by Sherry Truhlar from Red Apple Auctions. It included predictions for charity auctions in 2012. In her piece, Sherry predicts this will be the year online auctions will really explode and become a part of the gala experience. We wholeheartedly agree. In addition, she predicts a proliferation of mobile bidding. We see this as an exciting area we intend to embrace in the next twelve months. We hope you’ll join us in making this prediction a reality.