Week 5

Hello everyone, welcome back to my blog.

I helped send out a large wave of direct mailings at my onsite placement this week. This happened to coincide with research I was doing into the effects of solicitation, and something I found interesting was the potential negative effects of overusing solicitation. While it’s one of the most effective tools for encouraging donations, things like “donor-fatigue” and irritation can result from too much of it. Additionally, an onslaught of solicitation can actually cut down on its total revenue. To learn more about these topics, I recommend a paper linked here, and you can also find a lot more specific information in its references.  Because of this, tools that mitigate these risks like the considered fundraising calendar employed by the Brooklyn College Foundation are important for organizations to implement.  

In terms of the research paper, this week has mostly been an extension of the work I did last week. I began work on the introduction of the research paper, and continued to build out the strategies section. My next steps are to make progress on the conclusion paragraphs for each of the individual sections, and the whole paper’s final conclusion. I’ve been avoiding doing these since conclusions are usually the part of a paper I struggle with the most, so to try and mitigate some of the difficulty, I’ve tried to frame some of the goals I hope the conclusions will achieve. My hope is that this will help streamline the writing process, and make compressing the summaries a little easier. Aside from the conclusions, I’m now in the tuning phases for the other sections, with a focus on reorganizing sections and rephrasing parts to make my points and transitions more clear.

See you all next week.