Seth Godin:  Most big charities are based on direct mail fundraising, and as you’re read here before, direct mail is dying. What to do?  
I’ll start with the bad news: I despair for most of the top 50
non-profits in the US. These are the big guys, and they’re stuck.
Unlike the Fortune 100, not known for being cutting edge in themselves,
the top charities rarely change… if you’re big, you’re used to being
big and you expect to stay big. That means that generation after
generation of staff has been hired to keep doing what’s working. Big
risks and crazy schemes are certainly frowned upon. The good news is this …

The good news is this: the Internet is not a replacement for direct
mail fundraising. It is, in fact, something much bigger than that for
just about every non-profit.

As soon as commerce started online, many non-profits discovered lots
of income from their websites. This was mistakenly chalked up to
brilliant conversion and smart marketing. In fact, it was just
technologically advanced donors using a more convenient method to send
in money they would have sent in anyway.

The big win is in changing the very nature of what it means to
support a charity. The idea of "I gave at the office" and of giving
money in the last week in December speaks to obligation. Many people
donate to satisfy a guilty feeling, or to please a friend. This doesn’t
scale. Not one bit. It’s super easy to ignore a direct mail
solicitation when all you have to do is hit delete and no one notices.

The big win is in turning donors into patrons and activists and
participants. The biggest donors are the ones who not only give, but do
the work. The ones who make the soup or feed the hungry or hang the
art. My mom was a volunteer for years at the Albright Knox Art Gallery
in Buffalo, New York, and there’s no doubt at all that we gave more
money to the museum than we would have if they’d sent us a flyer once a
month.

The internet allows some organizations to embrace long-distance involvement. It lets charities flip the funnel,
not through some simple hand waving, but by reorganizing around the
idea of engagement online. It means opening yourself up to volunteers,
encouraging them to network, to connect with each other, and yes, even
to mutiny. It means giving every one of your professionals a blog and
the freedom to use it. It means mixing it up with volunteers, so they
have something truly at stake. This is understandably scary for many
non-profits, but I’m not so sure you have a choice.

Do you have to abandon the old ways today? Of course not. But
responsible stewardship requires that you find and empower the
mavericks and give them the flexibility to build something new, not to
try to force the internet to act like direct mail with free stamps.

Via Seth Godin