Once upon a time, many years ago, a fresh-faced me sat at the feet of the direct marketing greats and eagerly listened, learned and remembered.

We – my charity colleagues and me, and our agency – applied what we learned and spread that learning amongst ourselves. And the knowledge proved accurate and powerful. It did well, raised a great deal of money at good ROI.

Soon, many of us in the fundraising community had about the same amount of knowledge and we applied it, getting better and better with practice.

This was a generation ago. Where did that learning go? I know it stayed inside my head. I replayed it at conferences and with clients, but it was just last year that I realised:

• Many fundraisers have forgotten  that powerful stuff that we all learned and knew once upon a time
• There is no mechanism for preserving the best knowledge and passing it on to the new generation
• The sector suffers from amnesia, forgetfulness or is just plain distracted
• It has forgotten some of the classic, timeless fundraising knowledge that makes things work at their best

Here are 4 examples, anonymised, from 2006-2009, of what happens when you forget important, foundation knowledge:

• Junk e mail: the forgotten science of DM testing, laid down at least 40 years ago, resulting in untargeted, junk e mail campaigns ‘because it doesn’t cost us any more money to e mail everyone so why bother with all that testing malarkey?’. Words fail me.
• Using the donor’s data history comprehensively in communications: a top-drawer agency, founded a generation ago by DM greats, which obsesses over data analysis but forgets totally the potency of using highly personalised long-copy appeals with relevant data items inserted …leading to poor income results. Quelle surprise.
• The unexpected keepers of the flame: the agency whose charity client has such a high turnover of fundraisers  that only the agency greybeards (and none of them over 50) know the history of the charity’s marketing.
• Still being asked the same questions: those of us still active with roots ten, twenty, thirty years ago sometimes reflect to each other that we are being asked the same questions now as when we began. Is nobody out there learning?

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