DECONSTRUCTING SUPPORTER THANK YOUS, CEO LETTERS AND INTUITION-BASED DECISION-MAKING

David Burgess: Making your Thank Yous SUPER
Published by Flight of the Fundraiser
We love this guest blog on why receiving a donation is a bit like being told "I love you", and how many charities fluff their lines in response. It can be easy to blame lack of time for sending mediocre thank yous, but you might be missing out on a lot more support as a result, and getting this right doesn't need to take very long at all. Here's how to dazzle your donors with a few minutes' extra effort, with a couple of real-life examples from Solar Aid and a small local music charity...

Matt Chittock: Why CEO letters suck (and how to make them better)
Published by CharityComms
You know when you've written or read something so many times that you take it for granted there's only one way of doing it? Well this month it's not only the mediocre thank you letter being deconstructed, oh no. Not when CEO letters are often where plain English goes to die - Matt's brave words, not ours. A letter from your CEO might feel like the crowning glory of your annual report, but it's often a missed opportunity to write something engaging and memorable for your supporters. And since there's no point deconstructing something if you're not going to make it better, here are five tips from Matt on how to do exactly that.

Beth Clarke: Six characteristics of a resilient charity
Published by Charities Aid Foundation
I met the founder of a local youth charity recently who told me he despised the word 'resilience'. Who creates a society where so many young people face such a struggle to get a good education, good healthcare etc, then puts the emphasis on them to be resilient enough to cope? You could say the same about smaller charities, who are often tasked with so much to do in their local communities yet left to battle so hard to even stay afloat. Yet here we are - organisational resilience is a key buzzword, so thank you Beth for sharing six ways in which a charity can be resilient, inspired by CAF's Resilience programme.

David Floyd: Can't get there from here
Published by Beanbags and Bullsh!t
On a related note, social enterprises have the odds stacked against them too, with the expectation that they'll be able to scale up into established household names despite the lack of sizeable grants available. Here, David argues that we need to develop a different funding landscape that gives social enterprises a genuine chance of thriving in consumer markets - because the few social enterprises that have managed to do this, like The Big Issue and Cafedirect, have actually benefitted from millions of pounds of private investment.

​Emily Zulz: Daniel Kahneman - Your Intuition Is Wrong, Unless These 3 Conditions Are Met
Published by ThinkAdvisor
And finally, this caught my eye recently despite having nothing to do with the charity sector. How many times have you relied on your intuition to make a big decision? Do you trust that deep down you've got a good reason for 'knowing' the right thing to do, even if you can't explain it? According to Daniel Kahneman, an award-winning behavioural economist, unless you're able to meet these three conditions, relying on your intuition might actually be a huge risk. In our experience, intuition often plays a key role in decisions made by trustees and CEOs with varying results, so this is worth two minutes of your time.