While Wal-Mart did its part last year to buoy the increasingly hard-hit nonprofit sector, contributing nearly half a billion dollars to various foundations, the economic downturn is clearly still hitting home for many other nonprofits, literally. I received a call this week from the Philadelphia Museum of Art asking if I would like to donate. This benign gesture is underscored by the fact that I was a member only for a single year nearly nine years ago when I was a freshman in college nearby, and had not been solicited even once since then.
Though the museum appears to be digging deeper than any time in recent memory into its database to find donors, I was surprised to see that calls for contributions are not displayed prominentaly on the museum’s site. “Integration” is a keyword saturating the industry these days, and though response is surely better in traditional channels like direct mail and telemarketing, not having a simple Web site callout just makes the effort seem incomplete.
