Event-Based Marketing for Nonprofits is a powerful way to ride the wave of attention rather than creating it from scratch.Quick wins are tempting. But building genuine connections with your audience requires more than just jumping on the latest trending conversation.At Whole Whale, we see many nonprofits struggling to find their voice in a crowded digital… Read more »
The most successful nonprofits don’t just ask for support. They grow it, bit by bit. Quick donation wins feel great—but if you want to meet your fundraising goals year after year, you need more than a viral moment. You need a digital fundraising strategy that builds trust, deepens relationships, and turns curiosity into generosity time… Read more »
Quick wins are great. But if you want to build a movement, you need more than momentary momentum. At Whole Whale, we see too many nonprofits with too narrow an approach to digital marketing that misses out on building long-term relationships and sustainable support at scale. To move your mission forward, you need a full-funnel… Read more »
In the tidal surge of Vibe Coding, we’ve enjoyed an exhilarating wave of effortless creativity. AI-driven development promised rapid, intuitive programming with mere prompts. Developers no longer wrestled with syntax; simply describing their vision allowed algorithms to craft solutions. Yet, as the tide recedes, the hidden cost emerges starkly: digital barnacles accumulating beneath our sleek,… Read more »
Every time someone asks ChatGPT about your industry, is your brand part of the conversation? When Perplexity answers a question in your field of expertise, does it cite your research? As AI assistants increasingly mediate information discovery, a new form of digital visibility has emerged—one that traditional analytics completely miss. Your AI Brand Footprint may… Read more »
Humans Are Becoming the Minority Online Traffic For the first time, bots now outnumber humans online. Human traffic dropped from 62.8% in 2019 to below 50% in 2024. Meanwhile, bots—both helpful and harmful—now dominate web traffic, marking a fundamental shift in digital strategy. The Data Tell the Story Year Human Traffic (%) Good Bots (%)… Read more »
It is easier to ride a wave than create one, prom is a multi-billion dollar wave that many nonprofits are missing. Co-branded campaigns are a great and underutilized strategy that nonprofits can use to increase reach using cultural staples to add messaging around. Organizations like MADD, SADD, DoSomething.org and others have capitalized on campaigns around prom… Read more »
In digital marketing, there’s a dangerous myth that’s costing organizations millions in misallocated resources. We call it the “Last-Click Fallacy” – the mistaken belief that the final touchpoint before conversion deserves all the credit for the outcome. At Whole Whale, we’ve seen this fallacy lead to critical strategic mistakes across hundreds of nonprofit campaigns. The… Read more »
Creating vs Discovering Campaigns The most successful nonprofit initiatives often aren’t created—they’re discovered. UNICEF’s famous Halloween campaign, which has raised over $180 million, didn’t originate in their marketing department. It started with a Philadelphia Sunday School class collecting coins instead of candy. UNICEF’s strategic genius lay in recognizing and scaling this organic community solution. UNICEF’s… Read more »
In an era where storytelling and personal narratives have become the currency of attention, platforms like GoFundMe have turned into powerful tools for raising funds in disasters and personal times of crisis. However, the model these platforms use perpetuates a system called “Extractive Empathy,” where emotionally charged stories are leveraged to elicit donations inequitably without… Read more »
Altruism has become the new must-have accessory of the elite. In today’s world, where appearances often mask reality, the wealthy view giving as a way to display their power and image. This isn’t just a trend—it’s a modern twist on something as old as the Gilded Age but now at an all-time high. There’s a… Read more »
As the “Silver Tsunami” sweeps across the United States, driven by the aging Baby Boomer generation, the nonprofit sector is poised for a major shift. By 2030, over 20% of the U.S. population will be over the age of 65, and this demographic shift will create significant demand for new services catered to older adults.… Read more »
In June 2024, my family welcomed our third child, and the process of naming him was a delightful yet challenging journey. Our older children had strong feelings and vetoes over some names for their little brother. This added many layers of complexity to our decision. This experience of choosing and then protecting a name made… Read more »
‘George, why is your face on the side of my building?’ The text message lit up my phone. It was the summer of 2015 and I was in the middle of nowhere when I received it. It turns out my friends down on Wall Street lived in a building on which my face had just… Read more »
Challenge: What is the common thread between these stories? 2024 People: We can just use the free GPT tools to create and edit our documents. You: I feel like there is risk here but I can’t put my finger on it yet. Companies: We need to catch up in the AI game by training on… Read more »
Chat-first search, where people use conversation interfaces like chatbots to find information, is poised to overtake traditional search engine usage sooner than you might expect. This new type of information exploration is now being called AI Overview (formerly Search Generated Experience or SGE for short by Google). Some estimates indicate that in as little as… Read more »