Now, in today’s wonderful Agitator post (appropriately enough from not just one concerned scientist, but an entire union of them), there is a full year test of mailing four pieces instead of 12. Turns out that this change, along with socializing this change with donors led to:.Cuts in the cost to raise a dollar by almost half. Decreased donor services calls and increased the quality of donor servicesĪnd more.I won’t spoil it because it deserves a read on its own. And less is more is what we are seeing in early testing with other nonprofits as well.Īs more evidence accumulates, we may/will have to make the shift from “burn the witch!” to “this can’t be the way the world works” to “is this the way the world works?” to “how do we deal with this new world?”īut going from 12 to four is a particularly bold and dramatic example. Like Galileo before us, I think we’ll find beauty there, new worlds to explore. We’ll find that volume is but one lever to pull, one arrow in our quiver. When we can no longer add a mailing to make up a gap, we will have to delve into deeper understandings of why people give and why they stop. I look forward to the exploration with you. Special thanks to Laurie Marden, the Union of Concerned Scientists, and the Agitator for sharing this great case study. *President Bartlett: I know of one guy they were ready to carve up with instruments of torture because he had this silly idea that the Earth revolved around the sun.Įllie Bartlett: If this is an object lesson about how scientists have it better today because there’s no Inquisition… And please share your stories in the comments. If Galileo had muttered “It still moves” after they made him recant his life’s work, they would have killed him on the spot, and I don’t know why I let you do this to me!… President Bartlett: I enjoy talking about Galileo, and don’t you start with me!Įllie Bartlett: It’s apocryphal, Dad. President Bartlett: When Galileo said “Eppur si muove”, it meant that he would continue no matter what to study and publish.Galileo Galilei was born on 15 February 1564 in Pisa and was educated at the Camaldolese Monastery at Vallombrosa. In 1581 was sent by his father to enrol for a medical degree at the University of Pisa. Galileo never seems to have taken medical studies seriously, attending courses on his real interests which were in mathematics and natural philosophy. He left Pisa in 1585 without completing his medical degree and began teaching mathematics in Florence and later at Siena. During the summer of 1586 he taught at Vallombrosa, and in this year he wrote his first scientific book The little balance ( La Balancitta) which described Archimedes' method of finding the specific gravities of substances using a balance. His reputation grew and in 1588 he received a prestigious invitation to lecture on the dimensions and location of hell in Dante's Inferno at the Academy in Florence. In 1589, Galileo was appointed to the Chair of Mathematics at the University of Pisa where he wrote De Motu a series of essays on the theory of motion which he never formally published. The book contains his important idea that one can test theories by conducting experiments and gave the famous example of testing falling bodies using an inclined plane to slow down the rate of descent.
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