One of the organizations I serve as a Board Member, SHS, recently suggested mounting an email fund raising campaign. Below is my reply to my fellow Board Members.
“Dear All,
In this age of the internet, my personal response to online advertising is particularly negative. I always block messages from individuals and organizations that send me multiple appeals to give or to buy. I don’t click on ads that decorate the web pages I visit even if I am actually interested in the product. I generally don’t return to sites that mix ads with content in a way that makes it difficult for the reader to tell the difference. I don’t visit news feeds and blogs that cover more than 15% of the screen space with unrelated images or text. This is my way of voting with my dollars and my patronage. It is so easy for advertisers to barrage the public with unchosen messages that I believe we’ll gradually lose the ability to avoid them if we 
don’t fight back now. I would be very disappointed if SHS engaged in this practice. Even though the YIVO appeal is quite visually attractive, it is still advertising. This practice might appear to be successful at first but, IMHO, it will backfire in the long run.
I will support our strategy of making personal contact with potential sponsors by phone, snail-mail and personal email. I am also ok with “user-pull” strategies such as including small buttons on web pages that reveal the ad or appeal only when the visitor clicks on it. If we decide we need to be in more frequent contact with potential supporters, we might consider sending out single SHS Newsletter articles monthly. Each article could carry a donate button. This mailing would work like a free subscription service and should also carry a subscription cancellation button. Without that option we risk forcing resisters such as myself to block all communication from us so that we can not reach them, even occasionally. When users block our communication channel everybody loses: users can no longer receive the messages they do want from us and our overall readership decreases.
Let’s think this process through before we embark on a funding campaign that will hurt us down the road.”
How do your organizations use the internet for fund raising?