A recent conversation about the vagaries of HTML e-mail on the Progressive Exchange mailing list prompted some good conversation about a perennially vexing topic: how do you keep your hard-won html design rendering properly in your recipients' mailboxes?

Short answer: you probably don't.

For coders who like to get into it, I've been in the habit of recommending the exhaustive sleuthing done by sorta-competitor Campaign Monitor (for instance), which blogs the bejeezus out of the issue and has great resources like 30 free design-compliant templates that might shortcut the process.

The thumbnail version for the rest of us is that there's no orthodoxy. Like 4th century heretics, every e-mail provider has its own slightly different standard which on pain of hellfire and junk filtering is incompatible with every other provider's standard.

What's a small organization without the luxury of coding line-by-line styles to do?

I referred the other day to the rising importance of small-dollar fundraising online.

So how important are they? Can nonprofits really adopt smallball as a development strategy?

More than one might think.

A breakdown of online contributions received by all our organizations in 2006 by gift range reveals, unsurprisingly, that smaller gifts are by far the most frequent -- with gifts of exactly $50 (the most frequent donation amount) or less accounting for over two-thirds of all contributions.

I think I heard somewhere that the personal is political.

We receive our share of unusual inquiries hereabouts. The other day, we got one ("bcc: many folks") prompted by this page and reading in part:

your first three choices for "Title" on your drop-down "Select Title" menu are:
--Mr.;
--Mrs.; and
--Ms.

This implies that you are using "Ms." as an abbreviation for "Miss," which is incorrect.

Furthermore, it is very discouraging to those of us who fought for years to eliminate the varieties of ways in which women are discriminated against, by our laws and by our cultural institutions.

A major tactic in this effort was the creation of a title for women (Ms.), parallel to that used for men (Mr.), for the purpose of denoting gender only and nothing at all about marital status, as a means of eliminating the institution of requiring that women identify themselves as either never-married or as [previously] married.

...

I BEG you, remove "Mrs." from your drop-down menu and stop requesting women to tell you whether or not they are-now-or-ever-have-been married. It is SO 19th-century, and it invites a renewal of discrimination against women based on marital status.

This was an interesting inquiry for us: we'd already removed 'Mrs.' once before.

Training -- though sometimes stressful -- is one of the best parts of my job, largely because of what I get to learn from people with completely different outlooks who pose incisive questions I would never think to ask.

On the orientation-to-Salsa webinars we've been running for current clients, I got a great question the other day about running reports to help campaign managers identify possible mistyped e-mail addresses so that they could manually correct them in the headquarters while the relationship was still retrievable.

A perfect occasion for both our custom report builder and a forehead-smacking "why didn't I think of that?"

In this week's edition, we circle back to donations analysis to explore an oft-asked question.

Last month, the Tipsheet's three-part series (I, II, III) explored timing the release of your donations appeal. Today, we're getting a little bit more abstract. Using the entire year's collection of gift data from throughout the DIA universe, we're going to try to get at what a supporter might be expected to contribute ... and as a result, what they're worth to obtain in the first place.

Numbers on the flip.

Tuesday Tips was a little too sick to get this out Tuesday, but as with a fundraising ask, better late than never.

After the first two entries in this series took a more ground-level look at donation patterns appropriate for organizations considering exactly when to release an upcoming appeal, this issue zooms back to a bird's eye view of the seasonal rhythm of donations for organizations scheduling the year's principal pitches.

To begin with, I've taken a daily count of donations to all organizations in the DIA universe*, divided by the number of supporters belonging to organizations using our donations services for each day during the year.

This week, we get into the details of exactly when people donate.

In last week's first installment of the donations series, we looked at the relative performance of different days of the week for donations across the DIA network.

This week, we zoom in closer, to the hour of the day.

As survivors straggle back from the holiday blue gap, we're proud to initiate a new feature here on the blog, Tuesday Tips. Every week, we'll share some analysis on trends in the sector and how to muscle up your online actions.

To lead off, an oft-asked question: when should I put out that donation appeal? We'll do this in stages taking a look at the very macro level of seasonal averages, and the very micro level of time of day. But we begin in the creamy middle, with days of the week.

You've got that thing all queued up. Do you cut it loose now, or might you do better by waiting a day or two?

This graph neatly sprouting from just under five million to just under 10 represents the number of people on our organizations' supporter lists through each month of the past year. Actually, it's a little more complicated than that -- there are several million more not represented here, accounted by some larger organizations that have their own node (i.e., they're running DIA off a separate dedicated server), and this doesn't at all include other-than-nonprofit organizations using the toolset through Wired For Change.

We'll be delving into a lot more figures -- fundraising and otherwise -- from the DIA network in the weeks ahead, but a champagne (okay, okay ... vodka) hangover on New Year's allows time enough for a quick follow-up to last week's suggested push for donations:

The last five days of 2006 were the five givingest days in DIA's history.