AmazonSmile Closing on February 20: What Your Organization Should Do Now

Disappointingly to the broader nonprofit community, including many arts organizations, Amazon announced on January 18 that effective February 20, 2023, it is closing its AmazonSmile program. Established in 2013, the program had allowed Amazon users to designate a charity to receive 0.5% of the cost of their purchases. It had been a case study in establishing a “set it and forget it” ancillary revenue stream for charitable organizations. Supporters had only to pick their chosen charity and then bookmark the AmazonSmile landing page and without any further effort needed, the charity would … Read more

Are You Ready For Mastercard’s New Recurring Payment Rules?

Earlier this fall, Mastercard issued new rules for merchants processing recurring credit card charges on its network (essentially, merchants who process recurring charges to a Mastercard-branded credit card, regardless of the issuing bank). As originally announced, these new rules would have presented extra and potentially burdensome administrative work for small nonprofits, including arts organizations, that have recurring monthly donations (though enforcement for the recurring donation case was due to begin later than for other types of recurring charges). Stripe, one of the major payment processors, has a helpful breakdown of the new … Read more

Using The Serial Position Effect To Become A Better Manager

This article is the first in a series designed to help those working in the arts and culture sector apply user experience (UX) best practices to common tasks and beyond. Using Jon Yablonski’s collection at LawsOfUX.com that gathers best practices designers consider when building user interfaces, these articles will show you how each practice can be applied to more than just user experience tasks. The Serial Position Effect Per lawsofux.com/serial-position-effect here’s how the Serial Position Effect is defined: Users have a propensity to best remember the first and last items in a … Read more