any more.
That age, the early and middle industrialized fundraising age ... when the easy gains were, well, "easy,"[1] because everyone understood that "it's a numbers game" ... where smokestack factories churned out thundering herds of direct mail for brand name charities, charities marching in lockstep, arm in arm with union printers and the federal postal service ... I suspect that age is falling behind us.
Not that it's dead. It's just no longer the only game in town. Now it's kind of quaint but still very powerful.
Quants (deep-diving numbers people) have entered the fundraising business; they'll blow everyone away for awhile, as they have on Wall Street.
Neuroscience has entered the fundraising business, for anyone who's listening. You can still be hired as a fundraiser without a single, fragile credential. But you won't succeed unless you study like crazy. The turnover in the "fundraiser" position is unmerciful. The average fundraising hire lasts 16 months, latest study. (Another researcher found it's more like 3.5 years; so maybe there's hope, with better data.)
No charity should expect to get anything useful from its fundraising program in just 16 months (there are exceptions; safest to assume you're the rule).
If you don't know neuroscience and you're supposedly a fundraiser, you're like a Rip Van Winkle car mechanic who woke up 20 years later; and now he can't get a job because computers run everything under the hood.
Neuroscience is the new "must learn" destination.
Why? Fundraising has never been anything more than braino a braino.
[1] You want to witness US fundraising 20 years less cynical? Study Australian fundraising.