Donor Relationship Management

It's been a while since I've written regularly for newspapers — and riled up people in the process. So long ago was it, in fact, that people who wanted to respond to something they read had to put pen to paper to compose letters, mail them, and then wait for them to arrive in the newsroom and appear, possibly weeks later, in print.

CHICAGO, September 22, 2009 — Donors to charitable organizations give more when they are asked in person and when someone they know makes the request, a new study commissioned by Chicago-based consulting firm Campbell & Company and conducted by the Center on Philanthropy at Indiana University finds.

Los Angeles, Calif., September 9, 2009 — Philanthropic training and immersion appears to be an effective way of encouraging donors to contribute more money and spend more time volunteering, according to a recent report published by The Center on Philanthropy and Public Policy at USC.

Charleston, S.C., August 31, 2009 — Blackbaud, Inc. (Nasdaq: BLKB), the leading global provider of software and related services designed specifically for nonprofit organizations, today announced that the University of Michigan, one of the world’s premiere research universities, has selected Blackbaud Enterprise CRM™ and Target Analytics® to replace its system-wide fundraising technology and prospect research services.

August 24, 2009, Crain's Chicago Business — Fundraising has been called an art and a science, but, most of all, it's a crapshoot.

STANFORD, Calif., August 25, 2009 — Charities and nonprofits are suffering as much as commercial businesses from the economic downturn. Donations at two-thirds of public charities declined between 2007 and 2008, according to the Giving USA Foundation. This represents the first decrease in donations in current dollars since 1987, and only the second in year-by-year giving slump since the organization began publishing its annual reports 52 years ago.

The more you know about your lapsed donors — their characteristics, interests and relationships to your organization — the better prepared you are to recapture these donors or, more importantly, prevent them from lapsing in the first place. Prevention is perhaps the strongest strategy in addressing lapsed-donor issues. Consider the following when developing your donor-retention strategy:

The population of the U.S. is becoming more diverse, making it more and more imperative that nonprofits create messaging that's relevant to multicultural audiences to engage them as donors, volunteers and allies. This was the focus of the session "Multicultural Resource Development: Effective Practices to Broaden Your Donor Base" at the 2009 Bridge Conference held just outside D.C. last week.

We’ve been hard at work here at Easier Said Than Done Laboratories on the holy grail of fundraising — a new Unified Theory of Fundraising. I’m happy to announce some breakthrough discoveries: Three Laws of Fundraising Dynamics that will give you the theoretical platform for great fundraising.

Remember the story of the boy in Holland who noticed a hole in the dike? Fearing a leak could flood the entire town, he shoved his finger into the hole, potentially avoiding a major disaster.