May 23, 2016 at 11:01 am
We aren’t the same people we were 10 years ago—or even at the start of last year. But the one thing we can count on is that change is a constant. The key is to embrace the change—and nonprofits have seized the opportunity...
May 19, 2016 at 11:46 am
Good use of data can help you create messages for your donors that are more relevant, interesting—and effective. But data can betray you in embarrassing ways. Like it does in this letter from an organization I support. (I'm hiding its identity because I don't want it to be embarrassed in front of its peers.) Here's…
May 18, 2016 at 10:52 am
Communicating by email is a mixed blessing. It’s fast, easy, relatively inexpensive, and almost everyone has an email address. You can quickly get a message out to a lot of people. But here’s the problem. People get hundreds of emails a day and don’t have much time to weed through them. How can you stand…
May 17, 2016 at 10:19 am
I eagerly read every new article and exhibit from the Showcase of Fundraising Innovation and Inspiration. However, the article, “9 Tips for Effective Emails,” made me pause. Oh, yes, I agreed with the author, Nick Allen, on most of the points. Yet there were a couple of tips I found missed the mark, and one in particular I thought was outright bad advice...
May 13, 2016 at 9:54 am
What could you do with a bigger email list? More donations? Volunteers? Capacity? Impact? Probably all of the above. After all, according to a recent M+R Benchmarks report: In 2015, on average, nonprofits received $44 in donations for every 1,000 fundraising emails sent. Nonprofit email revenue grew by 25 percent, faster than the overall rate of…
May 5, 2016 at 8:00 am
Yes, I know how much it costs to send out a newsletter. But I also know that done right, a newsletter is a moneymaker for your organization. It’s a win-win—more net income and more opportunities to build loyal donors. In other words, a newsletter is one of the remedies we can apply to dwindling donor-retention rates. Done well, a newsletter can be a dollop of glue to bind your donors to the organization...
May 5, 2016 at 8:00 am
While freezing temperatures continue to chill many in the U.S., the boys of summer have nevertheless returned for the start of the 2016 baseball season. What better way to mark the occasion than drawing a parallel between the baseball book and movie, "Moneyball," and fundraising? OK, enjoying a hot dog and beer at a ballpark…
April 28, 2016 at 10:09 am
Some readers will say a newsletter is old-fashioned and irrelevant, but I believe it is one important tool...
April 27, 2016 at 12:14 pm
Your donors are constantly on the move. On a daily basis, they need to: Pay the bills. Make lunches. Drop off the kids at school. Meet work deadlines. Pick up the kids. Drive to soccer practice. Cook dinner. Do laundry. And that’s just Monday! There’s hardly a second to breathe, much less time to write,…
April 27, 2016 at 12:08 pm
Millennials are now the largest working generation in the U.S., and their habits are very different than those of earlier generations. Direct marketers who have constructed an email program to address earlier generational cohorts will find that their campaigns increasingly fall flat without some key strategic changes. Social and mobile media are much more popular…
