Fundraiser Education

The end of the year will be here before you know it! Are you working on your year-end appeal? Crafting fundraising appeals and end-of-year campaigns is not rocket science, but you do have to adhere to certain guidelines if you want to achieve blastoff. So, here come some guidelines!...

Eighteen nonprofits from all sectors came together for two days to discuss mid-level giving. Here’s what they say is mandatory for measuring success...

Being a major gift fundraiser is one of the toughest careers you could choose. Being a successful one is even harder work. One barrier to being extraordinary in your job is a reluctant CEO or executive director. Conversely, Richard and I have seen amazing CEOs and executive directors who are just waiting on the development team to lead and manage them through the major gift waters, yet the director of development or the vice president of major gifts is not using them properly...

I’ve just reviewed results from three middle/major donor integrated direct response fundraising campaigns that my teams managed for various social service organizations over the last year. The numbers are astonishing! We’ll get to those in a second. First, I want to share some of the negative myths we’ve dealt with around these campaigns, and why…

When I worked at the Canadian Cancer Society as a corporate fundraiser, I had a sign on my desk that read: “You are here to: No. 1, end cancer, or No. 2, raise money so we can end cancer.” It guided everything I did. Could I work with a corporate partner who wanted help changing…

If football coaches do not recruit well, their teams will not have winning seasons. In the nonprofit world, a losing fiscal year could mean a reduction in programs, services and staff. If you have too many losing fiscal years, you could end up looking for another position at another nonprofit...

Growing up, we didn’t talk about fundraising at our dinner table, but looking back, I have learned that my parents prepared me for my career by teaching me important lessons. I recently jotted down a few of these lessons to share with you in this and the next few posts...

Understanding our audience members and their motivations is important to successfully recruiting them to support our causes. Born in 1980 or later, Millennials are the first generation of digital natives; at about the time they entered high school, the internet became a public space. Half of this group, age 26 and younger, entered high school with social media, first Myspace and then Facebook...

Another year, another International Fundraising Congress. Another round of presentations ranging from the transformative (none more so than this masterclass, "Reinventing the Donor Experience" by Kevin Schulman and Adrian Sargeant) to the tawdry (tempting but unfair to name, but, like any conference, always plenty of choices). And of course another jaunty slogan. So what is…

Why would the answer to, “Does it matter why people give?” ever be "no"? Because from a nonprofit professional’s perspective, it is not our job to judge people’s motivations for giving. It is our job to be the vehicle that enables a donor’s or volunteer’s gift of time or money to support the important work of our organization...