Strategic Planning

Do you have some fundraising strategies ready to roll to close out your year end campaign or the final three days of the year? If not, you may want to as, depending on your data source, anywhere from 5 percent to 25 percent of all online giving happens in the last three days of the…

Football brings about a lot of passion (and agony), especially this time of year. A few years ago, I was guest lecturing in my Lighthouse Counsel colleague Tom Landrum’s class on higher education fundraising. Many of the students had just returned from the annual Georgia - Florida football game in Jacksonville (also referred to as…

“And how will we implement it?” That’s one of the more exasperating but essential questions a board can ask itself. A board can throw a lot of time and effort into creating a considered and forward-thinking strategic plan, but one reason the “plan that just sits on the shelf” is such a cliche isn’t so…

The other day, I was thinking about what the perfect resource-development job is like. In this complex society and profession, there are many moving parts in play. In my mind, however, I thought, "Wouldn’t our jobs be easier if we created our own organizational vision of the perfect nonprofit organization?" Here's what my dream organization would look like...

A process is "a systematic series of actions directed to some end." The process in strategic planning, for example, can even be more important than the resulting plan. If you conduct planning as a process and not an event, have a proven outside facilitator and let the process work without a leader trying to control it (after all a plan is about the organization, not one person), the results are phenomenal...

We are working with a client who is undergoing a CEO transition. Over the past two years, this organization had invested in a master planning process and also an extensive strategic planning process. When asked if it should pause while searching for a new CEO, our response was an emphatic "No!"...

For more than a decade, the blogosphere has touted the power and promise of social media (this blog included), but there is also a downside to using social media for your nonprofit. Granted, the positives do outweigh the negatives, but it is important to step back occasionally and take a critical look at how social…

Some things are not predictable and “Pokemon Go” falls into that category. Did your organization take advantage of any of the hype? Is your organization prepped to grab lightning in the future?...

Recently, a United Way agency asked our organization to participate in a several-hour-long audit session. While the event was very structured, it also was conversational in approach. It provided a wonderful forum for our organizational members to evaluate how an outside organization perceives us, and for us to test our systems, processes and performance standards...

A few weeks ago, I wrote an article entitled “It’s Not Too Soon to Plan Year-End Fundraising.” While Dec. 31 seems far away (especially if you’ve used up your vacation time for 2016) in fundraising time, it’s just a blink of an eye. To help all of us prepare, I recently chatted with Bill Sayre, president of Merkle Response Group, about the back-end processes for year-end donations—making sure your donations are processed accurately and quickly so you can mail out your thank-you receipts in a timely manner...