Strategic Planning

I want to share 10 pragmatic ways that nonprofit leaders can more effectively ask for and secure gifts that will fuel their missions.

Any engagement other than donor engagement is meaningless — at least if your purpose is to drive contributions. Why care about clicks if they result in nothing more than likes and follows? When cobbling together your fundraising strategy, consider how to get from awareness to interest to engagement to investment.

For any-sized marketing team, the choice of how to knit together the right blend of marketing channels has to be driven by a plan and understanding some fundamental rules of integrating channels. Understanding these rules gives your team the best chance of success.

Many nonprofit executives still struggle with how to pay for fundraising. That’s a shame because fundraising done well pays for itself. Yet the dilemma is real and persistent.

Today's donors are savvy, skeptical and well-informed. As a result, they know when someone is trying to sell them something — including donating. So how do you motivate people to support your cause in a world of mass messaging? One way to do it is to go old school with word-of-mouth and align it with your fundraising.

Fundraisers find themselves emerging from two challenging years and preparing for the possible recession in the year ahead. On the final day of the NonProfit POWER conference, Bill Stanczykiewicz of the Lilly Family School of Philanthropy opened the final day of the event with his keynote, “Current Trends in Fundraising.” His takeaways were surprising.

Is your board just not getting it? If we need our board members to be more engaged, we need to engage them. Here’s a plan to do so.

Trends in evaluation are worth paying attention to. They may not take over your social media feed with witty memes or become the latest office buzz, but they are profoundly important for nonprofits.

Understanding themes and trends offers numerous benefits to you as a leader since they can help inform decisions and strategies.

Here are several reasons why it’s a bad idea to use year-end giving as a significant fundraising strategy.