Bryan Terpstra

In the DMA Nonprofit Federation workshop “45 Top Strategies to Survive and Thrive in Today’s Economy” held in May in New York, presenters Lynn Edmonds, president; Bryan Terpstra, vice president of fundraising; Amy Beaudoin, associate creative director; and Kevin Eagan, vice president of production services, all of LW Robbins Associates; and Jenny Floria, senior director of account management at ParadyszMatera, offered practical guidance on the best strategies to strengthen donor relationships and increase net revenue during the economic downturn.

Do you need help developing long-term relationships with your mid-level donors? Do you want to launch some special mailings and tailored communications for these high-level donors but don’t know where to begin? Or is your current mid-level program in dire need of some fresh ideas?

Several organizations have made a big impact on the bottom line by attracting donors to the mid-level and by maintaining long-term, fruitful relationships with them, L.W. Robbins Associates President Lynn Edmonds said at Blackbaud’s 2008 Conference for Nonprofits held last month in South Carolina.

Bryan Terpstra, vice president of client services at Robbins, added that, “A big focus is on the creative approach used to attract the mid-level donors and how this differs from the approach used for other segments of the donor file.”

Fundraisers who want board members and upper management singing the praises of direct-response fundraising have to convert them. In the session “Managing Up: Helping Your Board and Senior Management Become Direct Response Evangelists” during the 2008 New York Nonprofit Conference earlier this month, co-presenter Bryan Terpstra, vice president of client services for Holliston, Mass.-based direct-response marketing firm L.W. Robbins Associates, said that fundraisers must change board members’ minds by speaking their language. First and foremost, fundraisers who want board members on their side need to avoid fundraising jargon. Board members and senior managers can’t relate to terms like “donor retention” and “donor pyramid,”

Let me preface this by saying that I’ve been told that I’m too hard on myself (and, unfortunately, on everyone around me — but that’s another story). I hope you’ll agree (with the first part, anyway) when I fess up to the misgivings I’ve been having about some of our editorial content. I’m mainly talking about our weekly e-letter, the FS Advisor, and our newest e-letter, Giving 2.0. We’ve been rather short-staffed for what seems like forever, and I’ve been losing sleep (yes, literally — how sad is that?) over the fact that a lot of our e-letter content has been picked up

Unlike the tax v By MAURA SZENDEY and BRYAN TERPSTRA For most of us, when we hear the word "audit," our gut instinct is to run and hide. We've been trained to think an audit means a review of our finances, and sometimes that can be downright scary! But there are other types of audits that can be a lot less stressful and have a big impact on your bottom line. There are two common, basic audits, for example, to help evaluate the annual performance of a direct marketing program: a creative audit and a file audit. For nonprofits with mail programs