Look at your donation receipting program top to bottom. What’s working? What’s a potential deterrent to donor retention? How can you fix it?
Read MoreTag: Organization
We Always Have Choices
But we need to be aware of who needs to make which choices. When we don’t attempt to make the choices that others should be making, life works out a whole lot better for everyone.
Read MoreUnite Your Board and Blast Off!
Your board may be performing well enough, but once you’ve seen a group that is truly united, you realize how much more can be achieved.
Read MoreFundraising and a Glimpse Into My Electronic Inbox
Seeing what others are doing with their fundraising is one of the best ways to jump-start your own creativity and find new things to try or test. If you haven’t done it recently, make some donations to nonprofits that you think you can learn from; reading about fundraising is good, but actually being a recipient of it is great!
Read More7 New Year Resolutions for Nonprofit Marketers & Fundraisers
Let’s face our gaps and challenges head on, and let’s do something about them so we can be better fundraisers and marketers — because what we do is really important in this world.
Read More10 New Year’s Resolutions for Nonprofit Board Members
This is the time when we all step back and make our resolutions. Here are some great New Year’s Resolutions for your board members!
Read MoreKeystone Cops to the Rescue
If you’re in an organization that is overly dependent upon single-source funding, especially the structured variety of public and institutional sources, the time to create a program of diversification is now, not when you’re faced with the sudden loss of a major source of your revenue.
Read MoreThe Iceberg Effect
Make sure people know what you want them to know about you. Try to control the message before it controls you.
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The Real Cost of Overhead
Liz’s worthy organization sought to be frugal for years. Not a bad thing. Gradually, but surely, this desire to be financially responsible morphed into a cost-cutting monster. That’s when the need to keep faith with investors, donors — those who pay the bills — somehow got lost in the desire to maximize cash flow and reduce overhead to zero — if possible.
Read MoreClutter Can Kill Your Fundraising
The key message running through NextAfter’s “5 Ways to Cut Through the Clutter With Your Year-End Fundraising” report (in my opinion) is that over time, when everyone adopts “best practices,” they become overused. My personal beef is when a great concept that makes perfect sense for one organization is adapted — and jimmy-rigged — by another. Think about the dime used by March of Dimes; it makes perfect sense for that organization, but most of the other coin mailings seem to me to be a major stretch. Or the brown lunch bag used as the outer envelope for a food bank; it loses something when it’s used by an organization that doesn’t provide food, I think.
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