Recently I met with a client—one of the top 10 health care nonprofits in the U.S. I asked for a meeting with its marketing and donor acquisition staffs. Much to my surprise, this was the first time this group had been brought together in the same room. At another client, recently an entire layer of the marketing department had been released, with new personnel being brought into the development department to do marketing....
You could invest a few minutes each day, or just an hour or two each week to increase your major donor retention, strengthen relationships between you and your professional colleagues, donors, potential donors and volunteer leaders, and help you stand out in the field...
At what point after a donor has stopped donating to your cause do you stop mailing them solicitation letters? Five years? Fifteen years? Turns out, it’s ever too late to reactivate your lapsed donors—if you’re sincere about it...
It’s easy to get lost in big, complicated projects, like capital campaigns. When you’re on the verge of getting lost and not understanding how your fundraising all fits together, there’s nothing like a clear, simple picture to help you make sense of it all. I've created a simple, attractive image of how capital campaigns work. It lays out the entire process in eight simple segments.
Last week, I mentioned some phrases my parents had said often (it seemed ad nauseam when I was a teen) that, in hindsight, I’ve realized relate to fundraising. Here are a few more “mom-isms” and “dad-isms” that constituted my earliest training in fundraising, whether I knew it then or not...
Fundraising is about people, not money. Not that well-meaning organizations don’t continue to make it about money—all the time. Because they do. This truth was on stellar display recently when The Wall Street Journal reported that Duke University had filed a lien on the estate of oil magnate and Duke alumnus, Aubrey McClendon, for the balance of unfulfilled pledges amounting to about $10 million....
While many nonprofit peer-to-peer programs have been able to connect with the Millennial audience based on school or institution structures, the audience often does not often transition to post-academia participation. Why is that?...
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!...
Do you have a plan in place to meet your year-end fundraising goals? Just imagine: The average nonprofit raises more than 40 percent of its annual revenue during the last quarter of the calendar year. Start getting ready for year-end fundraising with the following tips you can start implementing now...
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...
