Are you confused between opinions and facts when it comes to email marketing? Here’s a list of 104 answers for you…
With the immediacy and ease of email, there’s no need to rely solely on formulaic thank you notes. You can send a standard thank you note with its more formal language, but I encourage you to pair it with an email, phone call or text message that makes a more immediate and personal connection...
As I have for four consecutive years, I’m starting 2017 off with a report on last year’s charitable giving volume. The analysis is based on 17 million individual direct mail contributions received in 2016 by more than 60 national nonprofit organizations. It encompasses six primary charitable sectors served by Merkle’s Response Management Group...
This old dog challenges you to think about that old fundraising standby, the telephone, in a new way. Just maybe there’s a stronger donor relationship that will result from a telephone call and a genuine word of appreciation...
An email recently landed in my inbox, and it was all about the ask. As I’m sure you can imagine, it wasn’t the first email I’ve ever received about it, and it surely won’t be the last. The ask is such a nuanced thing, and it lives in a gray area, which is often the case when there’s no one-size-fits-all approach for doing something the right way...
The first time I understood that I did not sell stuff was when a client said, “I need to buy some X,” and I asked “why?” She stopped with her hand in the air. She stayed there a bit. Finally, she said, “I can’t answer that.” For any decision you make, ask yourself why you made that decision, and whether anybody needed to make that decision. Rinse and repeat until you get to your true purpose...
Persuasive copywriting is just one skill in the fundraiser’s toolbox, but I’d argue that it’s critically important. After all, everything from your newsletters, to your fundraising appeals, to your grant proposals, to your online campaign, to your website, stems from the written word. It’s a skill-set that you should be honing on a regular basis. How? Here are a handful of my most-relied upon resources...
If you knew that 80 percent of your unsatisfied constituents would unsubscribe from your email, would that make you more concerned about satisfaction? What if unsatisfied constituents translated to your email list or Facebook community shrinking?...
Impact is not achieved by one person, one Millennial or one donation alone. Impact happens when you tap into the collective power of your donors. When we stop treating Millennials as an isolated entity and unite them with givers of all levels and sizes, we, in turn, empower them to actualize that long sought-after impact—even on a $50 donation. Because with the strength in numbers of tens of thousands of Millennials giving just $50, the impact is both unparallelled and accessible...
Last year at this time, I sent $25 donations to 19 organizations. Only one ranked among larger organizations in term of annual income. So, how do I, a small-level donor, feel 12 months later? Would I want to give again (and maybe a larger amount) based on the relationship that was built in 2016?...
