If you intend to make a career in the nonprofit sector, seek to constantly have the right stuff. Also, be aware that “the right stuff” constantly changes and you must be proactive instead of being reactive. The dynamics of the nonprofit sector continue to evolve internally and externally in your world...
Volunteer retention is as important going into 2018 as it has ever been before. Volunteer behavior is changing and supporters want to be engaged in exchange for their time. What strategies is your nonprofit deploying to keep volunteers coming back? How is your organization measuring volunteer impact and communicating with your volunteer base?...
Principle 3 of The Eight Principles™ is Leadership Leads™. The governing board and senior staff of an organization are the ones responsible for doing the leaping. Far too often, however, those leading are the ones resisting their role...
In this time of year-end fundraising campaigns, it's especially likely that professional colleagues might let slip that they are denying reality. It happens more often than you might think...
During a recent client coaching session, we spent an hour talking about the reasons why it’s so important to hire a capital campaign consultant. Yes, we’ve covered this topic before, but the question keeps coming up. Besides, we thought of even more reasons that hiring a consultant is such a good idea. Why? Because any nonprofit that’s planning a capital campaign should really make the oh-so-worthwhile expense of hiring a consultant a budget priority!...
It was time to trot out my PowerPoint presentation and go through all the points of what we did as a company, the results we secured and how we did it. I was invited into the office of the president of a very prestigious eastern nonprofit. The purpose of the meeting was to explain what…
A few weeks ago, I shared how I made 20 online donations on Black Friday. For some, this was a repeat donation; for others, it was my first. Of course, all organizations sent me an auto-responder message and a “thank you” email message. So far, so good...
You have a great idea. You run it up the flagpole to leadership. They love it! Then, nothing happens. You wait. You push it up there again. They love it again. They gush over your creativity and forethought. Then, nothing happens...
I think you might be making your job as a major gift officer even harder. Richard and I often run into CEOs, board members, finance and programs staff who don’t know how major gift programs work or, at best, are just down right skeptical that it really works...
Maybe you are a chief development officer who must report to your board that fundraising for the previous year was flat. Or worse, that it was down. Or maybe you’re new to your organization and were brought in to turn around declining revenue...
