Baking with Purpose: Telling Your Why
Sweeten the Dough: Leveraging Matching Gifts
Matching gifts are a great way to rocket up the value of gifts given to any campaign, but they sometimes feel out of reach for small nonprofits. Let’s fix that.
Rolling It Out: My top 10 spring campaign tips!
Craft Your Recipe: How to Write Your Campaign Plan
Slice Up Your Audience: Using donor personas to target.
Get Ready to Serve Up Spring Campaign Success
Before we bake, we’ve got to know the recipe. This week, we’re talking about how to know what to aim for in your spring campaign.
How to address board objections to fundraising.
Sometimes board members just plain don’t want to touch fundraising, but even board members who don’t have networks to solicit can help. I’ve heard every objection in the book; here’s a manual for addressing it.
Get your board members some buddies.
Have you tried pairing board members up with potential donors?
Asking isn’t enough…
If you want your board to fundraise successfully, you have to teach them to be successful fundraisers.
Setting ground rules in board fundraising
Sometimes, we get frustrated with our board of directors because the won’t fundraise. But often, I see that we haven’t actually made that an explicit requirement of joining the board. Instead it’s more of a “shouldn’t they have known that?!” implied thing. Let’s make the implicit explicit this week, shall we?
No More Madness: Board Fundraising
We all want board members who are willing and eager to help with fundraising, but that’s rarely the reality. This March, let’s cut down on the madness and come up with practical ways to get your board engaged in fundraising.
Try an Annual Stakeholder Meeting
Glossy, printed annual reports are on their way out. (Good riddance IMHO!) Here’s what you can do instead to report your impact back to your donors in ways that are more engaged, interesting, and—most importantly—interactive!
One mission-aligned touch per quarter
How do you build a donor stewardship program that doesn’t leave you feeling worn down and burnt out? You align it with your mission.
The easiest way to start a dialogue with your donors.
We need to be creating better dialogue with our donors. Here’s an easy-to-implement trick that will have outsize results in making that happen for your organization.
Do you have a leaky bucket?
It’s February. The month of #DonorLove do’s and don’t’s. But it’s really not about #DonorLove, it’s about donor retention. Let’s kick off this month talking about what your donor retention rate is and what it means.
Time-boxing: for when you wear too many hats 🧢
When you’re wearing a lot of hats, it’s hard to make time for everything. This Friday 4 Fundraising, we teach you how to stay on top of all. the. things.
Why do we always think more is better?
I believe that HOW you raise more money depends on WHY you want to raise more money. That’s because I’ve watched “more for the sake of more” destroy nonprofits. I always imagine myself like the Cheshire Cat when Alice hits that fork in the road. Alice asks, “Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?” The Cheshire Cat replies, “That depends a good deal on where you want to get to.” I ask why because when your WHY is crystal clear, the HOW just appears.
It’s not bad to get back to basics.
So let me give you permission today. Stop chasing the trends. It’s okay if you don’t use AI. It’s perfectly fine to not accept crypto donations. You don’t have to be in all the places all the time.
Social Media and Fundraising: The Fast Path to Overwhelm
I hosted a Fundraising Focus Session on Monday to help nonprofit fundraisers set aside some time, well ahead of November, to start thinking about and preparing for year-end. What was interesting was how much time we spent talking about social media and fundraising…and how much everyone hated having to spend time on social media.
Taking it offline
Whether you call it donor fatigue or poor donor retention, the instability in fundraising right now isn’t new…but donor enthusiasm does seem like it’s at a new low. Could it be because we’re increasingly removing the humanity from this deeply human thing we call philanthropy?