See you at Rally!

09 Sep See you at Rally!

Next week is Rally week. Rally, the National Land Conservation Conference, is in Providence, Rhode Island this year. I am looking forward to spending most of next week in the east.

This year will be first year in some time that I will not be presenting my Fundraising that Matters workshop. Instead, my colleague and good friend Anita O’Gara and I will team up to present The Surprising Secrets of Direct Mail Success on Friday. Anita is a mail marketing wizard who has built a membership for Iowa Natural Heritage Foundation that now numbers more than 6,000.

We’ll touch on membership systems and renewals, but most of our presentation is about membership recruitment mail and special appeal letters. We’ll cover writing effective letters, the mechanics of getting the mail out, the hows and whys of testing, and evaluating results. Dry you say? Not when Anita and I are presenting!

Also on the docket is the A Board for All Seasons seminar Peter McKeever and I have presented a half-dozen times now in Wisconsin. Peter and I go way back to capital campaign days with The Nature Conservancy. He’s a conservation easement attorney extraordinaire, and we’ve teamed up with a third partner, Nancy Moore, to work on organizational assessments and strategic planning for land trusts as the Conservation Consulting Group.

We like to think of A Board for All Seasons as a board orientation on steroids. It not only covers the basics of how land trusts operate and why things like Standards and Practices are important, but also how the nature of perpetuity changes the way board members have to think and operate. We end the session with five practical ideas land trusts can implement right away that will make a huge difference in their ability to handle perpetuity. We have fun presenting it and participants have bestowed upon it rave reviews. There’s still room in this half-day seminar (Thursday afternoon) for additional participants.

I will also have a display table this year. I went out and bought some tchotchke stuff and a banner for the table. Stop by and say hello. And if you don’t see one there, ask me for one of my bamboo pens. I’ve got about 300 to give away.

See you at Rally!

-da