22 November 2022 By David Allen, Development for Conservation Many of us are familiar with the concept of matching gifts. And with Giving Tuesday right around the corner, finding matching gifts is on most of our minds. And not too long ago, I posted about Legacy matching campaigns...
15 November 2022 By David Allen, Development for Conservation Have you ever known something completely and been just as completely inept at explaining it to someone else? That’s the way I feel about the tax-deductibility of in-kind gifts. So here’s another attempt. Let me know if this makes...
8 November 2022 By David Allen, Development for Conservation When your blog title is "First Thing Tuesday," you always end up publishing on Election Day. And so it is today. And I work as a pollworker today, and I have neither the time nor the inclination to...
1 November 2022 By David Allen, Development for Conservation OK – so let’s talk about donor fatigue. And two things we need to acknowledge head-on. First, donor fatigue is real. It’s defined as the situation where donors either reduce or stop donating due to “feelings of indifference or...
25 October 2022 By David Allen, Development for Conservation (This essay was originally posted in October 2018. I have updated it for posting today. I still find it relevant with all the recent attention I have paid to Legacy Bequest Matching Campaigns.) Back in 2018, Jeff Brooks, Future...
18 October 2022 By David Allen, Development for Conservation I’m one of those people who likes strategic planning. It exercises two parts of my brain that I seem to have some aptitude for: convergent thinking (analysis and interpretation) and divergent thinking (brainstorming). An early exercise in strategic planning...
11 October 2022 By David Allen, Development for Conservation On every Board, there are a handful of Board members who are interested in aggressively pursuing corporate support. It seems logical to them that the business community would support community nonprofits as part of their commitment to community...
4 October 2022 By David Allen, Development for Conservation That doesn’t work here. We tried a four-page letter, and it bombed. The two-page letter we did this year did much better. I tend to take these comments at face value. No one wants to believe that four-pagers...
27 September 2022 By David Allen, Development for Conservation Do fundraising goals and strategies belong in your organizational strategic plan? I think they do, but not in the way many people think. I’ve been looking at a lot of Strategic Plans lately – both those that I am involved...
20 September 2022 By David Allen, Development for Conservation My session at Rally this year featured three innovative ideas that work, or would work, just about anywhere. Each one is scalable, each one is easy to understand, and each one, when I learned about it, blew my...