by David Allen, Development for Conservation At some point between now and Christmas, you will be asking just about everyone you know for a gift to your land trust. Some will be asked to “renew.” Some will be asked to make an additional gift this year. Most...
The reason to do all this to inform your planning – to reverse engineer the process and project what kind of marketing budget would be required to achieve a certain specific “more.” Let’s say, for example, that your land trust wanted to go from the...
Whether you are an Executive Director, another staff member with fundraising responsibilities, or a Board member, giving yourself permission to make these stories personal by visiting the sites for which you need to raise money will help you a lot. It will make you more...
We all have a role to play in re-educating the public about overhead and fundraising costs. Maybe this type of graphic can help you....
This implies that once someone has been “assigned” to a segment, they stay there for at least this year. To be most helpful, your database system should be able to handle this level of complexity – the segments to which prospects are assigned based on...
The basic idea of the system I prefer is that you mail (using envelopes and postage) a sequence of four letters. The first three are one-page, straightforward renewal letters. They contain three important pieces of information: How long they have been a member, how much...
.....the cycle of solicitation, gift, and newsletter should all work together. How can that happen if they are each written for different audiences? It makes all the sense in the world that you would want to write your newsletters with the same rules that you...
We confuse transactional donors with mission donors all the time. We even call them “members.” We send them the same types of information in the same quantities as if they were mission donors. We include them in donor reports. And we try to “renew” them...
How do we manage our jobs and careers and even our organizations? What would full-time work even look like? (Forget about part-time – part-time for nonprofits simply means part-time pay.) And if we can’t define “full-time,” how do we say NO to things that would...
The fear comes from American mythology that if you are smart enough, or worthy enough, or you worked hard enough, you won’t need help – you won’t need to ask. Consequently, merely by asking, you are admitting that you can’t do it on your own...