10 August 2021 By David Allen, Development for Conservation If you are a Board member of a land trust or any other nonprofit, this post is directed at you. If you are on staff, please send it to your Board members. In my workshops and seminars and even...
2 August 2021 By David Allen, Development for Conservation I’ve been saving up ideas for a blog post about Board meetings for some time – like now. Short and sweet. BUT, I would really like it if you piled on here. Got an idea that works for you and...
25 May 2021 By David Allen, Development for Conservation An important concept in fundraising is that of “access” to current and potential donors. Access in fundraising implies that if you call, she will answer; that if you send an email or leave a voice message, it will...
6 April 2021 By David Allen, Development for Conservation I have been privileged to work with many different land conservation organizations since I started consulting full-time in 2009. Many of them have been run by so-called “Working Boards,” which means that they either do not have paid...
2 June 2020 By David Allen, Development for Conservation I am not a gardener. We live in an urban home on just shy of an acre, and we are busily converting anything that is now grass into something else – trees, flowers, vegetables, and so on – that...
By David Allen, Development for Conservation I’m working with several groups right now who are interested in changing their Board’s culture. Specifically, they have Boards who have not been particularly involved in raising money and are interested in encouraging and supporting Board level efforts in this...
By David Allen, Development for Conservation As I teased last week, one of my three checklist items each year in January is to get my Board Campaign organized. The link is a downloadable paper about how to organize a Board Campaign mechanically. (I won’t go into...
My accounting friend Dana says that every Board director should know how much money the organization has that is unrestricted – that it can spend on operations – and exactly how each restricted gift was spent. That would be an improvement for most land trusts...
The level of your giving also sends a signal to the public. Donors – including you – think of different organizations differently. When you, as a board member send $100 or less, or even $200 or $500, you signal how the Board considers this particular...
The job of fundraising, then, is to build a program of interrelated strategies (membership, campaigns, events, planned giving, and so on) that delivers a net result large enough to meet the organizational need. The mission is perpetual, so the fundraising strategies must be designed to...