9 July 2024 By David Allen, Development for Conservation A couple of weeks ago, I posted about working your appeal letters around the election this year: Let’s Answer the Election Question. In it, I offered three different timelines for mailing, depending on whether you intend to offer...
28 May 2024 By David Allen, Development for Conservation Are you ready for the election season? Me neither. Aside from the every-four-years political insanity, the presidential election always presents some challenges for fall appeal planning as well. And this year will be worse than normal. I believe that one of the...
14 November 2023 By David Allen, Development for Conservation Frequent readers of this blog will know that I am mixed about Giving Tuesday. It feels to me like doing very little nets you $3,000-5,000 while going all out nets you maybe double that. By “netting” I mean...
10 October 2023 By David Allen, Development for Conservation I’ve noticed a number of hits on old blog posts related to writing Fall Appeal Letters, and a couple of folks have even called asking specific questions. It appears that some of you are looking for last minute...
8 August 2023 By David Allen, Development for Conservation If you think about it, you will ask every person connected with your land trust to make a gift between now and year’s end. HOW that happens and WHEN that happens are still changeable. SOME people will be...
13 June 2023 By David Allen, Development for Conservation July is just a few short weeks away – Yikes! – Are you ready? What’s on your list for July? Annual Meetings? Summer field trips? Donor visits? Here’s what I’m thinking about. Plan the Fall Appeal – If you follow...
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...
9 November 2021 By David Allen, Development for Conservation I was informed last year that one of my clients had raised $6,000 from Giving Tuesday, which turned out to be 20% or so more than in 2019. Woohoo! Given the work they put into it, I estimated...
2 No0vember 2021 By David Allen, Development for Conservation I’ve heard from many land trusts around the country that 2020 was a banner year in several respects, at least from a fundraising perspective. In fact this is true for many other land conservation / Nature-related organizations, too. ...
12 October 2021 By David Allen, Development for Conservation Note: Most of this post was originally published in 2015. One July, my board chair came to me with a request that I “forecast” where we would end up on December 31st in each of our revenue targets. He...