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...
8 June 2021 By David Allen, Development for Conservation It’s June! Welcome to summer! From a fundraising point of view, think about this: You will ask just about everyone currently giving money to make another gift between now and 12/31. How much will you ask them for? I get asked...
9 February 2021 By David Allen, Development for Conservation Before I start into today’s post, I want to remind you that I’m collecting five-year value information again, Time to Update the 5-Year Value Metric. If you could run a couple of reports on your database and send...
6 October 2020 By David Allen, Development for Conservation Q: What wine should I pair with dystopian outlook? A: All of them. There’s still a full calendar quarter to go, and I can’t wait for 2021. The future is as uncertain as it has ever been. And I’m talking...
By David Allen, Development for Conservation You are on one side of a mountain range. And you need to get to the other side. You could go straight up. It might be technically difficult and very dangerous. You could go to the right for several months, parallel to...
By David Allen, Development for Conservation One way of looking at evaluating fundraising program health is to evaluate four of the underlying systems that serve as components: Marketing systems that bring new donors to the table; Renewal and Upgrade systems that bring donors to the $250...
By David Allen, Development for Conservation Events are part of fundraising. From field trips to galas, we are in the event business as much as we are anything else. Which means (at least): pre-planning, logistics, permissions, venues, caterers, invitations and reminders, site volunteers, parking concerns, nametags, photography,...
12 November 2019 By David Allen, Development for Conservation Major gift development isn’t hard. It’s a discipline. And it’s scalable. So just start. Let movement create momentum and let momentum create habit. It starts in January, and it could start for you in January 2020. You can do this for ten donors....
By David Allen, Development for Conservation Two quick thoughts for you this week – I’m running short on time – it being the season for fundraising and all. The first is this: We’re all in on Boomers. They are on our Boards. They represent the majority of...
By David Allen, Development for Conservation For many organizations, Fall is the time for planning and budgeting (which doesn’t really work out so well for fundraisers who need to be busy raising money!). The default seems to be starting with assumptions about what WE did last...