18 February 2025 By David Allen, Development for Conservation Beginning in about 2017, I started collecting data from readers of this blog about the five-year value of new members and donors making first gifts to their land trusts. My theory was that because recruiting new donors in...
12 July 2022 By David Allen, Development for Conservation A couple of blinks from now, it will be August the 1st – where has the summer gone? As we cruise toward Labor Day, here’s what I’m thinking about for August. What are YOU thinking about? Getting Out of...
31 May 2022 By David Allen, Development for Conservation If you were starting a new restaurant in town, its long-term viability would depend on getting people to try it right away – within the first couple of months. That means they would need to hear about it...
17 May 2022 By David Allen, Development for Conservation A few weeks ago, someone asked for a post about recruiting new members. This post (and next week’s) is for them and for anyone else looking for the same information. For the purposes of this post, I am defining...
25 January 2022 By David Allen, Development for Conservation It’s hard to believe now, but there was once a time, years ago, when the primary germ concerns were about washing your hands before dinner. Killer pandemics were the stuff of Stephen King and Michael Crichton novels. Before COVID...
5 May 2020 By David Allen, Development for Conservation WARNING: This post contains geek material. Last Fall (seems like another lifetime), I coordinated a direct mail collaboration between five conservation organizations – three land trusts and two river groups. The collaboration featured a collective rental of Nature Conservancy...
By David Allen, Development for Conservation I’ve never been a fan of gift memberships or member-get-a-member campaigns, because the renewal rate on these types of memberships is so dismal – ten percent is about as good as you could hope for. So I had my usual...
By David Allen, Development for Conservation As I reported in my study of five-year values, (see 5Yr Value: The Metric that Tells You the Most About Your Fundraising), organizations with a higher-than median five-year value (2014 donors) tended to be actively engaged in raising money (from...
By David Allen, Development for Conservation This week, I’m continuing a series about recruitment strategies. The series stems from a post I wrote two weeks ago called the 300-Member trap – the phenomenon that many organizations face where they have essentially the same number of members...
By David Allen, Development for Conservation Last week, I wrote about the 300-Member trap – the phenomenon that many organizations face where they have essentially the same number of members each year – about 300 – regardless of what they do to grow. The trap exists because...