Many organizations have moved away from using membership language for reasons I don’t fully understand and won’t argue here. It’s only a consequential mistake if donors no longer feel connected and therefore have less invested in renewing. In other words, if it ends up costing...
30 July 2024 By David Allen, Development for Conservation Many land trusts renew their members in the Fall and many are now scrambling to produce renewal letters. And let’s not get hung up on the word “member.” If your organization doesn’t have “members,” you still want people...
7 May 2024 By David Allen, Development for Conservation The secret to successful fundraising is asking. The secret to effective asking is follow-up. And the secret to effective follow-up is timing. Take a look at your 12-month renewal rate. How many households made a gift in any 365-day...
13 February 2024 By David Allen, Development for Conservation Those of you who have followed me or followed this blog over the years will recognize that I am a disciple of the “longer letters raise more money” cult. I’m planning to go off on the topic again...
29 August 2023 By David Allen, Development for Conservation So what is your retention rate? Count the number of unique households who gave money in 2021. And count the number of THOSE households who gave money again in 2022. Divide the 2022 number by the 2021 number and...
14 March 2023 By David Allen, Development for Conservation Happy PI Day!! One of the complaints I hear fairly often is that we didn’t do as well as we had hoped because the mail didn’t go out on time. The appeal didn’t go out on time. The renewals...
6 December 2022 By David Allen, Development for Conservation So how are you feeling about 2022? Got your fundraising goals all knocked out? Feeling like the corner got turned from COVID back to some relative normalcy? Or maybe you’re still anxious about the end of the year. Somewhere 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...
1 September 2020 By David Allen, Development for Conservation Numbers are just numbers. Five, 23, 478. Meaningless. We use numbers all the time, expecting them to convey importance. Four species, 42 acres, 55 years old, 300 members. But they don’t. Or at least they don’t convey any more importance than...
By David Allen, Development for Conservation My mother and her husband recently moved from Estes Park, Colorado to Portland, Oregon. In celebration and support, my wife and I bought her a membership in the Oregon State Parks Foundation, a day-use parking sticker for their car, and...