In the absence of a five-year mission budget, supporting fundraising goals have no context. As a result, Marketing, Membership, and Fundraising goals often end up vague, arbitrary, and insufficiently supported themselves....
15 November 2022 By David Allen, Development for Conservation Have you ever known something completely and been just as completely inept at explaining it to someone else? That’s the way I feel about the tax-deductibility of in-kind gifts. So here’s another attempt. Let me know if this makes...
11 January 2022 Last week I wrote about planning individual solicitations for your Board members and a selection of 30 or so donors: How to Make a Donor Plan. I suggested starting with a list of everyone who gave money in 2020 before pulling your Board members...
4 January 2022 There’s something you can do this week that will make a HUGE difference in how much money you will raise this year. It may take several hours to do it right, or maybe even a couple of days. And you probably won’t enjoy doing...
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...
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...
By David Allen, Development for Conservation Happy New Year! Time to start again. January of another year. 2020 is over. (Thank Goodness!) Probably wasn’t what you thought it was going to be last year at this time. (There’s an understatement!) But now, it’s finally over. History. Fa, sol, la, ti,...
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...
7 July 2020 By David Allen, Development for Conservation Planning 101: Take a close and honest look at where you are right now. Visualize where you want to be. Brainstorm the various possible ways of getting there. Prioritize and choose a course of action. Suggest metrics and...
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...