This BLOG is intended to help conservation organizations and land trusts pursue excellence in all aspects of their conservation endeavors. I welcome your comments and feedback to these posts.
21 March 2023 By David Allen, Development for Conservation Quick – you’re off to meet with a donor and you can take one and only one prop with you. What do you take? Answer: A map. People love maps, and they love them because maps help place conservation projects...
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...
7 March 2023 By David Allen, Development for Conservation Does your land trust have a Development Committee? A Board committee whose job it is to oversee organizational fundraising? What does it do? How is it organized? This post is about one way of thinking through these questions. I believe...
28 February 2023 By David Allen, Development for Conservation In the conservation community, and for land trusts in particular, the work is “in perpetuity” – forever. So, if our work will never end, neither can our organizations. They must be perpetual as well. And because none of...
21 February 2023 By David Allen, Development for Conservation Recently I attended a webinar presented by Tom Ahern. Ahern is a well-known figure in nonprofit direct response fundraising and has written several books related to communicating with donors: Turning Doubters Into Donors, How to Write Fundraising Materials...
14 February 2023 By David Allen, Development for Conservation Happy Valentine's Day! (Love your donors. They will love you back.) This post will have nothing to do with Valentine's Day. But I hope you have a lovely day, regardless! For the last several years, about this time, I...
7 February 2023 By David Allen, Development for Conservation Last week’s post – On Membership Levels and Data Retention – hit a chord with a lot of people. Great questions and what-ifs were posted in the comments and in my email both. So I promised a follow-up...
31 January 2023 By David Allen, Development for Conservation Two questions came through my inbox this week. I answered both in due course, but I get asked these a lot, and it occurred to me that I should share them here as well. The first question: We’re redoing...
24 January 2023 By David Allen, Development for Conservation There’s a fun story about three bricklayers who are asked what they are doing. (You've probably heard it.) The first describes laying each brick on top of the others so that the lines are straight in every direction....
17 January 2023 By David Allen, Development for Conservation I’m not a huge fan of fundraising events. So I’m going to give you a bunch of ideas about how to get the most from them, but I’m going to preface the tips by enumerating my list of...