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.
4 October 2022 By David Allen, Development for Conservation That doesn’t work here. We tried a four-page letter, and it bombed. The two-page letter we did this year did much better. I tend to take these comments at face value. No one wants to believe that four-pagers...
27 September 2022 By David Allen, Development for Conservation Do fundraising goals and strategies belong in your organizational strategic plan? I think they do, but not in the way many people think. I’ve been looking at a lot of Strategic Plans lately – both those that I am involved...
20 September 2022 By David Allen, Development for Conservation My session at Rally this year featured three innovative ideas that work, or would work, just about anywhere. Each one is scalable, each one is easy to understand, and each one, when I learned about it, blew my...
13 September 2022 By David Allen, Development for Conservation I’m heading to Rally today, and it seemed timely to pull out this post from 2017 and update it. After all, it’s been a while, and we might be out of practice. If you are heading to New...
6 September 2022 By David Allen, Development for Conservation Every year in September, I start thinking about how just about every single member or donor who has given us money in recent memory will be solicited between now and year’s end. The entire year comes down to...
30 August 2022 By David Allen, Development for Conservation One of the more frustrating parts of a fundraiser’s job happens when people don’t actually do what they said they would do. OK – any job. Donors promise a reply by Tuesday and Friday rolls around without a word. ...
23 August 2022 By David Allen, Development for Conservation I was recently forwarded a blog post from Cross & Crown, a digital marketing firm based in Pennsylvania whose tagline says they “strive to help educate, advocate, and thrive in a digital world.” The post, Conservation Land Trust...
16 August 2022 By David Allen, Development for Conservation Every so often I get significant pushback from readers either questioning or taking exception to something I have written. I love it when it happens. It causes me to re-examine something I may believe so matter-of-factly that I...
9 August 2022 By David Allen, Development for Conservation It’s primary election day in Wisconsin, and I am a pollworker, so I am reprising my set of fundraising letter “rules” from several years ago. The set is based on a book by Jeff Brooks that should probably...
2 August 2022 By David Allen, Development for Conservation This week I’m thinking about what someone might need to know to make a major gift. In this sense, I am staying with my soapbox premise that the word “major” should describe the decision to give and not...