30 Jun Summer Shorts
It’s June 30. You know everything you need to know right now about who you will solicit at year-end. You know who they are, how much they gave last year, and how much you will ask them to give this year – those you will...
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.
23 Jun Fish Ladders and Project Prospecti
The conversation got me thinking. The story is compelling. The project is real. And it’s easy to imagine a donor seeing him or herself making a difference. Why can’t we answer? Why haven’t we anticipated the question? Answer to both: Because we aren’t thinking in...
15 Jun Can We Talk About AI?
This is major gift fundraising. It’s the most important fundraising we can do, and it’s not even close. In a perfect world, we would be treating every one of our donors as major gift prospects – individually cultivating their interest and matching them with opportunities...
09 Jun F-Stop and Be There
He tells her that he could not imagine a future in which young people would not have access to such a place. That he was so glad she was helping protect it. That it was time for him to make a difference. He asks her...
02 Jun No Fundraiser Left Inside
2 June 2026 By David Allen, Development for Conservation The following is a post I published in 2018. I have reposted variations on this theme every year since. This week, I am out fishing in eastern Oregon, so it seems timely to republish the original. In 2017,...
26 May The Thing About Direct Mail Recruitment
The traditional solution is direct mail. Lots of folks believe direct mail is dead. The truth is that it’s less and less effective while still being head and shoulders better than anything else. Maybe twenty or thirty years ago, a “decent” direct mail return was...
19 May Snake Mountain
We are part of a community of people – thousands strong – who are productively engaged in permanently protecting conservation land across the country – even across the world. Beating back the FODs (Forces of Darkness). And there are little wins everywhere. And in some...
12 May Equivalency Language
Equivalency language should be legitimate, and that means it probably shouldn’t be used for levels of membership. Assigning equivalency to an ask string of $35, $100, $250, $500 and Other will ALWAYS be forced and gimmicky, and it will come across that way. ...
04 May The Stories We Tell Ourselves: Donor Fatigue
No one gives us extra credit for NOT asking. We are all deluged every day by nonprofit requests in the mail, in email, and on social media. How many of those requests were from our organization? Four? Ten? It doesn’t matter. The point is the...
27 Apr What Do You Do with Your Organizational Values?
If statements like these represent the WHY of what we’re doing, and we attract people who believe what we believe by leading with the WHY, how are we using our organizational guiding principles to discover new supporters?...