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.
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...
By David Allen, Development for Conservation In the early days of Nature Conservancy history, the organization spent a great deal more time figuring out how to buy land than they did how to take care of it later. As a result, by the mid-1980s, TNC nationally...
By David Allen, Development for Conservation Aldo Leopold, the famed author of A Sand County Almanac, is revered today almost as much for the quality of his writing as for its content. He was an early riser and often wrote in his journal in the wee...
By David Allen, Development for Conservation I’ve never been a fan of gift memberships or member-get-a-member campaigns, because the renewal rate on these types of memberships is so dismal – ten percent is about as good as you could hope for. So I had my usual...
By David Allen, Development for Conservation I’m intrigued this week by the idea that donors give for their own reasons much more so than for ours. This paradigm shift – from the notion that they are helping us do our work to one that we are helping...
By David Allen, Development for Conservation For the last several years, about this time, I have posted about a metric I’ve wanted to collect data on – the 5-year-value of new members. Last year I asked everyone to look back at the donors who made first gifts...
By David Allen, Development for Conservation I have several unrelated thoughts for you this week, none of which warrant an entire blog by themselves. Love to hear your thoughts! Great Video Simon Sinek has a new video interview on Millennials that is well worth the sixteen minutes it...
By David Allen, Development for Conservation One way of looking at evaluating fundraising program health is to evaluate four of the underlying systems that serve as components: Marketing systems that bring new donors to the table; Renewal and Upgrade systems that bring donors to the $250...
By David Allen, Development for Conservation Start again. January of another year. 2019 is over. History. Fa, sol, la, ti, Done. And January brings us ‘round again “to Do.” 2020 yawns before us. It could be anything. What will it be for you? January is a good time for reflection....
“Devoted though we must be to the conservation cause, I do not believe that any of us should give it all of our time or effort or heart. Give what you can, but do not burn yourselves out -- or break your hearts. Let us...