27 Feb Winning the Land Trust Lottery
When significant windfalls do occur, they often occur suddenly and unexpectedly. They can catch people and organizations unaware. And they have the potential to turn perfectly ordinary people stupid. ...
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.
20 Feb Sustainable Organizations Teach Financial Literacy
My accounting friend Dana says that every Board director should know how much money the organization has that is unrestricted – that it can spend on operations – and exactly how each restricted gift was spent. That would be an improvement for most land trusts...
13 Feb Using Social Media to Recruit New Members
By David Allen, Development for Conservation One of the people I met this last year at Rally was the Corporate Partnerships Manager for Access Fund, a national organization dedicated to protecting access for climbers to some of the nation’s best rock walls. She told me that...
06 Feb Adaptive Management and Membership Models
The thing about KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) or metrics is that the exercise of collecting the information is not the point. Using information to modify your behavior is. Here, we are called upon to think like a Range Ecologist. Act, Measure, Learn, Adapt. It is...
30 Jan The 45% Percent Solution and Other Ideas for Improvement
By David Allen, Development for Conservation I started last week’s post with a request. In preparation for a possible Rally presentation, I asked you about the value of your membership using one simple calculation: First, isolate the members and donors you have who made a first...
23 Jan How much is a New Member Worth?
• First, isolate the members and donors you have who made a first gift to your organization at some point – any point – during the calendar year 2013. • Now add up what that group has given to your organization – as a group – since...
16 Jan Cultivating Top Donors
You will want to imagine the relationship from the donor’s perspective. What will they see from the organization? Will it come from a single “voice” (better)? Or will each communication be from someone different (not as good)?...
09 Jan Board Members and Donor Stewardship
When you have donor meetings set up, when you will be at an event or field trip where one or several top donors will be present, take a moment to invite a Board member to come along. I would not go so far as to...
02 Jan And that brings us ‘round to Do, oh, oh, oh……
January is a good time for reflection. Where have we been? How did we get here? What could we have done differently? What have we learned? ...
26 Dec How will Tax Reform Affect Donor Giving in the Future?
What we know about most charitable giving is that people give first because they want to see something done and second because they believe the recipient organization can do it. Tax deductions are something donors take advantage of later more so than something that actually...