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.
Writing and editing fundraising letters is better thought of as an exercise in technical writing, than as writing actual letters. There are techniques, rules, and form to the exercise that, if followed closely, will help you raise more money. Many of these techniques are counter-intuitive....
Renewal letters need to do three things: They need to remind me of WHY I’m a member. They need to remind me of what I gave last year. And they need to suggest an increased level of support this year. And they need to do...
This is what I’ve been talking about as a missing step in Strategic Planning. Instead of including “resource development” in your exploration of various goals and strategies, and plugging in reasonable extrapolations of what you are already doing now – or worse, instead of paring...
The final form of the LOI is as a Business Letter. Make sure to use board stationary for the first page and that it is addressed and dated properly. I recommend doing the legwork to find a real person to whom it should be addressed...
The level of your giving also sends a signal to the public. Donors – including you – think of different organizations differently. When you, as a board member send $100 or less, or even $200 or $500, you signal how the Board considers this particular...
Most of us are familiar with the basics of a gift chart – a list of gifts needed to make a specific goal with higher-level gifts listed first and smaller gifts listed below in descending tiers, sometimes called a donor pyramid. Gift charts are commonly...
.....giving yourself permission to make these stories personal by visiting the sites you need to raise money for will help you a lot. It will make you more effective when you talk about it. It will help you imagine taking donors there. And It will...
We were talking fish ladders. The problem was that many of the culverts on the river were set up too high. The culvert did a great job of moving water under the roadway without damaging the roadbed. It did a lousy job helping fish get upstream,...
The job of fundraising, then, is to build a program of interrelated strategies (membership, campaigns, events, planned giving, and so on) that delivers a net result large enough to meet the organizational need. The mission is perpetual, so the fundraising strategies must be designed to...
We need all kinds of people to make land conservation happen. We need land protection specialists, attorneys, scientists, administrators, and volunteers. And we need members and donors, too. I’m not saying put donors on a pedestal or inflate their importance, as some seem afraid of....