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.
13 December 2022 By David Allen, Development for Conservation I subscribe to a couple of essay aggregators in addition to four or five blogs and three newspapers. More than I can possibly keep up with. So, most of the time, I find myself skimming the headlines more...
6 December 2022 By David Allen, Development for Conservation So how are you feeling about 2022? Got your fundraising goals all knocked out? Feeling like the corner got turned from COVID back to some relative normalcy? Or maybe you’re still anxious about the end of the year. Somewhere in...
29 November 2022 By David Allen, Development for Conservation Let’s get real. Strategic Planning isn’t hard. In fact, it’s pretty straightforward. You and I could bang out a serviceable Strategic Plan on a Friday afternoon and still make it to happy hour on time. But between now and...
22 November 2022 By David Allen, Development for Conservation Many of us are familiar with the concept of matching gifts. And with Giving Tuesday right around the corner, finding matching gifts is on most of our minds. And not too long ago, I posted about Legacy matching campaigns...
15 November 2022 By David Allen, Development for Conservation Have you ever known something completely and been just as completely inept at explaining it to someone else? That’s the way I feel about the tax-deductibility of in-kind gifts. So here’s another attempt. Let me know if this makes...
8 November 2022 By David Allen, Development for Conservation When your blog title is "First Thing Tuesday," you always end up publishing on Election Day. And so it is today. And I work as a pollworker today, and I have neither the time nor the inclination to...
1 November 2022 By David Allen, Development for Conservation OK – so let’s talk about donor fatigue. And two things we need to acknowledge head-on. First, donor fatigue is real. It’s defined as the situation where donors either reduce or stop donating due to “feelings of indifference or...
25 October 2022 By David Allen, Development for Conservation (This essay was originally posted in October 2018. I have updated it for posting today. I still find it relevant with all the recent attention I have paid to Legacy Bequest Matching Campaigns.) Back in 2018, Jeff Brooks, Future...
18 October 2022 By David Allen, Development for Conservation I’m one of those people who likes strategic planning. It exercises two parts of my brain that I seem to have some aptitude for: convergent thinking (analysis and interpretation) and divergent thinking (brainstorming). An early exercise in strategic planning...
11 October 2022 By David Allen, Development for Conservation On every Board, there are a handful of Board members who are interested in aggressively pursuing corporate support. It seems logical to them that the business community would support community nonprofits as part of their commitment to community...