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 March 2021 By David Allen, Development for Conservation I started fundraising by going door-to-door on a political canvas. We were asking for and collecting $15 donations to support any one of a half-dozen laws that the group was promoting in the state legislature. And I saw the...
16 March 2021 By David Allen, Development for Conservation I’m developing a new workshop this year on fundraising basics. I feel like one of the most important lessons of 2020 was that fundraising basics still matter. Organizations that had – and trusted – good fundamentals tended to...
9 March 2021 By David Allen, Development for Conservation Several years ago, Vu Le (Non-Profit AF) wrote a critique of donor-centric fundraising. In the several weeks that followed, I wrote a critique of his critique, arguing that Le’s definition of donor-centric fundraising was based on several inaccuracies....
2 March 2021 By David Allen, Development for Conservation Much is made of the “evolution” of nonprofit Boards – from Working Board to Transition Board to Governing Board. The way the process is described – using words like “maturing” and “progressing” – one might assume that the...
23 February 2021 By David Allen, Development for Conservation I know several organizations looking to replace development staff who have moved on. Several others are considering hiring new development positions. And a couple are looking to hire their first fundraising staff. Seems like a good time to...
16 February 2021 By David Allen, Development for Conservation Three weeks ago, I asked you for data related to the value of your “first-gift” donors from 2016: Isolate the members and donors you have who made a first gifts to your organization at some point – any...
9 February 2021 By David Allen, Development for Conservation Before I start into today’s post, I want to remind you that I’m collecting five-year value information again, Time to Update the 5-Year Value Metric. If you could run a couple of reports on your database and send...
2 February 2021 By David Allen, Development for Conservation Before I start into today’s post, I want to remind you that I’m collecting five-year value information again, Time to Update the 5-Year Value Metric. If you could run a couple of reports on your database and send...
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. I’ve been asking everyone to look back at the donors who made first gifts (ever)...
19 January 2021 By David Allen, Development for Conservation I’ve been thinking about motivation. Why do donors give? Why will donors say YES? We spend WAAAY too much time imagining people saying NO to the point that we are terrified of that possibility. What would happen if we...