By David Allen, Development for Conservation My Plan B this year starts on November 13th. Years ago now, I organized a hand-written letter party for the Board. We had seventy-something prospects who had given $250 or more last year and we were launching a $1,000 giving club....
by David Allen, Development for Conservation As I quipped several weeks ago, you will be asking just about everyone you know for a gift to your land trust between now and Christmas. Most will be asked in a letter, which means that you will be needing...
by David Allen, Development for Conservation The new website is here! The new website is here! After weeks of promising, the new version of Development for Conservation’s website is complete. Take a look around. I hope you like it. The new site is still subject to Spam, but the...
The reason to do all this to inform your planning – to reverse engineer the process and project what kind of marketing budget would be required to achieve a certain specific “more.” Let’s say, for example, that your land trust wanted to go from the...
We all have a role to play in re-educating the public about overhead and fundraising costs. Maybe this type of graphic can help you....
The basic idea of the system I prefer is that you mail (using envelopes and postage) a sequence of four letters. The first three are one-page, straightforward renewal letters. They contain three important pieces of information: How long they have been a member, how much...
.....the cycle of solicitation, gift, and newsletter should all work together. How can that happen if they are each written for different audiences? It makes all the sense in the world that you would want to write your newsletters with the same rules that you...
We confuse transactional donors with mission donors all the time. We even call them “members.” We send them the same types of information in the same quantities as if they were mission donors. We include them in donor reports. And we try to “renew” them...
Board members who don’t give themselves will not be effective fundraisers. But Board members should not give money because they are Board members. They should give because they believe that what you are doing is worth doing – they should give because they believe in...
Frankly, they get stuck because they are comfortable and unchallenged at that level. We become “one of their $1,000 charities.” To get donors to move off of their chosen level, we have to first understand that it is their level as much as it is...