Net Gain: Playing It Safe
Identity-theft criminals are targeting not only large for-profit businesses, but also unsuspecting smaller businesses and nonprofit organizations....
The Donor/Charity Contract
There’s a contract between nonprofits and their donors. And frankly, it’s not all that attractive to donors. If donors knew what they were signing up for, how many of them would still give?...
Overteased and Underwhelmed
Sometimes teasers are like bad pick-up lines. And with the split-second decision your donor makes when she glances at your outer envelope, you don’t get a second chance to talk your way out of a poor first impression … you’ve...
The Core Ingredient for Success
Without hesitation, she pulls over, leaps out of her car and runs across four lanes of freeway traffic to save a lost and frightened dog. Why? Because she’s a champion for her cause; she knows nothing else … compassion runs...
16 Ounces of Hope
Charity: is an organization dedicated to spreading awareness about extreme poverty, educating the public, and provoking compassionate and intelligent giving....
One Ringy Dingy …
It can be challenging to navigate the rocky waters of telefundraising. With so many vendors to choose from, an ever-increasing tidal wave of legislation and budgets that shrink in the blink of an eye, it’s easy for a nonprofit to...
Briefings One Good Idea: Picture More Donors
Online social-networking applications have emerged as one of the new frontiers for nonprofits. MySpace, Facebook, YouTube and others offer organizations a public stage on which to present their causes, rally support, spur activism and build relationships with constituents and potential...
Innovate, Integrate
Ah, whimsy. It really is my thing. So I was totally tickled when Convio President Sheeraz Haji walked into a session being presented by Scottish fundraising powerhouse Bernard Ross at the Bridge Conference in D.C. last month. Sheeraz is quite...
Concentrated, Creative Outreach
There are literally millions of diseases — some fatal, some rare, some affecting children, some other demographics. And behind each of them is a group of people who are passionate about finding a cure. And most of them depend on...
An Exercise in Transformation
Airplanes and on-ramps. Talk to Atul Tandon about fundraising, and you get a lot of metaphors about movement. Whether it’s drawing a picture of specific programming as on-ramps to the highway of donor engagement, or comparing the development of an...
After the Acquisition
For some months now, I’ve been collecting samples — giving small donations to a number of charities (in addition to those I usually support), so that I can get an idea of who’s doing what with their “post-gift” donor communications....
And We Quote
On Branding: “What we are telling our donors in terms of our brand promise, in terms of our communication strategy, in terms of the donor promise we make when we raise money from them — that’s got to make sense...
Three Steps to Real Change
FundRaising Success: If you were to leave World Vision U.S. now and go to another nonprofit organization, and that organization was bringing in funds and its programs were doing what they were supposed to do, but it felt somewhat static,...
Prospect Research: What You Don’t Know — and How It Can Hurt You
A few years ago, one of my clients requested rush research on a prospective donor. The client, a development officer at an independent school, explained that the headmaster was planning to meet with a parent to ask for a gift....
