“Donor visits” have been a cornerstone performance metric for most all gift officer evaluations.  But, instead of advancement leaders communicating clearly that donor visits were only a proxy for donor engagement – that the visit only represented potential evidence of donor engagement – the donor visit itself became donor engagement. Sure, many performance metrics systems […]

If you Google, “questions to ask before hiring a campaign consultant” (or something similar), you will no doubt wade through an almost-endless supply of results which purport to provide you with the keys to asking the most salient questions of potential consultants. There are tons of numbered lists – “the 10 questions every consultant should […]

If you are not asking your constituents what channels they wish to receive different types of communications, you are wasting a ton of time, financial resources, and energy. If you are not asking your major gift donors when they might be open to discussing their next significant investment in your mission before inviting them to […]

  There is a characteristic that most financially successful people share:  They make money while they sleep.  This characteristic refers to the fact that financially successful folks have figured out a way to extend their ability to make money beyond their own efforts. They have saved and invested their capital in ways that earns them […]

In his thoroughly-researched 2018 book, Endure: Mind, Body, and the Curiously Elastic Limits of Human Performance, “running science geek,” Alex Hutchinson, makes a compelling and fascinating argument.  Gathering together decades of research from various fields, he argues that the limits of human endurance in activities such as running, cycling, swimming, hiking, etc., can only be […]

Donor engagement will be different for a long while – perhaps forever – even after a vaccine for COVID-19 is in place and distributed widely. The ways in which we engage or involve donors will change because of the reduction of in-person opportunities, events, and activities.  Additionally, a change in our approach to donor engagement […]

It’s easy to critique. It’s more difficult to create. It can feel less burdensome to evaluate. And far more arduous to produce. It can seem safer to be the respondent. And more vulnerable to be the proposer. But being the creator, the producer, the proposer, is a role the very best advancement leaders are willing […]

We should all be imagining how advancement work will be rearranged, adjusted, and altered post-COVID-19. It’s easy to think of remote-work or work-from-home norms as becoming commonplace policy, especially for gift officers.  The integration of video conferencing and digital technologies with in-person, human-to-human donor engagement is another aspect of our work which, most likely, will […]