Supermarkets price milk and eggs (and turkeys during Thanksgiving) below, at, or just above their cost. These items (and others) are called “loss leaders” or “leader priced items.” Every time you buy milk or eggs, your local supermarket is, most likely, losing money on that transaction. If one were to analyze a supermarket’s value by…
Author: Jason McNeal
I provide leadership, advancement and fundraising consulting services to educational, healthcare, and non-profit organizations.
Backward and Forward
Our culture is laced with references to both going backward and forward in time. “Monday-morning quarterbacking,” and “hindsight is 20/20,” are two examples of spending time looking backward. Similarly, “looking into my crystal ball,” or “just around the corner” are idiomatic phrases of focusing on looking forward in time. While we can’t physically go backward…
Being The Proposer
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…
A Brighter Light
We often work in dim light. There are questions to every problem we are working on for which we don’t yet have clarity. Sometimes important questions. And sometimes the problems themselves are important. You may be finalizing a direct mail piece. How many segments of that solicitation should you employ to get the highest…
The Real Change That’s Coming Post-COVID-19
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…
Giving Is Greater Than The Gift
The first 5 months of 2020 have been distressing. An understatement, I am aware. Just as the world was beginning to understand how to “re-open” safely from the COVID-19 virus and its vicious health and financial calamities, we were faced over the last week with an even tougher test – one squarely confronting the perceptions…
Mission Or Method
If your goal is to increase the amount of gift income you receive, you can: Ask new prospective donors to give for the first time; Ask past donors to give again; Ask current donors to give more. Those, really, are the only methods (or some combination of these 3) to increase gift income. Developing plans…
Believers vs. Everybody
Believers in your institution’s mission give consistently. Everybody won’t do that. Believers in your institution’s vision for the future invest charitably. Everybody won’t do that. Believers in the leadership and values practiced at your institution remember you through their estates. Everybody won’t do that. As advancement professionals, our job is not to invite everybody to…
The Day-Trading Boss
If you haven’t yet worked for him or her, you probably will at some point. He’s the VP who focuses more on metrics than on the relationships and processes the metrics are there to measure. She’s the President who wants to know why gift officers aren’t asking for major gifts during a first meeting. Day-traders…
What Am I Doing?
The world is filled with leaders in every industry (including advancement/development) who rarely ask themselves this important question. Posers, caring more about the perception of leadership than the practice of it, almost never ask this question. Even still, some are able to ascend to high-level, leadership posts (again, yes, even in advancement/development). It doesn’t matter…