Spend time on Facebook each day? Want to help your favorite charity? You can now do both – simultaneously. GamesThatGive (now owned by Facebook software company Vitrue), allows gamers the opportunity to support their favorite charities simply by playing online games. The longer you play, the more money is donated by GamesThatGive. For those who…
Author: Jason McNeal
I provide leadership, advancement and fundraising consulting services to educational, healthcare, and non-profit organizations.
3 Simple Ways To Enhance Your Creativity
Advancement work regularly requires our best creativity. Whether we are devising cultivation strategies for key major donor prospects, writing direct response solicitations, or designing case statements and campaign videos, each of us has to engage the most creative elements of ourselves consistently. The problem, though, is that we tend to think of creativity incorrectly. We…
Why Variety Is Not The Spice of Your Case Statement
Gad Saad, in The Consuming Instinct, has penned an interesting and deep read around the notion of biologically-driven choices. He discusses how our biology drives our consumption behaviors in ways far more important than culture or socialization alone can account. I thought about our work as advancement professionals when Gad covered the “variety effect” and…
A Tale of Two Influences
Not long ago, I was in an airport looking forward to getting home after a long but productive week of client visits. It was late on a Friday night and a far away but severe weather system had wrecked havoc with the friendly skies. Although the weather at our location was perfect, a number of…
Manage The Mission, Not The People
How can you lead the members of your advancement team so that each performs even the most ordinary of tasks in extraordinary fashion? How do you motivate staff members to be the best version of themselves day-in and day-out? How do manage staff members so that they respond positively to new ideas or new strategies?…
What You Know Is More Important Than What They Know
Time to make the call on the prospective donors. You know which call it is – it’s the ask. This is big. In fact, it’s the biggest ask you’ve ever made of a prospect. You’ve set up the meeting and a member of your Board will be with you. You’ve created a call script. You’ve…
Here’s a Resolution: Break Something Important In 2012
Forget about your stand-by New Year resolutions. As humans, we seem incredibly poor at keeping them. And, in the instances where we do keep them, they don’t seem to make much of a difference. One year rolls into another and we find that we still want to get better at our work, we want to…
How Much Klout Do You Have?
Have you stumbled upon Klout.com yet? It’s a quantitative value analysis of your online influence. Every facebook “like,” every tweet, every published blog, every status update, and photo comment adds to your value as an online influencer. A higher score means you have more influence with others in the virtual realm. Recently, I read an…
The Celebrity, The Artist, And The Development Professional
In our world today, there are many who chase after acknowledgment without a proficiency in any art form. Their goal is not to develop a craft, aptitude, or skill. They simply want to be famous. And, because a proficiency in an art is absent, others wonder aloud as to how these folk achieve any level…
Overcoming Your Hurdles
What are the hurdles you are facing in your work life today? What are the problems keeping you from reaching your Far Edge of Promise? Go ahead, list them. Not enough budget? Not the right people on the team? Not enough people on the team? Too much bureaucracy? A micro-managing boss? Support staff that doesn’t…