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…
Category: Fundraising
Permission-Based Relationships
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…
Territoriality And Raising Money While You Sleep
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…
The Outcomes We Predict
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…
Winning Donor Engagement Beyond The Pandemic
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…
When Being “Efficient” Is Not The Primary Goal
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…
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…
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…