Effectively engaging volunteers – be they Board members, campaign leaders, special event volunteers, advisory council members, or others – can be a tricky proposition. On the one hand, influential volunteers have an ability to open doors, leverage personal relationships, and tell the story of your institution with an authenticity that can be unmatched by those…
Category: Fundraising
The Real Reason Your Annual Fund Matters
Tactically, and even strategically-speaking, the Annual Fund for most non-profit organizations is credited with serving 2 purposes. The Annual Fund: Provides important (often-times budget relieving) annual gift income to fund current organizational priorities, and; Serves as a (hopefully expanding) pool of future major donor prospects for the organization. While these purposes are important, they are…
Don’t Forget To Invite These Donors to Give Before December 31
Over the next 3 weeks, donors will be making far more charitable gifts than at any other time during the year. It is the season of giving – and donors respond. As you implement plans to encourage and remind donors to support your mission during this period of generosity, there is a group of donors…
The 5 Questions You Should Be Answering In Prospect Management Meetings
Prospect Management Team (PMT) meetings are often under-utilized as a major gifts program management tool and, sometimes, completely misunderstood. The purpose of PMT meetings is rather straightforward: to ensure that all major gift prospect managers within a unit, division, or institution are aware of the prospects with whom other prospect managers will soon be engaging….
The Intersection of Politics and Giving
The 2016 U.S. Presidential election is now behind us (although my Facebook feed would suggest otherwise). If we can remove the divisiveness from the election for just a moment and look at what the candidates proposed about charitable giving policy, we will see that neither of the major party candidates were focused on enacting tax…
A Giving Revival
A wonderful benefit of my work as a consultant is the opportunity I have to interview some of the wealthiest and most generous individuals in North America. I ask questions about their philanthropy – where they give, why they give, and how much they give. I listen to their life’s stories. And I attempt to…
It’s Lazy to Focus on “Working Harder”
You’ve heard it before. You may have said it yourself – to yourself or to others. You probably even believed it when you heard it or said it. And you may have thought it would motivate people toward better results. “We’ve just got to work harder.” In today’s world with tighter budgets and higher expectations,…
Responding to the Preemptive Gift
“Thanks for the lunch invitation. I appreciating you visiting with me,” the donor said. Before the gift officer could respond, the donor reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a check for $3,000. “And before I forget, I wanted to make sure I gave this to you,” he said. The gift was larger than…
The Value of Influence in a Post-Expertise World
One of the by-products of our digitally-connected age is the waning value of expertise. The growing understanding today is that the everyone’s right to express an opinion is synonymous with the notion that everyone’s opinion is equally informed. Medical doctors and research scientists have been publicly second-guessed by celebrities with influence but no medical training…
“How Many?” versus “How Deeply?”
For many institutions, the concept of “advancement performance metrics” can be boiled down to a collection of quantifiable goals that represent some number more than last year’s. For instance, you may have a metric for an increased number of $1,000 donors. Or, you may have a metric for an increased number of “moves,” or “visits”…