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: Leadership
One Simple Way To Make Your Meetings More Productive
Workplace meetings are important. Studies show that collaboration in the workplace (meaning, when two or more people communicate to share ideas and achieve common goals) leads to all types of beneficial and excellent outcomes. From increased staff member retention to coming-up with more effective decisions, plans, and solutions, collaboration works. And while collaboration can happen…
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…
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”…
Customer or Community Member
If people talk about your institution as “being a community” (or words to that effect) and yet, you don’t consistently ask people to give of themselves and their resources, you are only talking about community, you don’t have community. Many institutions behave toward their constituents as if they were customers, not community members. Customers are…
The 3 Most Damaging Fund Raising Myths – Part III
Note: This post is part III of a series of III in which I identify 3 separate fund raising myths that make us less productive. The first installment in this series focused on the myth of donors giving only (or substantially more) for restricted purposes. The second post discussed the myth that case statements which focus…