Giving is Good
Recognizing a need to do professional development better for advancement folk, my colleagues at Gonser Gerber recently launched a new division – the Gonser Gerber Institute. The mission of the Institute is “to make advancement professionals and teams more effective by delivering dynamic and innovative educational content.” The idea for the Institute came about because we were convinced that…
During campaign years institutions raise more money. The research is clear on this. A campaign focuses an institution and its donors on strategic priorities and gift income goals. During a successful campaign, the case for support is concisely articulated and the institution places an extraordinary level of energy on the discovery, cultivation, solicitation, and stewardship…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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?…
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…
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…
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…