If your goal is to increase the amount of gift income you receive, you can: Ask new prospective donors to give for the first time; Ask past donors to give again; Ask current donors to give more. Those, really, are the only methods (or some combination of these 3) to increase gift income. Developing plans…
Tag: #development
The Day-Trading Boss
If you haven’t yet worked for him or her, you probably will at some point. He’s the VP who focuses more on metrics than on the relationships and processes the metrics are there to measure. She’s the President who wants to know why gift officers aren’t asking for major gifts during a first meeting. Day-traders…
3 Ways to Market Giving
“Marketing,” to an advancement professional almost always refers to the marketing of their institution’s programs and services. You market what you do. Or more importantly, the impact of what you do. You market your mission as a way to communicate the rightness and goodness of people giving in support of your institution’s efforts and outcomes. …
You Are Not A Fundraiser
How do you respond when someone asks about your profession – what you do for a living? While it can be tempting to offer a knee-jerk and readily-understood response such as, “I’m a fundraiser,” please don’t. Ever again. For the sake of our authentically-transforming work, just don’t. Fundraising is the transactional, point-in-time act of donating. …
Every Donor Is An Exception
Over the last few years, I’ve taken to explaining the purpose of donor and prospect management as the “management of exceptions.” By that phrase, I simply mean that all major donors and major donor prospects are “exceptions” to any conceivable universal rule one might use to engage them as a group. Each of these identified…
3 Ways Social Technologies Are Failing Development Efforts
I’ll start this post by professing that I am neither a technological luddite nor hypocrite. I value and gladly utilize technology – in all its forms. Heck, I’m communicating with you via a distributed, social technology that makes our large world wonderfully and magically small. Technologies, especially social technologies, such as social media, wikis, blogs,…
The Gift and The Giver
It’s easy to focus on “the gift.” What is the amount we are seeking? For what purpose? Over what period of time? We talk about the gift in strategy sessions, when we ask for it, and when we receive it – especially when we receive one of significance! We write proposals that answer the questions…
What They Will Do
Far too often I witness strategy discussions about major gift donors and prospects that leap too quickly to observations focused on what a particular donor “will do,” in terms of his or her gift amount. The conversation plays out something like this. The Associate Vice President (or whoever supervises the Major Gift Officer) asks in…
“Whatever Makes You Feel Good”
In all the years I’ve flown through Denver airport, I can’t recall ever having my shoes shined there. Earlier this week, though, I had a long layover and realized that my scruffy dress shoes were in desperate need of help. As I waited my turn at one of the chairs, I looked around but…