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How well do you know your donors?
Or, more to the point, do they feel as if you know them?
I think of a story about President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. After he died, his body was transported by train through America. At one station, a reporter asked a man who was in tears if he knew President Roosevelt. And the grieving man said, “No, I didn’t know President Roosevelt. But he knew me.”
The quote above is a story Amy…
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Why sincere is better than clever
Why sincere is better than clever
We have all made mistakes.
That might be the most universally correct statement ever. (Or not!)
Admitting to them can be embarrassing. But it can also be educational. Today, I want to use early mistakes of mine to underline why we should avoid the temptation to be clever when we can be sincere instead.
At the very beginning of my fundraising career, I had a remarkable opportunity. I was…
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Your voice is needed! Donors and community: who's in the center?
Your voice is needed! Donors and community: who’s in the center?
Community centered or donor centered?
I attended a conference last week (thank you, Liberty Bank Foundation). The estimable and hysterical Vu Le offered the keynote address.
If you know Vu, you know we were holding our stomachs and behaving in otherwise undignified ways because we were laughing so hard. (If you don’t know Vu, get acquainted with his blog. You’ll thank me.)
But the humor was the…
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Beware these pitfalls if you want to raise more money
Beware these pitfalls if you want to raise more money
Indulge me, will you? There are some common words or phrases that I see in too many appeals (and annual reports or even thank you letters) that set my teeth on edge. You’ll find me, almost daily, sorting my mail and shaking my head. So here, for your amusement or education, are a few. “Give back to our organization” Nope. Nope. Nope. A donor never ever owes you anything. Do not let your…
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4 ways you might be making it all about you
4 ways you might be making it all about you
And why that’s a mistake We all do it from time to time. We fall a little in love with our own organization. Or we get a little tired of the hard work. Then we forget that good fundraising focuses on the donor and the mission. Are you making these mistakes? 1. You make decisions about donor stewardship based only on how much work something will take. I know. Fundraising isn’t easy work. So if you…
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How to address hard truths in the era of fake news
How to address hard truths in the era of fake news
Yes, this is still a piece about fundraising and nonprofits I watched the press conference wind to an end. At that point, the spokesperson uttered demonstrably incorrect words and walked away from the podium. Boom. The intent was obvious: my “facts” will trump your “fake news”. Obviously, our current situation is fraught with danger. But more to our point here, it presents problems for…
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Do you like me? You like me!
Do you like me? You like me!
Let me ask you something: do you really like your donors? I don’t mean as a group or as an idea. I mean as people. Do you like them? I recently read an article by Roger Dooley at Neuromarketing. He was writing, as he often does, about Robert Cialdini and his findings about sales. Your instinct may be to back away when I say “sales”. That’s not what we do, right? It is what we do, really. Just a…
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Love your donors? Why you need to care about keeping them
Love your donors? Why you need to care about keeping them
Recently, Tom Belford at The Agitator shared information from the latest Fundraising Effectiveness Project Survey Report. Two statements jumped out at me. Perhaps most striking is the performance difference in retention between the top 20% organizations, who lost on average 14.1% of their new donors, whereas the bottom 20% lost a whopping and unforgivable 68.3%. Who did the worst? The little…
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