Whenever I am working with a nonprofit looking to increase their fundraising revenue, I get asked, “How do I get new people to give to my nonprofit? Where do I find new donors?” Good questions. The answers lie in your focus on mission, your planning, taking advantage of all your community connect...

To effectively communicate with donors, you need to engage them first. c It’s a relationship. It’s a two-way street. To be a successful relationship, each party will give and get something as a result of the interaction. You want them to listen and respond to your request. If you want them to lis...

by Linda Lysakowski, ACFRE When I first entered the wonderful world of philanthropy back in the dark ages (before email, can you believe that?), I was amazed when I found out this was actually a career and that large organizations had staffs of dozens of fundraisers. But when I started my consul...

In any one day, a nonprofit executive director’s duties can include managing operations; satisfying funders and donors; informing and inspiring board, staff and volunteers; listening to clients; communicating your mission and accomplishments to the public; assessing community needs; collaborating...

In the series Building Donor Relationships we’ve talked about building relationships with individuals and foundations. In the third part of the series, we address building donor relationships with corporations. Corporate Motivations for Giving Like individuals and foundations, relationships wit...

How can you get community businesses to pay attention to you? Help them meet their goals. Know what their goals are: increasing visibility, acquiring customers, keeping customers, and reducing costs. What are the types of things you can do to help them meet those goals? Improving Their Visibilit...

In Creating Awareness in the Business Community we talked about how you can raise your nonprofit’s visibility to the business community. In Helping Business Professionals Meet Their Goals we discussed ways you can help meet their marketing and net income goals, on which they spend millions of dol...

In Measuring Overall Fundraising Performance we talked about the two factors that you can influence to bring in the most money: the amount of dollars raised and the number of people giving. Today, we are going to go into more depth about how to influence more people to give and how to influence c...

In Measuring Your Marketing Endeavors, we talked about how fundraising and marketing are both similar to and different from one another. Today, we continue to borrow from the field marketing, with a twist. We borrow the concepts of the customer journey and customer experience, revising them to re...

When a company is trying to realize more revenues from sales, there are two factors that affect the outcome: price and volume. To make more money, either more people will buy the product, or people will pay more for the product, or some combination of the two. The same principle applies in fundra...