Thoughts on Nonprofit Leadership

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...

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...

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...

As we said in Measuring Overall Fundraising Performance, net income is a better indicator of monies raised than gross income. Net income takes into account the costs associated with raising the funds while gross income doesn’t. You can increase net income by either increasing your revenues...

Fundraising and marketing are similar to each other in many ways. Fundraising is concerned about building donor relationships that result in charitable contributions. Marketing is about building customer relationships that result in sales. Both are concerned with the interactions that result in...

Data collection may not be the most exciting part of fundraising but gathering and analyzing it is crucial to fundraising success. Data is used in budgeting, evaluating, goal setting, benchmarking, and problem solving. It is data that tells us what is going well and what isn’t – and...

In my blog Building Donor Relationships: Individuals, we talked about how to approach and retain individual donors. This blog will address how to build foundation relationships, shore up your foundation fundraising strategy and get more donations from foundations.

Approaching Foundations

Like...

We’ve previously discussed building relationships with individual donors, foundations, and corporations. We now turn our attention to building relationships with government funders.

Let’s start with what’s the same.

Just like with other types of donors, a relationship with a...

Grant funding is a crucial part of many nonprofits’ fundraising strategies. According to the Fundraising Effectiveness Project, 18 percent of all charitable giving is given through foundations. Foundation also tend to give bigger gift amounts than many individuals, often in the $5,000 to a...