Fundraising

If fundraising has a number one rule, it might be that your asks should be relevant. They should be relevant to the donor, connecting to issues they care about. It should be relevant to your mission, showing what the donation will help you accomplish. And it should be relevant to what’s happening, right now, in the world. Planning your big fundraising campaigns around calendar events (like, say, Giving Tuesday or December 31) makes this more challenging: it’s hard to plan timely content months in advance. But it used to be possible, in a broad sense, to predict what would be in the news come end-of-year fundraising season. What do we do now, when it feels impossible to predict what might be happening in the world tomorrow, much less in the next three months? When every day seems to bring a new crisis for almost every nonprofit’s work? How do you plan anything, much less a robust end-of-year fundraising campaign, when the entire world feels like it’s in chaos? None of this is easy, but the answer is not to do away with planning. In fact, the better you plan, the more prepared you’ll be to deal with that chaos – Read More

December is the most exciting — and stressful — time of the year for fundraisers: the time we call end-of-year fundraising. It’s a terrific opportunity to raise money, and for many organizations, it’s their biggest fundraising month by far. For such an important campaign, you can’t start planning too early (summer isn’t too soon), and you don’t want to miss out on activities that could have bumped up your results. This checklist will help you plan ahead and make sure you’ve covered all the facets of a powerful, integrated campaign.   Need a hand thinking through your year-end fundraising strategy, or want to take your campaign to the next level? Get in touch and let’s talk.

You probably don’t want to think about year-end fundraising right now. Here in DC, it was in the 90s this weekend, the sun is blazing, and November feels far away. But winter is coming, and now is the time to prepare. You’re no sweet summer child. You’ve seen year-end fundraising before, and you know that, however busy you are this summer, you’ll be busier come year-end. Anything you do now to set yourself up for stronger fundraising will help you succeed when it matters. And the good news is, like the farmers of Westeros socking away extra food, many of your fundraising preparations are things you should be doing anyway. They don’t even have to take away from your current work. Here are a few projects you could take on now to save yourself some pain when winter (and year-end) arrives: Tend your infrastructure Is your Google Analytics set up to track donations? Are you tracking conversions on Facebook ads? Do you have the data you’ll need in your CRM? Now is a great time (especially while your coworkers are on vacation) to make sure your systems are all talking to each other and that your data is being stored Read More