Jo

Pencil, notepad, and crumpled pages

Planning for End-of-Year Fundraising in Unpredictable Times

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

Insights from the Digital Summit

This week I attended the Digital Summit, a digital marketing conference that draws participants from across many sectors. Because I work almost exclusively with non-profits, and most of the events I attend are nonprofit-focused, I find it energizing and often fascinating to attend conferences where many of the participants are from large companies and agencies. It can provide interesting insights to see what the “big brands” are thinking about: some of which is new for the nonprofit sector, too, and some of which isn’t relevant to our work… and some of which we’ve already been doing for a long, long time. Here are a few of my top takeaways from this year’s Digital Summit in DC: Content Marketing: Companies are talking about how to create authentic, meaningful content that connects with their target audiences. Nonprofits have a leg up here, since our content has built-in meaning, but it’s still important to keep our audiences’ priorities in mind. Just because our work is critically important doesn’t mean it feels relevant to people’s lives. If we want people to engage in our campaigns, it’s our job to make them relevant – to make people care. Audience Research: We tend to assume we Read More