Thoughts on Nonprofit Leadership

What Businesses Want corporate giving

Probably the biggest principle to remember about developing relationships with for-profit businesses, is that you are entering into an exchange relationship where both parties give and get something of value. It’s a two way-relationship. That is, you give to them and they give to you. You...

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Evaluating the Success of Your Nonprofit Fundraising Events: Income, Impact, Costs and Benefits evaluation fundraising special events

Golfers have golfed, walkers have walked, dinners have been eaten, awards have been bestowed. How did your agency’s fundraising events fare? Did your events spread your organization’s mission, or did the events just raise funds? Did you raise a lot of money? Really? At what cost,...

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Data That Tells You How Effective You Are With Your Donors evaluation financial management fundraising

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...

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Evaluating the Efficacy of Your Fundraising Processes evaluation fundraising

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...

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Measuring Overall Fundraising Performance evaluation financial management fundraising

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...

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Measuring Your Fundraising Costs evaluation financial management fundraising

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...

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Measuring Your Marketing Endeavors evaluation fundraising marketing and communications

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...

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You Have to Measure Data Too evaluation fundraising

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...

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Building Donor Relationships: Foundations grant writing relationship building

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

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