Thoughts on Nonprofit Leadership
Approximately 1.5 million U.S. nonprofits are vying for the attention necessary to raise the money they need. Many nonprofits struggle to be noticed in the fray. How do you get your agency to stand out in a crowd? How does your organization gain the visibility it needs to generate stronger...
Are you doing a lot of fundraising but still not making the kind of money you want? Maybe it’s because you’re focused on asking for money instead of asking to meet mission.
Keep Your Fundraising Focus on Squarely Your Agency’s Mission
Fundraising is not about getting...
We’ve narrowed it down to a small group of applicants. The proposals are all focused on meeting a mission that matches ours. They all present nicely and are written well, using proper grammar and no misspellings. The request is focused and cohesive. The narrative and the budget are...
Aah. Attracting new donors to your cause. You can always use new donors. The question is, “How do you stand out in a crowd and draw people to your cause who will give to your nonprofit?”
Target Specific Donor Groups
When nonprofits talk about their efforts to gain visibility, most of...
Is your board excited about fundraising? Probably not. They may think that fundraising and governance don’t have anything to do with one another. They may see fundraising as management’s responsibility, with their role only holding staff accountable for financial results. Or they may...
A nonprofit board has a fiscal duty to make sure that resources are raised and allocated to meet the organization’s missions. Often, however, boards have unrealistic expectations about how much money can actually be raised. They have no way of knowing, and thus planning for, how many...
I know what it’s like - sweating the finances – when not as much money is coming into your nonprofit when it was expected to come in. Government payments are delayed yet you are still expected to run the programs they fund. Grants were submitted later than anticipated. A major gift...
Crafting a budget is often then hardest part of grant writing. It was for me when I first started. I was a program developer, not an accountant. When accounting created the budgets, they had costs I didn’t recognize. And when I crafted them, accounting invariably added expense lines. Which...
Raising money doesn’t have to be complicated. The best fundraisers are volunteer ambassadors who talk about their agencies’ missions and mission impact. Not all dollars cost the same to raise though. To really know if you are making money, you need to measure net, not gross, income....
