Halloween Nonprofit Blog Carnival – Major Gifts Tricks and Treats

H E L P !!! I need major donors!

Fear not! The Nonprofit Blog Carnival is back, offering tricks and treats galore from nonprofit experts all around the web to help you find, cultivate, solicit and steward your major donors.

Pick a goodie or two from this great baker’s dozen. After all… it’s the season!

1. Let’s kick off our Halloween Carnival with this ‘majorly’ useful audio-post (just 5 minutes) from Vanessa Chase: A Less Scary Approach to Major Gifts Prospecting tells you how to find major gifts prospects hiding in plain sight; then what to do when you find them.
2. BOOst Your Major Gift Asks With Planned Gifts. Tony Martignetti of Nonprofit Radio fame reminds us that you may get more in the long run if you ask for your major gift with a little planned gift on the side (Tony gets a High Five for holiday spirit!).
3. Need a major gifts 101 primer? Cindi Phallen of Create Possibility offers up How to Get and Keep Major Donors  (and also gets a spirit High Five).
4. Want to have too many major donors? The fabulous wild woman of fundraising, Mazarine Treyz, provides this reminder that many of your major donors are seniors – and there’s a special way to talk – and listen — to them.
5. Joe Garecht at Fundraising Authority offers 4 Keys to Building Relationships with Major Donors so they don’t fade away and become ghosts.
6. Major Gifts from Major Donors is Major Fun, from Dani Robbins of Nonprofit Evolution, offers a practical, step-by-step guide to finding, cultivating, asking and stewarding major donors. Nothing creepy about it. Brass tacks baby!
7. From sweet to scary, Halloween tales like It’s the Great Pumpkin Charlie Brown and The Headless Horseman compel our attention. In President Obama Would Likely Make a Good Grant Writer, as He Recognizes the Value of Telling a Compelling Story, Isaac and Jake Seliger of Grant Writing Confidential remind us of the power of storytelling to influence philanthropy, even when your major donor prospect is a foundation. Think about becoming the “Storyteller-in-Chief” for your organization. I bet you’ll go far!
8. Please Treat me Like a Major Donor is a grim reaper reminder that you never really know who your major donors may be. You have hints, of course. But it’s your job to follow up and find out more — as Joanne Fritz of About.com Nonprofits (and Carnival organizer majordomo!) tells us in this article.
9. How to Thank Your Donors: Stop Focusing on the Money! comes from major gifts guru Amy Eisenstein. It’s a great sequel to Joanne’s post, above, and includes a practical stewardship plan to keep, and upgrade, your important supporters over time.  I predict you’ll be goblin this useful post up!
10. A recipe for securing major gifts is not about making stale popcorn balls. It’s about great personal donor stewardship, and comes from Erik Anderson of Donor Dreams Blog.
11. Big thanks to Ron Resigno of Marketing Connections for hopping into the Carnival for the first time with Look within for Major Donors and Prospects — a  primer on where to find major donor prospects. Hint: You don’t have to go running around in a spooky forest! Begin with the warm glow of your hearth and home – the smiling jack-o-lantern faces you’ll see are likely in your own database.
12. What? You say you Can’t Afford a Major Gift Program? Richard Perry and Jeff Schreifels of the Veritus Group show us how you can’t afford not to have one. Status quo and fall further behind, or find a way forward? Witch will it be?
13. And lucky 13, Craig Linton of The Fundraising Detective has gone into the SOFII crypt — and a newspaper ad in Belgium — to find Three major donor appeals & thank you’s to learn from.

Next month’s Carnival will be hosted by Pamela Grow, and she’s picked a great topic:. Check out her call for submissions – and, if you’re not yet on the list, sign up to get monthly reminders about each topic.

Photos: Flickr, Highway6