Jun112020

How Yucky Email Addresses – and Inhumanity — Hurt Your Nonprofit

Robotic_dinosaur_with_face_mask_-_Art_in_the_VoidThese days you’re likely communicating with constituents digitally more than ever before.

That’s terrific, but… I want you to remember one important thing, especially if you’re a small to medium-sized, local nonprofit.

Philanthropy, translated from the Greek, literally means ‘love of humanity.’

Whatever you do that gets in the way of your humanity?

Stop doing it!

I really mean it.

Why?

PEOPLE GIVE TO PEOPLE

Sure, sometimes the ‘cause’ alone is enough to drive donations. But generally this holds true only for first-time gifts, emergency response gifts, and gifts to national and international charities with large name recognition. Even in these cases, repeat gifts and major gifts are driven by human interaction.

When it comes to your current supporter base, they tend to want to engage with real human beings.

Want to know what’s not a real human being?

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1 CommentOnline Fundraising
Jun22020

REVEALED: Best Strategic Advice to Raise Money for Your Nonprofit, Crisis or Not

2020-05-31 16.07.25Is there a best way to raise money?

That question is really at the heart of what most nonprofits want to know.

And recently I was reminded of this when asked a question for a Virtual Summit for Nonprofit Changemakers in which I’m participating in the early Fall. [There will be a ton of useful content presented in this online conference – by 20 of well-respected experts over two days – so please check it out.]

Here’s what I was asked:

What is the best advice you can give to a fundraiser… and does it hold true in times of crisis?

I thought about this long and hard. Because I’ve lots and lots of advice!

But… my best advice?  Hmmn…

And then it came to me.

I recalled a favorite quote.

“If I had an hour to solve a problem I’d spend fifty-five minutes thinking about the problem and five minutes thinking about the solution.”

— Albert Einstein

That’s the advice!

You see, one can’t really pick a best fundraising strategy without first fully describing the reason money is not already flowing in. In other words…

You must identify and define your problem before attempting to solve it.

The time you spend doing so will be well spent. And when it comes to fundraising, worth its weight in gold.

I like to go through an iterative process of asking why, why, why, why…. until I’ve exhausted every question. It looks something like this:

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