Winter Wonderland Clairity Click-it: Nonprofit Links, Free Resources
This week I feel like letting you just dive right in to all the great content I’ve collected over the past two weeks. There are lots of eye-opening articles plus plenty of webinars and podcasts for you to enjoy.
[Okay, I do have a bit of Seth Godin wisdom to share, but this time it’s to be found below under “Articles/Events.” So, scroll down.]
As always, a big thank you to my sponsor, Bloomerang, for making it possible for me to spend the hours of time hunting, gathering and choosing the resources I believe will be most useful to you.
It is my sincere pleasure and honor to help you find the ideas, strategies, templates and tools you need to succeed.
Thank you for doing your vital work, and making our world a better place,
Claire
P.S. Please scroll down to see all my Clairification School sponsors who enable me to offer enrollment in ‘Clairification School at an affordable price [NOTE: If the enrollment fee is a hardship, please email me and we’ll work it out.]
P.P.S. If you’re an enrolled Clairification School student, your MARCH TIPS are live – and they include a BONUS this month! If you’re not yet enrolled, there’s no better time.
Clairity Click-it, Your Nonprofit Ticket to…
ARTICLES
Annual (Year-Round) Fundraising
Click-it: The Fundraiser’s Practical Guide to Older Donors: 3 Things You Need to Know. Jeff Brooks on the Moceanic blog reminds you that if you’re under age 50 you are not most of your donors. He then proceeds to offer a list of useful strategies for making sure your mature donors open, read and act on your appeals. It’s time to get inside donors’ heads and hearts!
Click-it: What my 102-yr-old stepdad taught me about donors. Condolences to Julie Cooper. Fundraising Writing, who recently lost her philanthropic stepdad. There’s important wisdom here, especially if you have a lot of mature donors.
Content Marketing
Click-it: Nonprofit Annual Report Photos — Everything You Need to Know. Sad or happy? Single individual or group? Stock or hired photographer? These are questions all nonprofit marketers wonder about, and Storyraise (formerly Yearly) has some answers. First and foremost, don’t make the images an afterthought. Images matter!
Click-it: Alt Text, and Captions, and Titles, Oh My!. I want to thank Ephraim Gopin for alerting me in his Daily Dose of Nonprofit to this terrific article from Kanopi Studios. Send it along to your marketing or website staffer. You should care about this if you want your copy to be ultimately readable and searchable.
Database
Click-it: 5 Ways Nonprofits Can Improve Data Quality and Insights. Hopefully you’ve got a database. But are you being smart about how you’re inputting, outputting and assuring the accuracy of your data? See what you should be considering in this article from Convergent Nonprofit Solutions.
Donor Advised Funds (DAFs)
Click-it: Solving the Challenges of Donor-Advised Funds. They’re today’s fastest growing area of charitable giving, so it’s smart to adopt a proactive strategy to secure more of this philanthropy. This article from Pursuant endeavors to help you do just that.
Events & Merchandise (Purchased Swag or Premiums)
Click-it: How to Boost Charitable Giving with Custom Merchandise. Branded swag is where fundraising and marketing meet each other. This article from Eventgroove explores the benefits of on-demand merch; how to create custom merch; how to add custom merch to your site; how to make the most of your ecommerce store, and how to leave a lasting impact on supporters. It’s a fun way to increase brand awareness and also incrementally boost donor engagement and lifetime value.
Click-it: How offering a book as a premium with a donation vs at retail price impacts conversion rate and overall revenue. NextAfter did an experiment, which presents a different option from the simple sale of merchandise suggested in the article above. What about offering the merchandise as a premium in exchange for a gift? They did this with one of their clients, and the treatment definitely outperformed the control. Here, the treatment resulted in a 92% increase in traffic and a 199% increase in revenue. Very interesting!
Click-it: Auction Fundraiser Sponsorships Make Money. I always tell folks sponsorships are where event money is made (or lost). This article from Auctria lays out all the steps involved, not just in finding and pitching sponsors, but also in nurturing them so they continue, increase and spread the word. If you’re running an event, neglecting the sponsorship aspect is fundraising malpractice (IMHO).
Click-it: The positive auction. I quote Seth Godin all the time, but rarely include a piece of his just as pure fundraising advice. This is the exception. Think about how you might make every bid a donation. It’s really fun! Plus, everyone walks away feeling good.
Major, Capital and Legacy Gift Fundraising
Click-it: The Case of the Bloated Caseload. Alas, this article from Richard Perry of the Veritus Group rings just as true today as a decade ago when it was written. Think about this, and use it to talk with your manager (or staff) about the time and resources really needed to build quality relationships with major gift donors. What can you do to improve your situation? If you don’t, you’ll spin your wheels. You’re only fooling yourself.
BTW: I you want to learn more, and get yourself out of this swampy situation, take a serious look at the major gifts certification course. I love this course so much, and want you to take advantage. So, use my exclusive Clairification Code – CA5 – to register and grab a nice discount! In fact, if you sign up for the cohort beginning April 22 at least a month ahead of time (i.e., by March 22nd), you’ll get an even huger discount. Feel free to email me if you have any questions.
Online and Mobile Fundraising and Marketing
Click-it: $600+ Average Donation Through Text to Give: How? Relationships. Learn about how Rally Corp uses texting to build donor relationships that result in above-average size donations.
Click-it: How to Increase Your Email Open Rate by 14%. That would be great, right? Well, apparently it’s possible. Steven Screen, the Better Fundraising Co., let’s us in on how this happened for one of his clients. You can do this too, and it’s really not that hard.
Click-it: Always Send Your Fundraising E-Mails in Flights. Joe Garecht suggests a strategy to boost your fundraising results. And if you’re worried it’s too much, you can follow his 3 – 1 fundraising rule.
Click-it: How to Improve Nonprofit Email Deliverability. With new rules for bulk senders coming down from Google and Yahoo this year, more non-profits are beginning to pay attention to a long overdue topic — email deliverability. Here, Vanessa Chase Lockshin, The Storytelling Nonprofit, delves into everything you should consider
Storytelling
Click-it: Why your brain loves stories. Just in case you’re still making the mistake of filling your appeals and newsletter copy with stats, not stories. Mary Cahalane, Hands-On Fundraising, offers a well-written synopsis of your brain on stories vs. data. Stories build trust and enhance empathy – two fundraising essentials.
Strategy, Management and Planning
Click-it: 3 Top Learning Strategies You Need To Change The World. With today’s rapid pace of change, confident learning has become critical to adapting, adopting, and feeling connected to the world we inhabit. How we learn is the foundation of our ability to succeed. In this guest post for the Bloomerang blog, I share three innovative learning strategies to help you get back to the days (as a child) when you learned fast. I’ve included practical tips to help you get started.
Technology: So Many Kinds of Digital Innovation
Click-it: 11 Time-saving AI Tools for Nonprofits. Momentum focuses on leveraging AI to help with major gifts development. They also know a lot, lot, lot about all sorts of AI tools that can help nonprofits. Check this out!
Click-it: Tech as a Sidekick for Nonprofits. If you don’t have anyone with current technology savvy on your team, this article from Cherian Koshy should give you pause. Alas, you can’t keep doing fundraising and nonprofit marketing the same way you did ten years ago.
Click-it: The Return of a Community-Centered Fundraising Model in a Digital-First World. Becca Gregory Segovia writes in the Chronicle of Philanthropy about how to use the donor vortex model (I first wrote about this in 2013) to treat donors as unique individuals (not lemmings marching up the donor pyramid). This is made easier with the emergence of new technologies that enable you to leverage intelligence to create more meaningful donor journeys.
Other Learning Opportunities
WEBINARS, PODCASTS, CONFERENCES & ON-DEMAND AUDIO RESOURCES
If you can’t attend live, or are interested in sessions happening at overlapping times, note many are available via recording – but ONLY if you REGISTER!
Annual (Year-Round) Fundraising
Click-it: Agents of Good Direct Mail Clinic [Sign up ASAP for free consultation]. This is an amazing opportunity! John Lepp, Agents of Good, is offering free 15-minute consultations on your direct mail appeals. If you’ll be at AFP ICON in Toronto you can meet face-to-face. If not, you can still sign up for a session NOW. I’d hurry, as slots are no doubt limited.
Content Marketing
Click-it: How to Create a Simple and Effective Nonprofit Content Calendar [Register for free webinar, 3-21-2024]. Branding and marketing expert Lidia Varesco Roma joins Keela for this session designed to help you develop a system to enhance brand awareness, create engagement, and foster trust through content marketing. You’ll also walk away with a content calendar template you can use right away.
Donor Retention
Click-it: Invested Donors: Cultivating Positive Relationships [Register for free session, 3-13-2024]. How well do you understand the nuances of donor relationships? From leveraging digital platforms to nurturing personal connections, this session will explore strategies to cultivate lasting bonds. Join hosts NXUnite and Double the Donation and their guests, Jay Finney, Susan Kahan, and Karen Houghton, for practical insights and lively discussions that could redefine your fundraising approach.
Online Social Fundraising and Marketing
Click-it: 5 Secrets of Email Marketing Geniuses [Register for free webinar, 3-13-2024]. Join Jay Wilks, a wonderful presenter from Firespring, to learn these fundamentals: 5 types of nonprofit emails; anatomy of an email marketing campaign; 6 email marketing mistakes to avoid, and 5 secrets of email marketing geniuses.
Click-it: Super Charge Your Social Fundraising [Sign up for this free event (the first in a series of eight, 3-14-2024]. If you think it’s no longer possible to raise money on social media, you’ll be pleasantly surprised to hear from this team of social fundraising experts, brought to you via GoodUnited. If you’ve been looking for a way to get to know and activate the social media followers you have, don’t miss this opportunity to learn proven tactics that have worked wonders for other organizations. Then borrow liberally!
Storytelling
Click-it: The Impact of Storytelling on Fundraising [Sign up for free session, 3-14-2024] I’ve invited the co-founders of Storyraise, Josh Kligman and Jeff Rum, to speak to the Clairification community next week! This session is designed to help you connect with donors on a deeper, emotional level. They’ll bring real-world examples, and the latest research, to illustrate how crafting authentic narratives can significantly enhance fundraising efforts. Effective storytelling must be more than just a buzz word. In today’s world, if you can’t truly connect with people you won’t be able to thrive.
YOU: Just for Fun
Click-it: Twelve Movies That Can Help Us See the Best in Humanity Enjoy these recommendations from the Greater Good Science Center. They’re stories about how people learn to see and care for themselves and each other. Hopefully these help you see what’s good in humanity—and perhaps even what’s good in yourself. Something we should all strive for.
DOWNLOADABLE GUIDES, PAPERS, TEMPLATES & OTHER RESOURCES
Events
Click-it: Event Planning Checklist [Download free resource]. Ensure nothing falls through the cracks! Donorbox and Nonprofit Hub have joined to bring you this comprehensive checklist consolidating all essential tasks and considerations in one convenient document.
Did You Miss My Newest Articles?
Here are links to the most recent articles on the Clairification blog. Remember, your goal is not simply to squeeze money out of people. It’s to give donors a squeeze and a hug for being caring and generous. This will make them feel good, which will move them to continue sticking with you.
Cheers to you, to impending Spring, and to renewal and growth!
Don’t Worry, Be Happy: Useful Life Advice for Nonprofit Fundraisers
Strategic Nonprofit Board Recruitment
How to Craft a Nonprofit Board Orientation Strategy
The Role of Artificial Intelligence in Major Gift Fundraising
Fundraiser Job Tips: How to Hire/Get Hired + Top Interview Questions
Borrow From Old MacDonald’s Farm to Interview for a Fundraising Job
PLUS… don’t forget this one that’s particularly on point for the times we’re in: Plan ‘Random(ish) Acts’ of Nonprofit Donor Kindness, Especially Now.
Finally… if you have a question, any question…
Check out my free fundraising advice column on the Bloomerang blog! Ask your question here. And bookmark the Ask an Expert page for any time you have a question! Here’s one: How To Recognize Tribute Gifts When The Donor Wishes To Remain Anonymous
REMINDER for Clairification School students: Don’t forget to log in to your “My Clairification/Subscriber Dashboard/Monthly Tips” to grab your exclusive, timely tips for each month. MARCH TIPS are live, and there’s a bonus this month too! If you’re not yet an enrolled student, and don’t have direct, immediate access to ALL my blog articles, monthly tips, webinars, podcasts and much more, you can get in on the fun here! Your support helps me to support you.
And now, some things I found on outside walls over the past weeks… plus a harbinger of Spring!
Yes, these rubber duckies have congregated in what they must have assumed was a small pond.
If you’re going to hang out your laundry, it may as well be colorful!
This is how you want your constituents to feel about you and your embracing community.
You can’t keep new life — or your new ideas — from emerging!
May you blossom and grow as you reach for the light.
And please support my extraordinary sponsors (see below). The Clairity Click-it content is free, and Clairification School is affordable, because of their generosity.
