Winter Wonderland Clairity Click-it: Nonprofit Links, Free Resources
Here’s another spring bouquet of free resources for you to enjoy. It continues to be my great pleasure to curate content for you across the web – all with the goal of helping you in your quest to facilitate passionate philanthropy. This year’s Click-it comes to you for free due to the generous sponsorship of Bloomerang. Please check them out and send them a “huzzah!”
I’ve got lots more wisdom to share, and hope you’ll take advantage this year. Clairification School gives you a full year of strategic advice! Articles, free webinars, monthly tips and more. If you’re on the fence about enrolling, see what others say about why they’ve joined.
Enjoy, and may you go from strength to strength,
P.S. I’m also available for hourly coaching. Just email me if you’d like to explore this, or set up a 15-minute time to chat here.
Clairity Click-it, Your Nonprofit Ticket to…
Annual Giving
Click-it: Your Volunteers Love You: Why Not Ask Them to Give? The team at Front Range Source explain why you should be asking your volunteers to give. It’s the donor-centered thing to do!
Data Integrity
Click-it: Premature Exoneration. What’s your system for dealing with bad addresses and deceased donors? If you’re not sure, you owe it to your organization to read this piece by Roger Craver on the Agitator-Donor Voice blog (with a shout-out to T.Clay Buck). It’s an eye-opener.
Events
Click-it: Nonprofit Gala Events Worth Everyone’s Money – Part 1. I have a two-parter on Bloomerang this month (here’s Part 2), designed to help you maximize your event investment. Here, I focus particularly on Galas. They’re one of the most successful types of events, as they can help you accomplish multiple objectives. As long as you know where you want to go, and develop/execute a plan to get there!
Grants
Click-it: Why Your Grant Program Needs a Major Gifts’ Mindset. Katie Patrykus offers her view on a communication chasm between nonprofits and foundations and makes suggestions to leverage gifts from foundations, family foundations and donor advised fund.
Major and Legacy Gifts
Click-it: How to understand your donor’s consideration process so you generate more major gifts. This is an excellent, meaty piece by Greg Warner of Market Smart that will help you think about what messages you might send to prospective donors in the highly-considered, high-dollar category of decision-making. You must start with WHY they should support you, before you can get to HOW.
Click-it: Interview With Penelope Burk: How Are Major Donors Changing Today? Check out this super-informative interview, conducted by Gail Perry and published on the AFP website. Major donors are becoming increasingly independent, finding what they need to know about you on their own rather than meeting with you personally. What might this mean for your comprehensive fundraising/marketing efforts?
Online Social Marketing and Fundraising
Click-it: Creating Communities With a Purpose. Craig Linton offers an intriguing perspective about marketing on the Agitator-Donor Voice blog. In today’s highly networked environment charities compete with for-profit businesses in the race to bring meaning to people’s lives. How is your organization addressing this reality?
Click-it: Tips for Cultivating a Killer Online Presence. Now more than ever, customers rely on your online presence to understand who you are, how you can help and if you’re the best for the job at hand. That means a robust presence online embodying your brand’s authentic voice and mission is crucial to staying top-of-mind and increasing engagement with your community. The digital experts at Firespring offer some super useful tips!
Click-it: 10 ways your nonprofit should be using Twitter. If you’re struggling with ways your nonprofit can use Twitter to create brand awareness and engagement, Ronald Pruitt of 4aGoodCause has 10 nonprofit Twitter ideas for you to stick into your marketing and communications plan for the remainder of the year.
Trends
Click-it: 5G: Making the Most of Mobility and the Coming Revolution. If you’re a cutting edge type, and like to think ahead, this article on the Top Nonprofits blog will be right up your alley.
Your Clairification Insight
Click-it: The true cost of customer response. Check out this piece by Seth Godin. In your mind, retitle it as “The true cost of poor donor service.” It’s spot on. One cranky receptionist… one tired volunteer coordinator… one overworked program manager… all can undermine a year’s worth of work by the development team. Culture is an organization-wide calculation.
FREE AUDIO-VISUAL LEARNING OPPORTUNITIES
The more you learn, the more you grow.
Finding webinars you’d like to attend that overlap? Note that for many of these webinars you can obtain a copy of the recording if you’re unable to join live – as long as you register!
Grant Writing
Click-it: Shaping Your Ask: Learning to Love (or at least Live With) Restricted Revenue [Register for free webinar, 5-16-2019]. Nonprofit Quarterly will explore how the latest changes in accounting standards for revenue recognition can be used to develop more effective grant proposal narratives and budgets. Register if you want to craft grant proposals that bring in the most flexible funding possible.
Management and Strategy
Click-it: How to Do a Strategic Self-Audit of Nonprofit Strengths & Weaknesses [Register for free webinar, 5-22-2019]. Join me and Bloomerang, and bring your questions. I’ll walk you through the steps of conducting your own internal audit of your strengths and weaknesses, while also considering opportunities and threats on the horizon that may impact your choice of strategic direction.
Online Social Fundraising and Marketing
Click-it: Winning Grassroots Campaigns with Multi-Channel Advocacy [Register for free webinar, 5-2-2019]. Multi-channel advocacy campaigns can significantly increase your organization’s supporters and engagement. This session from Salsa will offer techniques, tools and actionable ideas you can put into immediate practice.
Click-it: Fundraise Like Netflix: Engaging Donors in a Subscription-Driven World [Register for free virtual conference, 5-8-2019. Network for Good presents this 4-hour, multi-presenter event focusing on the changing charitable giving environment, how it’s being impacted by technology, and what nonprofits can do to harness these changes.
Trends
Click-it: 5 Hot Nonprofit Tech Trends for 2019 [View video]. Check out these quick 2019 Nonprofit Technology Conference highlights from Give Lively, a philanthropist-founded tech company that builds best-in-class fundraising tech for nonprofits at no cost.
Your Clairification Insights
Click-it: Amanda Palmer on the Art of Asking and What Thoreau Teaches Us about Accepting Love. This is an amazing, profound article on giving and receiving, seeing and being seen. You are bound to find something useful here, no matter where you are in life, love and career. Read the article by Maria Popova, courtesy of Brain Pickings, or the book by Amanda Palmer, or watch the video interview with them both. Enjoy and reflect.
FREE DOWNLOADABLE MATERIALS
Annual Giving
Click-it: Pre-Written Matching Gifts Articles [Free download]. Matching gifts can hugely amplify the value of any given donor’s gift to you. Are you actively promoting them? The good folks at Double the Donation are offering these free articles for you to use in your communications.
Donor Retention
Click-it: New Donors: You Need Them More Than They Need You [Download free white paper]. Amy Bobrick of Merkle RMG takes a look at the critical need to develop systems that embrace the reality that ‘lifetime donor value’ matters if you want sustainable fundraising. This means moving from transactional acquisition to transformational retention (you can read Amy’s intro to the paper here.
Online Fundraising and Marketing
Click-it: Attract, Educate and Convert Donors through Digital Marketing [Download free Digital Marketing Handbook]. Everyone today is online. Are you reaching them effectively? 67% of a donor’s decision-making is done online. Lots of tips here from the good folks at The Stelter Company.
Peer to Peer
Click-it: Peer-to-Peer Participant Toolkits. Want to create stronger volunteer and donor advocates? The experts at Qgiv discuss strategies to prepare your peer-to-peer fundraisers before your event starts.
Research
Click-it: 23 Fundraising & Marketing Reports for Nonprofit Professionals Worldwide [Download free reports]. Here’s a wealth of data you can use to inform your planning efforts. Great data to share with your board and other “powers that be” to justify the direction you want to go in. Thanks to Nonprofit Tech for Good for curating/sharing!
Did You Miss My Recent Articles?
Here are links to my most recent articles.
- To Be or Not to Be: What Goes in This Year’s Nonprofit Work Plan?
- If Your Nonprofit Disappeared, Would People Sing Hymns?
- NEW Feature: Fundraising Do’s and Don’ts — Spring Email Appeal
- How to Choose the Most Effective Fundraising ‘Ask’ Words
- How to Calm ‘Busy’ Nonprofit Overwhelm Syndrome
- 6 Strategies to Stop Killing Nonprofit Innovation!
If you find value in Clairification, your support via enrollment in Clairification School is a blessing. You’ll be able to read every single article I’ve ever written, plus you’ll get access to all my webinars, monthly tips, bonuses and more. I promise to pay it back, and continue to offer lots of specific advice to help you raise greater awareness, more volunteerism and passionate philanthropy.
My motto is: “If I know it, I want you to know it.”
