Winter Wonderland Clairity Click-it: Nonprofit Links, Free Resources
When’s the last time you sat down and were thoughtful about prioritizing your agenda?
Spring is an excellent time for new beginnings, and I have just the inspiration you need to provoke your thinking, not just about your own work but also about how to inspire donors to include your cause on their action plan for the coming year.
From Jobs to be done
We can measure our performance (and our days) by how well we’re doing the jobs to be done. They focus our attention and our effort and create positive outcomes when we do them on time (and negative ones when we don’t).
12 or more years of school are nothing but this. Training in awareness of jobs to be done, and applying the minimum amount of effort to get those jobs done. Show me your list of jobs to be done and I’ll have a good idea of how you spend your time and the impact you’re making.
Easily overlooked, though, is the process of how something gets on our agenda or doesn’t. Working on voting rights, paying attention to voices unheard, grabbing possibilities for learning or growth or contribution–these are easy to ignore if they’re not on the list of jobs to be done.
And the people who do have these on their list… part of their job is to put their issue on our lists.
As soon as you sign up for a social network, it becomes a job to be done. And the moment you take investment for a new company, your jobs to be done completely change.
This gets meta pretty quick: one of the jobs to be done is to be clear about what the jobs to be done are, and whether or not they are the right jobs.
And another one of the jobs to be done is helping other people see that the things we care about belong on their list of jobs to be done.
If all you’re doing is the jobs you used to do, you’re certainly missing out on the contributions you’re capable of.”
— Seth Godin
To help you become even more capable in the contributions you make, I’m happy to present this edition of free resources for you to enjoy. This year’s Click-it comes to you for free due to the generous sponsorship of Bloomerang. I am so grateful, as 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.
I’ve got lots more wisdom to share, and hope you’ll take advantage this year. Clairification School gives you a full 12 months of strategic advice! Articles, free webinars, monthly tips, bonuses 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,
Claire
P.S. Please check out all my 2021 sponsors (below) who make enrollment in ‘Clairification School’ so beneficial. I dare you not to raise a quick extra $100 — and much more — after digging into all the resources that will come your way. You get in-depth, actionable articles, webinars, monthly tips, bonuses and more. Plus you’ll build saleable skills to keep you in demand. My amazing, carefully-selected, highly recommended sponsors (scroll to the bottom) help to underwrite costs, so it’s not $800 – $1,000 like programs you’ll find elsewhere. Just $8.33/month.
Clairity Click-it, Your Nonprofit Ticket to…
SPECIAL CATEGORY: Tips for Not-So-Normal Times
ARTICLES
Annual (Year-Round) Fundraising
Click-it: 8 Incredible Tips to Ask for Donations in Person. Venturing back to do some in-person fundraising? The phone and zoom are great when there’s no alternative, but when it’s safe there’s nothing like meeting in the real world. Abby Jarvis of Qgiv has some great tips to remind you how it’s done.
Culture
Click-it: Diversity Is Not Enough in Fundraising Offices. This comprehensive piece in Chronicle of Philanthropy follows Ticely William’s nonprofit career, demonstrating what it takes to become a truly anti-racist, inclusive organization. Alas, making sure people feel included and nurturing a sense of belonging require a level of intention most haven’t mustered. Is that you? See what you can do to turn things around.
Click-it: You Have The Power to Change Philanthropy. Nell Edgington, Social Velocity, discusses how to move beyond scarcity thinking to lead philanthropic change. She talks about moving from complaint to active commitment by articulating solutions, using data and case studies to back up your vision, being bold about what you want to change, and gathering allies to lead the way forward.
WEBINARS, ROUNDTABLES & ON-DEMAND AUDIO RESOURCES
If you can’t attend live, note many are available via recording – but ONLY if you REGISTER!
Annual (Year-Round) Fundraising
Click-it: Cut Costs and Get Creative in Crisis Mode with Nonprofit Appeals [Register for free webinar, 4-21-2021]. Still in crisis mode? Join Firespring to learn how to invigorate your direct mail, maximize impact and even cut printing and mailing costs in these resource-strapped times.
Culture of Philanthropy
Click-it: Becoming a Social Prophet. Joan Garry, Nonprofits are Messy, hosts Lynne Twist, global visionary and author of “The Soul of Money,” for a conversation about why people who work for and with social benefit organizations (don’t call them by what they’re not, aka “nonprofits”) are all “social prophets,” including donors. Together, they imagine the future. It’s an inspiring listen – all about abundance, not scarcity. About becoming a “pro-activist” – tapping into heart rather than hurt — working from a place of for, not against.
Major and Legacy Giving
Click-it: The Upside for Planned Giving in a Pandemic and Beyond [Register for free webinar, 4-28-2021]. The good folks at Stelter host Brantley Boyett, Giving Docs, to examine the science behind what happens when we are faced with our own mortality, the effect it has on estate planning, and how gift planning professionals can take action to amplify their results based on this new reality.
Trends
Click-it: Outlook for Charitable Giving [Listen to on-demand podcast]. Early indicators show charitable giving was up in 2020 in response to the coronavirus pandemic. Projections for giving in 2021 and 2022 are even rosier. Learn what to anticipate, and plan for, in this “Fresh Research” podcast from the Nonprofit Times.
DOWNLOADABLE GUIDES, WHITE PAPERS & OTHER RESOURCES
Board Development
Click-it: Why Nonprofit Board Diversity Matters: A Q&A [Download free e-guide]. How can you improve board diversity? And why does it sometimes fail? These questions and more are answered in this guide from Boardable. They’re great questions for discussion at your next board meeting.
Other Articles: The Beat Goes On
Annual (Year-Round) Fundraising
Click-it: Of Course You Can Ask Too Much (but you almost certainly aren’t) .This is so good, so useful, so practical – read it! It’s from Steven Screen, the Better Fundraising Co. Seriously, read it. You’ll be able to raise more money almost immediately.
Click-it: Non-Obvious Fundraising Design Tips (& My “Unboxing” Video). This includes useful tips about writing and design from Julie Cooper on the Fundraising Players blog. You can also watch her open and evaluate a fundraising pack on YouTube here. Fun!
Click-it: How to convert your nonprofit donors into recurring regular givers. Robin Cabral says in Australia they consider recurring giving “regular giving.” That makes a lot of sense given the fact monthly donors renew at 80 – 90% vs. one-off donors at just 43%. Want to make it more the norm for your nonprofit. Read this article on the Development Consulting Solutions blog.
Content Marketing
Click-it: Using the ‘Story of One’ to convert donors on your blog. The “Story of One” is an evergreen principle to keep in mind for all your fundraising and nonprofit messaging. Stories inspire; data repels. Ron Pruitt of 4aGoodCause explains.
Click-it: Where to Focus Your Efforts for Customer Experience Transformation. I love to borrow wisdom from other disciplines and this advice (and research) comes from Merkle’s experience with commercial marketing (they’re also experienced with nonprofit marketing). Every time you read the phrase “customer experience” in the article, simply think “donor experience.” It turns out having access to first-party data is foundationally important. Also, the way you do content marketing – holistically or in siloes – matters a lot. You have only one brand, and that’s your donor’s experience of you. They don’t care which department the message comes from. They do care if the messaging is muddy, confusing or inconsistent.
Corporate Fundraising
Click-it: Corporate Donor Love. Heather Nelson of BridgeRaise teaches you how to connect with corporate donors by being human, relational and adding value. Donor love is not just for individuals.
Donor Retention
Click-it: 3 Steps to Mastering Your Donor Journey. Whether supporters stick with you or not depends a lot on how you engage them in a meaningful way on the medium they prefer. This article from Rally Corp explores the steps of the donor journey, suggesting ways to motivate donors not only to give but to also become ambassadors for your cause.
Major and Legacy Gifts
Click-it: Donor Decreases Giving – What Do You Say? The major gifts experts at the Veritus Group suggest resisting the temptation to blurt out: “What did we do wrong?” Start elsewhere. Begin with gratitude. Be kind, and confidently curious as you tease out what may be going on for them. This is a great approach. Check it out!
Click-it: Who Gets to Be in Your Nonprofit’s Major Donor Portfolio? When you’re determining who to cultivate for your major donor portfolio, do you simply look at everyone who gave more than $1,000 (or whatever your major gift amount is) and dump them all into your portfolio for the year? There’s a better way. Check it out in my article for the Bloomerang blog.
Click-it: Exploring Gifts of Life Insurance. It’s helpful to know about simple ways donors can make larger gifts than they might otherwise have considered from their income by considering giving from their assets. Life insurance is a largely overlooked giving vehicle. Here Ligia Pena describes all the ins and outs on her Globetrotting Fundraiser blog.
Online Fundraising and Marketing
Click-it: Your Roadmap to Google Ad Grant Success. Happened on this gem from Mary Gross, Advertise My Nonprofit, and she explains how to access and use your free $10K (each month!) account, how to select key words, how to write ads, how to leverage Google Analytics, and how to boost that free account by adding a paid one.
Psychology of Giving
Click-it: So you want to change the world. This is a topic I write about a lot, and I like the way Mary Cahalane of Hands-On Fundraising writes about it here. It’s important to understand how human beings are wired if you want to persuade them to take your desired actions (e.g., volunteering, advocating, donating). Working with people is so much better than lecturing and working against them.
Website
Click-it: Digital Fundraising: 9 Common Mistakes to Fix Yesterday. Now is a great time to fix your website to make it easier, and more compelling, to give. Don’t wait until fall or end-of-year when you’ll be too busy to think straight. Check out these tips from the Wired Impact blog.
Other Learning Opportunities
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!
Donor Retention
Click-it: Avoid These All-Too-Common Nonprofit Thank-You Mistakes [Register for free webinar, 4-22-2021]. Want some help thinking through your donor acknowledgement process? Then join me, courtesy of Firespring, for a live session where I’ll offer lots of actionable tips to help you turn gratitude into an effective donor retention and upgrading strategy.
Major and Legacy Gifts
Click-it: Gen X: 3 fundraising strategies for the Latchkey generation [Register for free webinar, 4-20-2021]. Gen X makes up 20% of all dollars given — twice as much as Millennials. As Gen X gets older, accumulates more wealth, and plans their estates, nonprofit professionals in planned and major giving have a huge opportunity to engage them in their work. Join Patrick Schmitt, Co-CEO of FreeWill, to explore trends and motivations shaping their giving.
Click-it: Finding the Hidden Problem in Your Major Gift Program [Register for free webinar, 4-22-2021]. In major gift donor files all over the country, non-profit organizations are losing hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars each year to donor and donor value attrition. And they don’t even know it. Join Jeff Schreifels of Veritus Group as he explains the problem, and how to avoid it.
Psychology of Giving
Click-it: Who Are Social Donors? This article from OneCause offers a way to segment your donors you may not have thought about. It’s a reminder wealth and giving history are not the only ways to prioritize with whom you should build relationships. There are other frameworks well worth consideration!
Website
Click-it: How to Create a Donation Page that Converts Visitors into Donors [Listen to on-demand podcast]. Join Tim Kachuriak of NextAfter with Mike Duerkson on the BuildGood podcast to stop losing valuable donors who are abandoning you before they make a gift. Learn what an ideal donation page looks like top to bottom — based on extensive research, testing, and optimizing with some of the biggest nonprofits out there.
DOWNLOADABLE GUIDES, WHITE PAPERS & OTHER RESOURCES
Online Fundraising and Marketing
Click-it: Digital Marketing for the Modern Nonprofit [Download free e-guide]. In this comprehensive guide from Flipcause, you’ll find best practices for content marketing and blogging, email marketing and pay-per-click advertising, and how to tie it all together with a strategy that bolsters your fundraising efforts.
Click-it: 5 Online Fundraising Habits to Quit in 2021 [Download free e-guide]. This is the perfect time to reflect on your online fundraising from last year and figure out where to make improvements. This free book from NextAfter will help you identify where you may be going wrong. The changes you need to make are shockingly easy!
Did You Miss My Newest Articles?
Happy Spring!
Here are links to the most recent articles on the Clairification blog. I think you’ll find these either thought-provoking, practical or both. Hope so!
- The Real Skinny on Nonprofit Donor Thank You’s
- Why Aren’t Nonprofits Retaining More Donors?
- How Not to Ask for a Major Gift
- What Causes so Many Fundraisers to Leave their Jobs?
- Money Matters: Why a Good Nonprofit Fundraiser is Hard to Keep
- How 13 Nonprofit Donors Yields a $1 Million Philanthropic Legacy
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! Check out Should I Publicize the Amount of a Major Gift? and Motivating Donors to Make a Will to Leave a Bequest.
Please support my extraordinary sponsors (see below). The Clairity Click-it content is free, and Clairification School is affordable because of their generosity.
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. APRIL’s tips are posted! If you’re not yet an enrolled student, you can get in on the fun here!
My motto is: “If I know it, I want you to know it.” Don’t miss out.
