One of our consultants was recently in a staff meeting at a client organization when a member of the marketing department proudly announced that they had put an end to email usage.

We think that strategy is brilliant.

Your brand (or, what the public thinks of when they hear your name) and your ability to raise funds from that public, are inextricably linked. A prospective donor’s understanding of your values, mission, and work (not to mention what they think of that work) play an enormous role in their decision of whether and how much to donate to your cause.

In this guest post, Erin Booker from Funraise tackles the question of what makes an effective board meeting (Besides plenty of coffee and snacks)?

Of course, there are the basic components to any board meeting, but we believe in a secret sauce that will take your board meeting from good to great, from volunteer to movement leader, from good Samaritan to superhero, from...okay, you get the picture.

As important as it is to have the right Development Director or Major Gifts Officer, when it comes to maintaining an effective fundraising department, it is absolutely essential to have the right Development Assistant.

To be more effective, we suggest that you seek to hire for attitude and train for skills.

There is a misconception about what goes into fundraising that can sometimes keep organizational stakeholders (such as board members, or dedicated volunteers) feeling a little skittish about getting involved—that fundraising is all about asking for money.

Yes, of course fundraising includes asking for money, but a development department’s work is so much more than that.

Conflict is a part of everyday life, but when it comes to Board Members or donors, it is easy for that conflict to become especially fraught. It can be challenging to walk the line between expressing and adhering to your organizational values while simultaneously trying to keep an important stakeholder happy. Here are a few suggestions for strategies to strike that ever important balance.

Building relationships with donors is the goal of your donor engagement strategy. These 6 tips will help you keep in touch to begin this essential relationship!

Wondering what your nonprofit has to gain from fundraising research and consulting? See these 4 major ways they will help your nonprofit reach its goals.

If there’s one thing we advocate for on the Donorly Blog, it’s donor data tracking. We’re interested in data hygiene, the uses for fundraising, communications, and sales data, and choosing the CRM that’s right for you. Of course, none of that matters if you’re not staffed to successfully keep your data organized and clean in the right tool, in a way that is actually useful to you.

As you may have guessed from the title of this post, we are here today to dispel a common myth about the way that fundraising works.

There is no magical unicorn fundraiser.

Hopefully, if you’re reading this post, then we don’t have any more work to do in convincing you that data is important. (If you’re still on the fence, read our blog post on the importance of fundraising data!). But, in order to make sure that your data is doing the work that you need it to do, you have to prioritize keeping it clean.

One of the most important tools in your nonprofit’s fundraising arsenal is your online donation form. This is the last step on the giving ladder and an important part of securing a gift from your supporters. Optimizing your online donation form should be at the top of your nonprofit’s list as you prepare for your next big fundraising campaign. With a streamlined, effective, and inspiring donation form, there’s very little standing in the way between your team and its goals.