Nonprofit organizations are notorious for putting out surveys – surveys to event attendees, surveys to program participants, surveys to volunteers. But in all that data collection, are you surveying your donors? If you’re not, we think you should be.

There are many people working in the nonprofit world who believe that grants are the low-hanging fruit of the fundraising orchard. We understand why that is—grants usually have a clear protocol, process, and decision-making timeline. Unfortunately, grants are just not low-hanging fruit. In fact, let’s call them high-hanging fruit, the kind of fruit that you need a team of people, a ladder, and an extended cultivation period to pick.

List segmentation is a topic that comes up often when we talk about marketing, but it is essential to your fundraising strategy as well!

Whether the communication that you need to get out is a solicitation, a status update, or a thank you, there is no one-size-fits-all message that is going to make your donors feel seen, heard, and like they are a valuable part of your community (and they are a valuable part of your community).

Donor relationships are great, especially when they have been built organically and authentically around a shared passion for your mission. But in order to keep your donors deeply connected to the organization, we recommend building more than a relationship—instead, build an entire community.

Even though coffee meetings, phone calls, birthday cards, and organizational updates are essential pieces of any donor cultivation strategy, do not underestimate the value of a cultivation event.

Why? Because none of the other items on that list involve a social gathering, and social gatherings are the perfect setting for three things…

A big part of what makes running a nonprofit organization possible – from sustaining your impactful programming, to keeping the lights on, to paying your staff – is the daily work of fundraising. But fundraising isn’t always easy, especially when your rolodex isn’t filled with immediately obvious connections, like wealthy friends and family members. This makes fundraising a challenging strategic puzzle.

If you are struggling to crack this puzzle, know that you’re not alone. Furthermore, with the right tactics in your toolkit, you can build a realistic and sustainable fundraising plan to support your brand-new organization.

There are so many factors to consider when making the choice to migrate to a new CRM: the cost, the allowable number of users, whether it has functionality you need, the ease of the interface, whether remote or cloud access is available…and that’s just to name a few.

That said, we’d like to make the case for prioritizing another factor that isn’t on the list above: the quality of the customer service experience.

We’ve polled our consulting team and have collected for you some of our favorite tips for taking on your FY20 contributed revenue budget.

Crowdfunding might seem like a tech-driven fundraising trend, but the concept has actually been around for quite a long time. In 1884, The New York World raised over $100,000 from 160,000 people in order to fund the base for the Statue of Liberty. In his appeal to his mass readership, publisher Joseph Pulitzer wrote on the front page of the paper “Let us not wait for the millionaires to give us money.”

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.