Our big announcement last week that we have opened a new Donorly office in Washington, D.C. was the culmination of a long journey and a lot of work—but at the same time, it is also just the beginning. We have loved getting to know the nonprofit landscape in D.C. as we’ve been getting set up locally, and we are looking forward to getting to know the community even better over the coming months and years.

Thinking about the work that we’re doing to build community with nonprofit professionals in D.C. reminds us of the advice that we give time and time again to our consulting clients—it’s all about authentic relationships. When it comes to relationships with prospective donors, it’s all about finding and leveraging your existing connections, and forming new ones that are based around your work.

In honor of Donorly’s 6th Anniversary, and in celebration of last week’s opening of our Washington, D.C. office, we sat down with Founder and President Sandra Davis to talk about where Donorly came from, and where we’ll be going next!

It’s the most wonderful time of the year. That’s right, the end of the tax year is fast approaching and most donors are preparing to make their annual charitable gifts. We know you’ve already got the wheels in motion on your Year End Appeal, but are you thinking about how to fold #GivingTuesday into your campaign?

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.”