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Tag Archive 'fundraising'

Gartner predicts U.S. tablet sales will exceed 20 million in 2011. By this time next year 10% of all Americans will have a tablet and half of us will have smartphones – a year later will see ⅓ of us with tablets. Gartner goes on to predict that by 2015 most of us will have [...]

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While meeting with a client the other day the conversation turned to their growth plans. The client softly explained that their growth plans were pretty conservative considering the economy and how much their board of directors enjoyed their dividend checks. We both chuckled knowing that growth needs to be funded by profit and would cut [...]

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I get asked this question a lot. When I talk with a community benefit organization about their marketing for fundraising, probably 4 out of 10 times I’m asked whether everything they send out should include a fundraising ask. In my opinion, the answer is quite simple — no. Your donors and prospects are valuable but [...]

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Over the last several years the economy has taken an alarming toll on the community benefit sector. For many organizations and foundations income is down 20% to 40% and sometimes more. No business can contract that much without suffering tremendous pain. While the markets have shown signs of rebounding over the last several weeks, other [...]

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I had an epiphany the other day. Needless to say, that doesn’t happen to me very often. This one happened while I was attending a Habitat for Humanity build. If you are a regular reader of SPURspectives, you know that I work with Habitat fairly frequently. But this last time held a surprise. When I [...]

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Around the corner from my house is a lovely pre-Civil War era house, the Alexander Majors house. It’s a historic landmark in Kansas City. Alexander Majors helped open the west by leading the first wagon train from Westport (Kansas City) to Santa Fe and then made a fortune along the Santa Fe and California trails. [...]

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Don’t you love it when everything just clicks — when it all goes according to plan? It’s an awesome feeling to have that happen. On the flip side, it’s a real pain when you are sure you’re doing everything right and it’s still not working. That’s maddening. I believe that’s one of the reasons why [...]

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Aren’t annual reports beautiful documents? They’re the top of the food chain among printed business documents — lush, rich, and elegant. I recently saw one from a community benefit organization that had been entered in a design competition. It was gorgeous. It had beautiful paper, fantastic photography, the finest printing, and truly exceptional graphic design. [...]

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I recently met with several community benefit organizations that are contemplating some aspect of membership. They’re either making plans to change an existing membership program, are adding memberships, or are scrapping memberships. All of this talk got me wondering about the value of belonging. What does it really mean to belong? Are there different kinds [...]

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Good data about your donors can help you develop a “donor taxonomy” specific to your organization – a classification scheme that will help you customize each donor’s experience and give you powerful insights into your base. When your nonprofit is determining the kind of data you need about your donors to engage in 1:1 marketing [...]

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