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Tag Archive 'fundraising'

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 start-up [...]

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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 of [...]

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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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When people decide to make a charitable donation, they go through a process. Even a small gift can involve quite a bit of internal debate about where else the donation could do the most good - or, especially in today’s economy, about whether to make a donation at all.
The point is this: giving isn’t [...]

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Saying thanks is always welcome and often overlooked. You don’t thank your Aunt Betty for her “generous contribution to your wardrobe.” You thank her for the beautiful cashmere sweater. You say why you love it. You tell her where you wore it and how many compliments you got. You might even send a picture. [...]

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Many nonprofits are losing out on the opportunity to increase both donations and loyalty because they approach their donor base as a monolith: they treat everyone the same and then wonder why they don’t get better results.
You can debate the mailing date of your annual fundraising letter until your faces turn blue, but trying [...]

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