Posted in donor, donor engagement, economic recession, fundraising, investment, lifecycle, marketing, marketing budget, non profit, nonprofit on Aug 3rd, 2010
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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Posted in donor, donor engagement, fundraising, individualized marketing, network, non profit, nonprofit, personalized marketing, social branding, social marketing, social media, social network on Jul 28th, 2010
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 different [...]
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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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Posted in SPURspectives, branding, community, consumer behavior, consumer engagement, consumer perception, customer engagement, customer interaction, donor, donor engagement, follower, fundraising, marketing, network, non profit, nonprofit, social branding, social marketing, social media, spur communications on Feb 18th, 2010
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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Posted in SPURspectives, Uncategorized, community, donor, donor engagement, economic recession, fundraising, kansas city, leader, lifecycle, marketing, marketing budget, network, non profit, nonprofit, spur communications on Feb 10th, 2010
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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Posted in branding, community, consumer behavior, consumer engagement, consumer perception, customer engagement, customer interaction, donor, donor engagement, fundraising, investment, marketing, marketing innovation, network, non profit, nonprofit, social branding, social marketing, social media on Oct 19th, 2009
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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Posted in 1:1 Marketing, CRM, SPURspectives, branding, community, consumer behavior, consumer engagement, consumer perception, customer engagement, customer interaction, customer relationship management, donor, donor engagement, fundraising, individualized marketing, investment, lifecycle, marketing, marketing innovation, network, non profit, nonprofit, one to one marketing, personalized marketing, social branding, social marketing, social media, social network, spur communications on Sep 14th, 2009
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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Posted in SPURspectives, branding, community, consumer behavior, consumer engagement, consumer generated content, consumer perception, customer engagement, customer interaction, donor, donor engagement, follower, fundraising, leader, lifecycle, marketing, marketing innovation, network, non profit, social branding, social marketing, social media, social network, spur communications on Aug 6th, 2009
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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Posted in donor, donor engagement on Mar 25th, 2009
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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