Those who have been involved in major gifts solicitations and have spent years trying to get inside the head and heart of a single donor in the hopes of securing that elusive impact gift will agree with the headline. Likewise, major givers who have endured countless...
In a fit of fundraising heresy I posted this question on Linked In last week: Does saying thank you really make a difference? Do you know of a research study that proves that thanking donors will lead to further or increased donations? There was some method to my...
If organizations treated a gift more like a sale, they’d find out the two words have more in common than four letters. There was a great post from The Agitator last week discussing the fact that fundraising organizations often concentrate on donor acquisition to the...
It doesn’t matter whether you’re talking about chewing gum or feeding the hungry; the principles of good marketing remain the same. But how you apply those principles to the fundraising arena will affect results. One of the fundamentals of traditional marketing is the...
For salespeople, fundraisers and businesspeople, making sure that we learn something new from every interaction with a current or prospective buyer (or donor) can convert a “no” into future success. This was brought to mind by a book that I am currently reading and an...
Does the size of a philanthropic gift determine its meaningfulness to the donor? As part of our book project The Philanthropic Mind my writing partner and I recently conducted one of our interviews with Canada’s top philanthropists. In it a donor told us that his...
