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...
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...
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...
Good marketers – and particularly fundraising marketers are always looking for good stories. A really effective form of storytelling is the donor profile. It’s an opportunity to present the case for giving in a way that’s personal and compelling. It’s a great way to...
Sales is a transfer of emotion. That lesson was drummed into me early in my working life. If you want to make a sale, you’re going to have to make someone feel something and your job is to figure out the right emotion for the right person. It’s taken me a long time to...
Every “top ten” list in the fundraising arena talks about the importance of using storytelling but it would appear that using it well is another story. I recently read two online posts that demonstrate there’s a difference between good ideas and good execution. In a...
