Spring fundraising season is upon us and the pressure is on for nonprofits to hit their goals at upcoming galas or events.  Here is a quick checklist to make sure your nonprofit is ready:

Ask short questions and hope for long answers. That’s one of my key mottos for fundraising. We’ve all been in a class or at a conference when someone got up to ask a question and delivered a soliloquy. When they finished we might even have wondered if there was a question! If you do that in fundraising, you’ll be dead in the water. As you start going on and on your donor’s eyes will glaze […]

Lists of the 10 most common grant writing mistakes are common (I’ve even written one myself), but just avoiding the mistakes isn’t good enough to make yours a winning proposal. And whereas it is easy to come up more than 10 things not to do, on the positive side there are just four major things to remember to get right.

When it comes to member engagement, I often stumble across this nonprofit story as old as the industry itself:  It’s the belief that just the passionate expression of an organization’s mission is somehow all that’s needed to be engaging. That upon hearing the mission or the work of the organization, a donor, a volunteer, a company, a foundation will simply leap into action. And that action will not only be beneficial, but befitting to the […]