March 28, 2024
March 26, 2018

What You and Your Board Need to Know When Asking for a Gift

I’ve been asking for gifts for more than 40 years. Some as modest as $50, others for $100 million. You could say I’m acquainted with the do’s and don’ts of motivating donors. In my book Asking you’ll find a detailed approach to soliciting major gifts. In this article, I’ll simply highlight eight suggestions to keep in mind as you prepare yourself and your board for the big push.
March 27, 2018

Member Engagement Is Not A One-Trick Pony. It’s Seven.

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 […]
March 28, 2018

The 4 Most Important Things for Grant Writers to Get Right

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.