Tagged as ‘Direct Response Fundraising’
Fundraising Day in New York 2010 is June 11. If you haven’t registered yet, I hope you will. Not only because it’s the largest one-day conference on philanthropy in the country and chock-full of valuable fundraising information for nonprofits, but because I’ll be doing a rapid-fire session in the direct response track with Dennis Lonergan […]
Statisticians are equipped with a broad range of detailed tests and tightly controlled procedures to determine the probability of an outcome. But direct response testing isn’t done in laboratory. Our lab is the messy, busy, ever-changing world … which means it’s difficult to design a perfect test. In this climate, there are always variables beyond […]
No matter what your organization’s fiscal year is, the beginning of a new calendar year is like returning to “Go” in your donor communications. It marks a reset of your Annual Fund or membership program and the beginning of a new dialogue with your donors that will build over the coming months and culminate with […]
For many nonprofits, November 15th is the most important day of the year on the membership development calendar. It’s on or within a few days of this date that many of us send our most important direct mail solicitation of the year – the Year End Appeal. And arguably, it’s what much of our work […]
The simplest things can escape us sometimes. We get so involved in the details of inspiring people to make donations to our organizations that we forget about our donors themselves. We can tell you how our programs our doing. We can tell you our average gift, percent response, open rate, cost to raise a dollar, […]
With Labor Day behind us, it’s officially crunch time for all of us involved in nonprofit development. We have year-end appeals to produce, annual reports to mail, goals to meet and – if we’re real gluttons for punishment – galas to manage. So what are you doing reading this blog? You have work to do, and not […]
Let me just begin by clearing something up. Direct mail fundraising is not dead. (Here’s a nice article from Mal Warwick by the way on why.) In fact, for the vast majority of nonprofits, direct mail is still the most powerful, cost effective means of constituent engagement and giving. But how we’re using direct mail […]
I love fundraising and donor cultivation communications. In any form. Direct mail, email, websites, newsletters, annual reports, phone calls, donation forms, Facebook pages, you name it. We save most of what we receive at my office – and anyone working or interested in donor communications should do the same. Over the years we’ve built up a library […]
In June, Target Analytics released its Index of National Fundraising Performance for Q1 2009 indicating that direct response giving to nonprofits in the Target Index (35 million donors translating to nearly $2 billion in giving) was down in the first quarter of the year. This was not surprising on the heels of Giving USA’s report […]
