Over the last few years, New Year's Eve has started to feel a little bit like Giving Tuesday, with a flood of email appeals touting expiring match opportunities, goal shortfalls and giving deadlines bordering on aggressive. [spoken in a curmudgeon's voice] Spending some time today unsubscribing from nonprofit emails. Like [...]
Digital communications are essential for robust fundraising strategies today. Everything from your emails to your social media posts, blogs to live video streams, how you communicate with your donors and the community at large is becoming increasingly just as important as your message itself. Email is generally the most important [...]
Giving Tuesday has grown so big, so fast since its inception that its gravitational pull seems to impact the entire final two months of the fundraising year. It's also become one of my favorite days to study the behaviors and tactics of nonprofits who are attempting to capitalize on the [...]
The Bloomies are our award for outstanding donor communications in the nonprofit sector. Periodically, we’ll feature a newsletter, email, direct mail piece, acknowledgement, solicitation or social media post that caught our eye. […]
If we want donors to understand us, we have to start by understanding them. Donors give for their reasons, not ours. Doing great discovery dramatically deepens donor relationships and sets up a successful ask. That's why I've teamed up with Bloomerang to put together this free guide: The Lucrative Art [...]
How should we be thanking supporters? Should we thank donors for their gift, for the difference they have made or for being the kind of person they are or would like to be? And should a thank-you be designed differently for donors at different stages in their relationship? Do certain [...]
Bloomerang was proud to join Pursuant and The Institute for Conversational Fundraising to support The Philanthropy Centre in its landmark study on just how massively important saying thank you really is. The report is chock-full of interesting experiments, each with tangible takeaways for all fundraisers, including a simple method that [...]
In article #1 of this three-part series on donor retention and gratitude we discussed the benefits of thanking donors in a manner that resonates with them. Personally. That’s what will make your thank you stand out, a topic covered in article #2. In today’s article #3 we’re going to look [...]
It’s no secret that most online users have the attention span of a goldfish nowadays, and creating engaging content can be a difficult endeavor. In lieu of dedicating time to other media or doing a trial-and-error based approach to content creation, your organization needs to utilize video to stand out [...]
Year-end brings the largest flurry of direct mail within the nonprofit sector. Most charities rely on the final two months of each year to achieve more than 50% of the funding of their mission. New research confirms a course of action that can increase the results of those year-end [...]
The following is a story. Two out of three of my recent giving experiences have been negative. Within a three week period, I gave to three different organizations, one large, one medium, and one small: Org A - Larger higher education institution Org B - Medium higher education institution Org [...]
In this digital age, the main comment I hear from donors about our book-length nonprofit annual report is that “no one actually reads them, right?” Sadly, it's true, but like many nonprofits today, we're adopting new conventions to more effectively communicate with our donors. Succinct annual reports are replacing the old [...]