Award-Winning Blog


7 Questions For Your 2014 Marketing Plan

With November almost half gone, there’s not much we can timely advise regarding your year-end marketing/fundraising program. For the next 90 days or so, it’s all about execution. Much of your execution will be online, so I do hope you noted Roger’s advice yesterday about breaking through the Gmail barrier. So now let’s turn to […]

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Heads-Up for Year-End Email

Here are two factoids to alert you to some tweaks you should be making in preparation for your year-end fundraising activities. 74 percent of consumers/donors use Google search; 60 percent own GMAIL accounts. So what? In mid-to-late July Google introduced Gmail Tabs, a change to its Inbox designed to differentiate between what they call ‘Primary’ […]

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Mobile Marketing

Marketers (maybe more accurately, market researchers) love to create new consumer segments to spin theories about. I can’t resist this stuff, just out of intellectual curiosity … and sometimes I actually pick up an insight. So I was curious to read about ‘Affluencers’ — a composite of affluents (household income of $100K+) and influencers (those […]

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Walk In The Donor’s Shoes

Editor’s Note:  This guest post by international fundraiser Francesco Ambroghetti was triggered by our piece, Your Call Is Important To Us. Please Continue To Hold. At last month’s International Fundraising Conference in the Netherlands, participants in a Master Class made calls and online visits to a variety of charities posing as donors attempting to make […]

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Snickers Bars And Matching Gifts

Which Matching Gift Challenge formula works best? (A)   1:1 matching grant (“An anonymous donor will match your contribution dollar for dollar.”) (B)   2:1 matching grant (“triples your donation”) (C)   3:1 matching grant (“quadruples your donation”) The anecdotal (as opposed to scientific) ‘rule’ in our trade is that higher match levels are better than lower match […]

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Why You?

Imagine that today, by sheer coincidence, you received mail solicitations from two different organizations with international child sponsorship programs, neither of which you presently support. Take off your professional fundraiser’s cap if you can, and explain to me what would happen. Would you open neither, one or both? If neither, are you simply not interested […]

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