Award-Winning Blog


Life After Fundraising

“Life after fundraising” doesn’t mean you stop trying to save the world. Take the example of one of our favorite fundraising veterans, Mal Warwick. Mal ‘dropped out’ of fundraising a couple of years ago to devote his energies to One World Futbol. We’ll let his latest update speak for itself … Hi, Folks! I’m writing […]

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Conversation About Identity

Many US nonprofits are striving to understand and begin to enter the Hispanic fundraising market. Those who are not, should be! Awhile back, we noted the work being done at the Pew Hispanic Center to shed light on this important population group. Check out this interactive infographic. Their recent report on Hispanic identity,  When Labels […]

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How Does Your Packaging Compare?

One of the key lessons in the Walter Isaacson’s book, Steve Jobs, is the passionate attention and priority Jobs gave to design, even to the point where design considerations often over-ruled engineering constraints (frequently obliterating them). As recounted by Isaacson (p. 78), Jobs’ first mentor and investor, Mike Markkula, boiled the Apple marketing philosophy down […]

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Our Accomplishments Together

Debra Richmond commends this email Annual Report from Be The Match, a bone marrow registry helping patients get transplants from non-related donors. I agree. Using simple infographics, the email (subject line: Our Accomplishments Together ) effectively delivers the bottom line results (how could you not scroll through?), emphasizing that you — the donor — made […]

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Taking Risks With Your Fundraising

Yesterday’s post talked about evaluating overall effectiveness of marketing (including fundraising) programs. I cited a McKinsey article that included the following as one of five key questions to examine in your organization: How are we managing financial risk in our marketing plans? McKinsey talks about setting risk parameters that enabled some changes in the marketing […]

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Measuring Marketing’s Worth

Here is an excellent article from McKinsey Quarterly on evaluating an organization’s overall marketing effectiveness … that is, getting more bang for the marketing buck. McKinsey boils it down to asking five questions. Or more accurately, five lines of inquiry, each with a host of questions. If you have reason to be taking an overall […]

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