The latest edition of FundRaising Success Magazine has a terrific article by Bryan Schoell called Get Your Head Out of the Sand. Here’s the begining: People are talking about you online. Ignoring that fact won’t make it go away, so you’d best join in the conversation. Yesterday, the mother of a sick child Googled the [...]

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The Chronicle of Philanthropy is reporting that Sen. Grassley is continuing his push to increase regulations on nonprofit hospitals. I work in one and didn’t think the regulation could get any tighter–especially for small community hospitals with a large reliance on Medicaid and Medicare! His focus and intensity on this issue seems to me to [...]

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Anyone that’s attended any of my fundraising seminars knows I’m a big fan of storytelling. The NY Times offers a great article called 5 Tips for Telling Better Stories. In short, they are: Keep it simple Openings and closings are very important Be mindful of your story’s spine Make sure not to alienate your audience [...]

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Sue Hoye over at the Chronicle of Philanthropy’s Prospecting blog offers disturbing statistics about donor experiences with nonprofits. The Great American Donor Survey, conducted by Campbell Rinker, a marketing research company in Valencia, Calif., that specializes in nonprofit work, found that 83 percent of charitable donors consider the giving experience to be what they expect. [...]

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Well, the PRWeb approved press release is live and available at: http://www.prweb.com/releases/2008/04/prweb855134.htm

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Reading through a recent issue of Contributions Magazine, I was delighted to stumble across a summary of a new book, Forces for Good: The Six Practices of High-Impact Nonprofits. The authors underwent an incredibly thorough research project to try and ferret out the things that made nonprofits excellent. It sounds a lot like the research [...]

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I’m having quite a week! Tuesday, I was invited to train the super-elite fundraisers for Habitat for Humanity International in Atlanta. I’ve been a fan of Habitat for years. And what a terrific group of development people they have! Now I’m at the Consortium for Endowed Episcopal Parishes annual conference speaking on fundraising to people [...]

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Chris Busch has a great blog post on the differences of political campaign websites. You may remember that in the “Create a Cause” tenent Creating Donor Evangelists, I recommend looking at political sites to see what they do well. Well check out the sites of the front runners: John McCain Hillary Clinton Barack Obama Two [...]

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Liz Strauss has a great post on innovation at Brainless Business Bible: Customers want innovation. She says a speaker at a conference emphatically said “Customers want innovation.” He even had a powerpoint slide with that on it. But, as she points out, customers are people. Does the statement People want innovation stand up to scrutiny? [...]

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Let’s revisit the idea of clubs. In his article, Michael Masterson gives an example of a dining club. Summing up the example, he states: The basic elements of a club that are at work in this example: Association with like-minded people This is the fraternal aspect of the club. If you sell gourmet food, for [...]

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