Do you remember Jean Preston, the unassuming librarian who’d amassed an $8 million estate? Or Helene Whitlock Alley, the $100 donor that bequethed $7.3 million to a diabetes group. Well here’s another entry in the never underestimate anyone category: Richard Walters. Perhaps you’ve heard his name on NPR: “Support for NPR comes from the estate [...]

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Apparently 2009 is going to be the year of learning to delay Alzheimer’s. In today’s news, work is apparently officially proven to delay Alzheimer’s. The equation? 1 year or work = 6 weeks of delay. Earlier this year, I read that drinking strong coffee may reduce the risk of dementia or Alzheimer’s by 65%! What [...]

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See’s Chocolates sent me a tin of chocolates they use for a chocolate fundraiser. I told them my blog doesn’t talk about fundraising sales, but they insisted and who am I to turn down free chocolate? The tin came yesterday. I was pleasantly surprised by both the assortment of chocolates in the tin and at [...]

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I sure love the Chronicle of Philanthropy’s “Give & Take” roundup of nonprofit blogs. Today I found a gem from fundraising consultant Tom Belford on the Madoff ponzi scandal. Tom writes on a pretty obvious, but unspoken, double standard: every few years, nonprofits are called to account for their actions and donations but large players [...]

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Like many Americans, I’ve been inundated with news stories about the Big 3 automakers attempts to get a federal loan of billions of dollars. Yes, billions. So I started wondering, what if the Big 3 were to teach nonprofits how to fundraise? Some of the humorous answers included: Lose touch with your donor base: Ignore [...]

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I just spent 4 hours in the rain putting these signs for our Fall Pops Benefit Concert. The industry calls them “yard signs.” I’m hoping that they’ll catch people off guard in the midst of the signs of the political candidates! It’s a good reminder that as fun as web 2.0 is, offline marketing still [...]

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The Don’t Tell the Donor Blog had a chilling link to a New York Times article. Here’s a quote from the article: About 30 nonprofit agencies that held several accounts at Freedom, each with less than $100,000, lost money because the F.D.I.C. considers the multiple accounts of a single depositor as a single account. The [...]

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The Chronicle of Philanthropy’s Prospecting blog has an interesting post about a new planned giving tool. Apparently, it’s a CD that donors can play to see the benefits of making a planned gifts and a charity can customize it to be the “charity of choice” for the example. But wait! There’s more: What worries some [...]

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Here’s another story in the growing collection of unassuming people that become noteworthy philanthropists by leaving millions of dollars to charity. The Chronicle of Philanthropy reports that James Ebbert, the son of a sharecropper, left $10 million to charities in Pennsylvania. When reporting on this high-school-turned-business-owner: He lived frugally and invested his money well, says [...]

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I had fun today creating a parody of a sales letter for fundraising consulting. You can see it at www.GuiltFreeFundraising.com. It’s loosely based on the calls I’ve gotten from people over the last 10 years asking me to do their fundraising for them. It’s all meant in good fun. I got the idea from Fred [...]

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