How to get your donors to respond to you WITHOUT asking them to respond to you
Does polite persistence really work any more? When I first got into sales, my uncle told me that polite persistence…
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Top 3 reasons why major gift or legacy gift officers don’t have enough meetings with donors
I hear a lot of people complaining about gift officers not meeting with enough donors. Usually, these complaints come from…
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At last, the one big thing every fundraiser needs to know to be successful
After more than a quarter century as a fundraiser and a professor focused on fundraising research, theories, data, and experiments,…
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Are you a schmoozer?
If you think fundraising is about schmoozing, please change your attitude quickly or leave the profession. Several times I’ve heard…
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The Top 3 Reasons Spray-And-Pray Fundraising Communications Fail
The traditional spray and pray marketing communications tactics just don’t work. Here’s why: 1. They are Irrelevant In this day…
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You Can’t Marry Your Donors After the First Date
Donors build relationships with nonprofits the same way they build relationships with people. Slowly! Step 1: Meet through friends Step…
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You Don’t Need Data, You Need Actionable Intelligence
You have plenty of data. That data probably includes donation recency, frequency, and monetary value. You might also track involvement…
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What The Heck Is Progressive Profiling And Why You Need To Do It?
It’s about their timing, not yours. Fundraisers, as well as their organization’s leadership and board members, need to come to…
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10 Ways to Deliver Value to Your Major Donors and Planned Giving Prospects
Find ways to release dopamine and/or oxytocin in your supporters’ brains. Oxytocin creates intimacy, trust, and builds healthy relationships. It…
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The top qualification and prioritization data points you should consider before you reach out to your supporters to build a caseload
We surveyed a few hundred fundraisers to find out what they felt were the most (and least) important data points…
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What to do when a supporter notifies you that they left your organization in their estate plan but won’t take your calls
I know, it’s frustrating. You want to thank them but they won’t respond to your outreach. First things first. There are…
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16 Simple Things Your Best Donors Want
Here’s my list of essential major donor needs that you must aim to fulfill: Your best donors want you to…
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Top 10 Reasons Why Gift Officers Won’t Make Outbound Calls to Donors
The reasons why fundraisers won’t make outbound calls to donors are because they are: FEARFUL: They fear rejection. CONFUSED: They…
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Engagement Fundraising in 7 simple bullet-points
Focus- Focus your marketing (especially your expensive marketing like face-to-face meetings) on people who have a lot of money Generate…
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Why most of your marketing should appeal to donors in the WHY stage of the consideration continuum
Instinct. When I first started helping nonprofits raise major gifts for less, I instinctively knew that the traditional planned giving…
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Why Response Rates Don’t Matter
It always frustrates me to hear fundraisers or their consultants concern themselves with vanity metrics like response rates for lead…
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Donor target ask amounts offend me
I keep seeing software or wealth screening companies providing fundraisers with target ask amounts. I don’t get it. How on…
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The difference between wealth screening and wealth appending
First, wealth screening. Over the past 10 to 20 years, wealth screening has become a common practice for fundraising shops.…
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Stop SPAMMING your supporters with planned giving e-newsletters
Wiz-bang tech? I was talking to a fundraiser and he said, “We’ve got this cool system that includes pre-written estate planning…
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Don’t survey your donors unless you have cultivation ready to go
Let’s start at the beginning. Almost 10 years ago, when MarketSmart was a marketing agency for private sector businesses and…
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Why your nonprofit’s donor survey could be causing more harm than good
Thinking about sending out a donor survey? If so, be sure to use the survey responses properly so you ‘speak’…
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How to put marketing automation to work for your nonprofit’s fundraising
Catching up. If you read all my previous posts (starting here) about how you can use marketing automation to raise…
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Top 10 ways marketing automation helps nonprofits raise more money for less
Quick review In my previous post I outlined the 3 types of marketing automation tools fundraising operations really should understand.…
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3 types of marketing automation fundraising operations need to understand (including one you really need to deploy right away)
In this previous post we discussed the fact that lower-level, basic automation works better for raising low-dollar donors. That’s why…
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