Discomfort with engaging donors on bequests says more about your feelings about death than anything else. My mother died 11 years ago, almost exactly a year to the date after her mother, my grandmother, died. Within the next five years,...
Life was easier back then... When my fellow Good Workers and I began our journey into marketing legacy giving to annual donors in 2003, we had a lot of things to figure out. But one thing was simple and clear....
More than just scratching at the surface of the “giving economy” in Canada, a new report by the nonprofit sector’s primary advocacy agency may just be the most comprehensive longitudinal study ever in Canadian charity sector history – and many...
The old adage tells us we shouldn’t talk about politics, money or religion. While the first has lately become an all-too-frequent topic of conversation, it’s the latter two, and especially how they work together, that has been less discussed, especially...
The last quarter of the year is when most charities ramp up their appeals for donations and we all start thinking about making our charitable donations, primarily to ensure we get our receipts before the end of the year to...
In one corner we have fundraising experts who say that what’s needed is just two more appeal letters, while in the other corner, we have experts who say we’ve got to reduce the volume of mail donors receive. As fun...
The Millennial generation, or NextGen, gets blamed for a lot of what is wrong in the world today. Common stereotyping includes labels such as entitled, unreliable, cynical and easily distracted. Clearly, many of these perceptions are misconceptions. I know some...
The holiday season is a critical time for charities and not-for-profits. According to Imagine Canada, we receive almost 40% of our funding between now and the end of December. This is the time that our fundraising machines kick into action...
Surely by now Millennials must feel like monkeys in the zoo, analyzed and marketed to by everyone, quickly pronounced to be special snowflakes, condemned as slackers. Meanwhile, this generation — who loathes the generalized term for those born between roughly...
A small business can be a powerful engine for creating wealth. Small businesses are also the biggest creator of jobs in Canada. According to Statistics Canada’s Key Small Business Statistics survey “Small businesses account for more than 98 percent of...
