Small charities are near and dear to my heart. They tend to be more agile and nimble. The small team of staff and volunteers usually have their hands directly involved in the work. There’s a lot of passion. There are...
Email continues to be the greatest revenue driver in fundraising – but that also means that it’s become an incredibly cluttered, busy channel. Digital communications have gone the way of direct mail, in the sense that quality and a holistic...
Stories are the backbone of good fundraising and critical to small organizations. We often hear how important stories are, but not how to craft good ones. After all, there is a difference! Vanessa Chase Lockshin, storytelling guru, breaks it all...
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...
