Everybody is nobody From time to time, I get an email from someone looking for fundraising help. They want to know how they can get their message out to everyone. So, first, let me clear something up: fundraising consultants do not have a magic contact list you can use. And while I admire their conviction […]
What are your values?
Tomorrow is Independence Day in the US. Though it has become largely a day about cook-outs and fireworks, it should be much more. There were values expressed in our Declaration of Independence. While we’ve seen great progress, there are too many values that we are still failing to honor. Sometimes even regressing. So I’ve been […]
How to write a great fundraising appeal
Putting together an appeal that works Before you write Back when I was a Girl Scout, we had a bake-off. (I won our Brownie bake-off with peanut butter blossoms because I voted for myself. I still have residual guilt about that.) One of the lessons was to assemble your ingredients before you start. So before […]
Do you think fundraising is scary?
What’s holding your fundraising back? Is fundraising scary? I recently posed that question to a group I was training. We were having some fun with a true and false game. Most of the questions were pretty easy to answer. This one was more nuanced. Fundraising is sometimes scary. But it’s almost always needed. So if […]
Your voice is needed! Donors and community: who’s in the center?
Community centered or donor centered? I attended a conference last week (thank you, Liberty Bank Foundation). The estimable and hysterical Vu Le offered the keynote address. If you know Vu, you know we were holding our stomachs and behaving in otherwise undignified ways because we were laughing so hard. (If you don’t know Vu, get […]