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Do you like me? You like me!

Let me ask you something: do you really like your donors? I don’t mean as a group or as an idea. I mean as people. Do you like them? I recently read an article by Roger Dooley at Neuromarketing. He was writing, as he often does, about Robert Cialdini and his findings about sales. Your instinct […]

Filed Under: Blog, Donors Tagged With: donor focus, donor-centered fundraising, neuroscience 2 Comments

Love your donors? Why you need to care about keeping them

Love your donors? Why you need to care about keeping them Recently, Tom Belford at The Agitator shared information from the latest Fundraising Effectiveness Project Survey Report. Two statements jumped out at me. Perhaps most striking is the performance difference in retention between the top 20% of organizations, who lost on average 14.1% of their new […]

Filed Under: Annual Giving, Blog Tagged With: donor focus, donor retention 3 Comments

She’s the one.

She’s the one. Your donor, that is. Or she should feel like the one. Strong communication is one-to-one. Underline that for fundraising communications. Who me? Think about it. You’re writing with a purpose. You want someone to do something. Want donors to ignore your request? Ask “someone” to do something. (One funny exception: my younger […]

Filed Under: Blog, Donor communications Tagged With: donor focus, donor love, Writing Leave a Comment

The one thing you need to know about fundraising

What you need to know about fundraising: it’s not about you I’m embarrassed to say it took me years to realize this. I – like you, maybe – was filled with enthusiasm for my organization. That’s good. It’s really hard to do good work when you don’t feel that way. But I let it color […]

Filed Under: Blog, Donors Tagged With: donor focus, Donors, nonprofit mission Leave a Comment

Are you using the magic fundraising word?

Are you using the magic fundraising word? Wait, fundraising magic? You’ve heard it before: a magic word that will transform your fundraising. The word is YOU. So you dutifully make sure that word is everywhere. But maybe it doesn’t do as much magic as you’d expected. You is magic, but there’s more to it than […]

Filed Under: Blog, Donor communications Tagged With: donor appeals, donor as hero, donor focus 1 Comment

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