OK, commandment #1 (by far): You build your sales’ success (i.e., your fundraising comm’s success) backwards from your target audience. “What the heck does that mean?” might be your challenge. ——So … let’s get basic. You, fundraiser, are trying to sell my brain something. You want my brain to make a purchase decision … a purchase decision that will benefit your charity’s mission-cause-movement-ideal-belief-invention-initiative-program-plans for… Read more »
Category: Communications
Call For Papers: FOR VOLUME 14, ISSUE 1
Abstracts of up to 250 words are being solicited for Volume 14, Issue 1 of The Foundation Review. This issue will be an open (unthemed) issue. Papers on any topic relevant to organized philanthropy are invited. Submit abstracts to submissions@foundationreview.org by March 31, 2021. If a full paper is invited, it will be due August 31, 2021, for consideration for publication in March 2022.… Read more »
Twitter is now my social medium of choice for professional stuff. I visit it multi-daily. Do I use Facebook? It’s creepy.
Like a certain person I refuse to name (because when I do, my mouth tastes corrupt for at least an hour), I have become addicted to Twitter as my primary social medium
Winning the Small Game
Every word matters. Some words matter more. We or you?
My Top Eleven and Three-Quarters Bits of Advice for Winning at Donor Communications – Part II
7. Donors aren’t forever. Mostly. Again: Why do you need a donor acquisition program as well as a donor relationship program? Because donors come and go, like pee holes in the snow. A couple of years ago, I polled experts around the world with the question, “How long does the average donor stick with a charity?” There was a gawdly lot of hemming and… Read more »
My Top Eleven and Three-Quarters Bits of Advice for Winning at Donor Communications – Part I
1. Why Eleven and Three-Quarters? Be a little less predictable. “10 Top Tips” is predictable. “11 Top Tips” is a little less predictable, but still pretty obvious. I ripped this idea off, as most of you immediately recognized, from Harry Potter’s Track Nine and Three-Quarters at King’s Cross Station. Steal well. And often. But don’t steal from failures. Which means you’ll have to learn… Read more »
Laura Bush: Separating children from their parents at the border ‘breaks my heart’
On Sunday, a day we as a nation set aside to honor fathers and the bonds of family, I was among the millions of Americans who watched images of children who have been torn from their parents. In the six weeks between April 19 and May 31, the Department of Homeland Security has sent nearly 2,000 children to mass detention centers or foster care. More than 100 of these children are younger than 4 years old. The reason for these separations is a zero-tolerance policy for their parents, who are accused of illegally crossing our borders.
The Health and Humanities Pop-Up Institute
The Health & Humanities Pop-Up Institute is a collaboration between the Office of the Vice President of Research and the Humanities Institute at the University of Texas at Austin through the following endowments: the Holloway Centennial Lectureship, the Hoffman Centennial Lectureship, the Kidd Centennial Lectureship, and the Ho Distinguished Lecture in China Studies Endowment. Additional support comes from the College of Liberal Arts, the Department of English, and the Dell Medical School.
Why profitable fundraising communications are the work of specialists, not generalists … and why a standard-issue, untrained university marcomms department will almost certainly fail to deliver strong results when given a fundraising assignment which depends on an effective call to action
This just in: A fundraising copywriter at a prestigious university now faces a change in her chain of command. The university’s new brooms don’t see why fundraising should have its own dedicated writer. In an org. chart maneuver that absolutely makes sense on paper, they want her to go back into the pool, to work inside the marketing communications group (a.k.a., marcomms). She asked… Read more »
In Reciprocity We Trust
Newbies, skeptics, the timid (and Ian) DO worry: “So, Tom, where’s the irrefutable research that switching to ‘donor-centered’ communications will raise more money for our org. than the comms crap we now send out?”
