Funding News and Grant Tips Episcopal Health Foundation has announced a $10 million plan to help address the long-term impact of COVID-19, including a grant program, an emergency loan fund, and a research project. The grant program will help current grantees and partners continue their operations during the public health emergency with a focus on those directly involved in COVID-19 response and serving disproportionately affected… Read more »
Category: Communications
Vogel Alcove: Donate and help support a mom and her kids!
Hello, I don’t normally send you emails like this … but these are not normal times. Vogel Alcove needs your help TODAY! We have worked so hard to move our families from homelessness into housing and greater family stability, but as we enter yet another week of the Shelter-in-Place order, the coronavirus is threatening to push our families back into homelessness by devastating their… Read more »
Communicating with Donors During a Maelstrom: Practical Wisdom on When, What, Who, How, and How Often
The Covid-19 virus has upended every facet of our lives. For those of us in the nonprofit community, that has meant closing our facilities and offices, disrupting our delivery of services, and ceasing our communications with donors—Wait a minute! While those first two are true, the third is decidedly not. If your nonprofit organization hopes to survive during this crisis and beyond, you must communicate, strategically with your supporters! In this article, we’ve compiled the main questions you, your executive director, and your board members are likely to ask at this time to offer guidance on how to answer them. At the end of the article, we’ve provided a useful checklist to make sure your communications to donors and supporters are ticking all the boxes.
EMERGENCY >>> e-APPEAL >>> TEMPLATE >>> that really works: Complete with proof, from San Antonio
Via Tom Ahern and his acquisition of the eager permission of Steven Screen (l.) and Jim Shapiro (r.), the brainiacs in the photo below, co-founders of The Better Fundraising Co., based in Greater Seattle, I bring you THEIR 8-point….
>>> EMERGENCY
>>> e-APPEAL
>>> TEMPLATE
>>> that really works
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?”
