The terms “sales” and "selling" make a lot of nonprofit people nervous, which is too bad. There are many beneficial sales skills nonprofits would be wise to adopt, especially if you're raising major gifts and corporate sponsorship. So kindly overcome your distaste for “sales” and “selling” and read on. Fundraising and selling are two ways to generate income. Why not see what our for-profit brethren are doing that we could use??
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Fundraising professionals, are you burned out from too many holiday parties, cheese platters, cheap wine, and endless networking? Did the board ask you to hold "just one more holiday party" this year? Does "holiday cheer" start to sound like "holiday torture" around now? If that's the case, you're suffering from EFS - Extreme Fundraising Stress. This malady occurs most frequently at the end of the year, when you and every other fundraising professional and nonprofit executive are driving the bulk of their annual appeals and special events. If EFS is getting you down, it's time to use the Bristol Strategy Group SMART Tips for a stress-free and productive holiday season:
This is the first in a series of blogs about things YOU can do to make it easier for your development shop to get consistently great results and predictable levels of growth, by improving the way you manage things.
Tired of donor prospects who promise much but deliver little? Wasting time on donors who can't seem to make up their minds? No surprise. Raising major gifts (or major anythings) is hard work. Plus it's even tougher when your "prospects" turn out to be DOA - dead on arrival. They don't really have the money. They don't really love your mission. Or they just don't like you, personally. Sigh.
As all good fundraising managers know, raising money requires heavy-duty attention to ROI – return on investment. And the stakes go up when you’re looking for major gifts. Today's blog is a guest post from our official partners at DonorSearch, the experts in prospect research.
This is the fourth in our series on fundraising management. Last time we talked about Three Major Duties of Great Fundraising Management. This time we’ll discuss the must have management tools for your teams fundraising success.
This is the third article in our series on fundraising management. This time, we’ll discuss how good management practices remove obstacles to success. This is one of the three majorduties of management. And by the way, we’ll reveal (gasp!) the difference between management and “managers.”
What's missing in Moves Management? In most sales organizations, Moves Management would simply be called “Account Planning,” which is how big companies handle their major, national, or global accounts.
This is the first in a series of posts on the question of fundraising management, an issue I believe will revolutionize fundraising as we know it; as long as we understand and adopt the concept.
Why conduct a development audit? What is it anyway?
Development audits are in-depth analyses of what's happening in your fundraising shop - and what some people in the organization think is happening (or not). Opinions about such audits run the gamut from hate, fear and distrust to enthusiasm and delight at insights gained. We recently launched our new SMART Way Development Audit, and tailored it to respond to both the "delight" party and the "hate, fear and distrust" party.
Since we're addicted to research, we surveyed nonprofit professionals about their opinions on audits. Here's what we discovered:
- The two things people FEAR THE MOST about Development Audits
- WHY people want to conduct Development Audits, in spite of their fears
- Whose voices SHOULD BE HEARD when doing these audits, and...
- Are Development Audits just another way for fundraising consultants to wangle more money out of their clients??
If you'd like to see our video series on this topic, check it out here.
