2016 is ending not completely without marvel for me. Two great things happened last week. First, on December 16, the family of Canadian philanthropists Larry and Judy Tanenbaum donated $20 million to create the Tanenbaum Read more…
On Sunday, Katharine (comms manager) and I represented Save the Children Canada at the Patron’s Lunch. The largest-ever street party on The Mall, The Royal Family made philanthropy and patronage a centrepiece of The Queen’s Read more…
This Monday, March 28, I’m reporting to work in my new role as Chief Development Officer for Save the Children Canada. It’s been more than a year since I left my last full-time staff position. Read more…
You mean there’s a name for this? Said by me, exactly one year ago. I’d just guest-lectured at Humber College on the topic of crisis communications in war zones and natural disasters. The professor, Ken Read more…
We’re The Ripple Refugee Project, a group of private citizens in Toronto who’ve come together because we want to help refugee families start new lives in Canada.And under Canada’s Private Sponsorship of Refugees Program, that Read more…
With a young family, my wife and I decided we couldn’t support Ebola in the field by me going to West Africa, so she suggested we embrace the Walk Without Borders campaign instead! We fundraised Read more…
South Africa. A beautiful, complicated country that’s only recently emerged from a very difficult past. In terms of fundraising, it’s considered an emerging market. From the story and webinar below, I hope fundraisers around the Read more…
Our 101fundraising community has lately been blogging and talking a lot about fundraising leadership: the emerging and the stale, the breathtaking and the reprehensible. I now want to pivot the conversation from managing up to Read more…
The best leaders I’ve had in my career have been surgeons, academics, arts administrators, software sales executives, and humanitarians. Most have been brilliant. The fundraisers, by and large, have not. Now, this could just be Read more…
My eyes follow Maestro’s baton up… and…. down. SPLEE-AAAAAH! (The cacking sound no French horn player wants to make, also known as a clam.) Tap tap tapping on the podium. Concentrate. Hear the note you’re Read more…
When we asked Helen Upperton to fundraise for MSF Canada, we also offered her the support and guidance of our fundraising and communications teams. I figured the two-time bobsleigh Olympian and silver medalist could learn Read more…
My dearest family, friends, fundraisers, and donors: In his 2010 Christmas letter, a donor wrote Count that day lost whose low descending sun sees at thy hand no worthy action done. This appears in the Read more…
I think that if I was writing fiction instead of remembering something that happened, I would never have given her that dress. – Alice Munro, “Voices” We’re in the high holy days of Ontariocottaging right Read more…
In 2011, I helped raise $30 million. In 2012, I helped raise $300,000. And I was just as proud. This was when I was on maternity leave. Toronto city council voted to close a number Read more…
Once, twelve days into a new fiscal year, we threw out the annual plan.
Fundraisers love – and should love – their strategic and annual plans. We need plans. Then sometimes we need new ones. This is a blog post about agile planning, and thinking less linearly about the planning cycle.
Admittedly, the time we threw out the playbook was a dramatic one: Haiti. January 12, 2010. We all know the story: the earthquake and its horrible loss of life. 300,000 acutely injured, 1.5 million homeless. A minute after the earthquake, MSF/Doctors Without Borders launched the largest rapid emergency response in our history. (more…)
One morning last December I went to outer space and plucked a star. We named her Beatrix.
She’s our first, and I’d not had much exposure to newborns before. Even less on how to care for one.
Bea and I’ve taken many long walks these past five months (moves management, verily) and I’ve had time to think back over my twenty-year fundraising career, and if there was anything there that could teach me to be a parent. More interestingly to my colleagues and team, how would giving birth and nurturing a newborn shape my leadership style back at work? (more…)
Today’s post is a morsel.
Short and sweet, it’s a petit four or, if you’re more of a savoury person, a piece ofbleu benedictinto finish a sumptuous year of blogging on101fundraising.org, our crowdblog.
A year ago next weekthe very first blog postwas published on this site. Since then, many more fundraisers have written, shared, and debated on many aspects of our profession: the theoretical, technical, and ideological. I have no agency to speak on behalf of anyone but myself, and so I thank you personally, Reinier and Jeroen, the Men in Black, for your genius and hard hard hard work bringing fundraisers of the world together in this space. And of course a multitude of thanks to my fellow crowdbloggers: your content has enriched my professional practice.
Now.
On the subject of thank you’s, today’s blog post subject: a quick case study on email subject lines. (more…)
September 12, 2011
Dear Mr. Lipsyte,
Loved “The Ask”!
I’ve reviewed it, and wonder if you’d write a few words in response? We in the development world are really curious about your career choice for the protagonist, and how you researched the hard details of the profession.
I know the book has been reviewed extensively, but I can’t find one done by a fundraiser like me. Again, we’d really appreciate your perspective.
Yours,
Rebecca (more…)
Thank you so much for the wonderful chance to really feel a part of what is happening in Haiti! These workers are real, sincere, ordinary people with the right training who work on behalf of our pittance donated to help the people in distress. Thank you so much for having enabled us to listen as the team told of their work in such an ongoing needy situation of our confreres in Haiti. Sincerely, a Donor, Oakville, Ontario
I hosted a donor accountability webinar last year. Like the curate’s egg, some parts of it were excellent, others, not so much.
Here it is:
(Click here if the embedded video is not working.)
That night I dreamed I was an indentured servant in colonial Philadelphia. Somehow, even in the dream, I sensed that I had once been a development officer in post-Colonial New York City.
We need every drop of philanthropy we can get. We must fasten our lips to the spigot and suck, so to speak.
“The Ask” – Sam Lipsyte
I’m blogging today from the land of the silver birch, home of the beaver, where still the mighty moose wanders at will. What you call your own ‘where’ — camp, cabin, or cottage — depends on what part of Canada you’re from, but everyone’s destination looks pretty much the same: blue lake and rocky shore, family and friends, sunsets on the dock. And above all, in a Canadian camp/cabin/cottage there are books. The swollen and musty throwback paperbacks permanent to your camp/cabin/cottage and that you’d only read, for reasons both pragmatic and snobby, in that context (“Mrs. John Albert Jr.’s Guide to Making Soap out of Wild Game Fat”, “Summer Sisters” by Judy Blume). And, of course of most of all, those books you’ve saved all year to read at the lake.
Show me a fundraiser who thinks they’ve solved integrated campaigning and I’ll show you someone who whistles past the graveyard.
What exactly constitutes an integrated campaign, anyway? Is it simply having a landing page that looks a lot like your direct mail piece? And why do it? From a fundraisers’ perch, the answer to both questions is…money. Integrated campaigns can raise the money you need to meet your revenue objectives. They do this by using complementary channels, which create multiple levels of exposure and engagement points influencing your donors to action. Donate Now is a good one; Unsubscribe, not so good. (more…)
Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bells tolls; it tolls for thee. – John Donne
There’s an interesting exchange happening right now between MSF Canada and our donors, a phenomenon I think would be interesting to fundraisers outside of the humanitarian-NGO arena and that I’d like your opinion on. MSF Canada donors are again being stress-tested by us, the very organization many Canadians look towards as an outlet for their compassion in times of sudden crisis, most recently and specific to this post, last month’s cataclysmic earthquake and tsunami in Japan. If our doctors’ acts of vaccination and surgery are their humanitarian tools, then the donations our supporters make are theirs. And so how do donors feel when MSF tells them we do not accept earmarked gifts for the catastrophe in Japan? Do we wrest from them a degree of solidarity with the Japanese people in asking for unrestricted donations?
As a relationship professional, I’m a big fan of Alexander Graham Bell’s electronic speech machine(*), the latter-day telephone.
My mantra when communicating with major donors: phone first. Phone first. Ph f. (Soothing, isn’t it?)
Email and letters don’t allow for the bilateral conversations our donors and prospects deserve for their generosity. The best “touches” by phone aren’t end-games of trivial information or data collection, either. The goal of every call you make should be to begin, advance or deepen a new or long-term relationship between your prospect/donor, you the fundraiser, and your organization.
The secondary goal of every phone call is to move beyond the business at hand – the hook – to get your donor/prospect to articulate what they need from you to further engage with your organization. The language and approach can be the same for loyal donors and discovery prospects: “I welcome the opportunity to update you on where we stand today, and our goals for the year.”
Years ago when I stepped on the tee box to play my first round of golf, I assumed success. My swing, short game and putting were decent after months of practice at the driving range. But that day my game never took off to even be able to fall apart. I knew the rules and had reliable shots – all the necessarytransactions to the game. I did not, however, know the etiquette of golf: the social behaviours that enhance the experience and sport, and expose a novice like I was then. I talked. A lot. I constantly walked in front of others’ lines on the green, and my club must still be at the bottom of that pond. Of course I was never invited out by that group again. In recreational golf, technique is necessary as a point of entry but is not enough.Values-based behaviour is as important to succeeding at the game as having a consistent fairway shot. (more…)
