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strategy

Speed Dating Is Not the Path to a Great Board

around the tabelA great board should be a force multiplier filled with “connectors to mission-critical constituents” as Jon Glaudemans of Ascension Health says.  People who know and care about our mission and organization.  Leaders who have integrity, grit, empathy, humility and the will to succeed on behalf of the people, beliefs and planet we serve. Generous people inspired by what we do, wise workers and committed philanthropic investors.

Yeah, right.  Are you rolling your eyes or wiping them because you believe in the list but have no hope of getting there? (more…)

Karen Osborne

Fundraiser, are you too busy to change the world?

email timeI wonder if, like me, you sometimes feel this modern world is going just too fast? Perhaps, as I am, you’re increasingly coming to doubt that the many technological advances of our times are actually making our lives easier and better, like they promised they would? By any chance, does your daily email mountain also seem to you ever harder to climb and less interesting to boot, as mine does? Or does it trouble you, as it does me, that while you can now be reached by telephone pretty much wherever you happen to be, (more…)

Ken Burnett Ken Burnett

So you want to grow your income? Use the C word…

GrowthAt =mc we’ve been working a lot recently on fundraising and income growth strategies with a range of agencies- from global ones like UNICEF to national ones like AIDS Fonds/Stop Aids Now! in Holland. We’re also helping a number of local museums in the UK cope with local government cutbacks.

The strategies we were discussing for these agencies were obviously very different and were designed to deliver very different outcomes. (more…)

Bernard Ross

Don’t forget your pen: Do’s and don’ts of digital fundraising

I spent my entire summer in a summer course studying digital innovation with a bunch of 19-20 year old university undergrads. Apart from making me feel very, very old, they also taught me a few very valuable lessons.

Watching them all getting writers cramps one by one during the written exam – which at the LSE is a deliciously 20th century style affair done by pen and paper – taught me the most valuable lesson of all: It is dangerous to abandon your analogue skills even in a digital world. (more…)

Maia Kahlke Mikkelsen

Dear Fundraiser: What, exactly, is Your “Product”?

I’ve been reading Peter Drucker lately.  In case you don’t know, Peter Drucker was one of the first management gurus of the 50’s, and one of the most influential of all times.  As Mr. Drucker got older, he turned his talents to nonprofits, first opening a foundation for nonprofit management, and then donating his own time and energy to the social sector. His book, Managing the Nonprofit Organization, first published in 1990, was a seminal work in our field.

In 2005, just after he died, Bloomsberg News posted a fundraising challenge to the NGO world:  “Convert donors into contributors”,  Drucker had said in his last days.  “If nonprofit groups are to acquire more financial resources, those who give will need to feel more like participants.”

So, has this advice from the sage of NGO management held up? Are today’s NGOs creating more – or better – donors using methods of “engagement”?   It’s definitely the buzzword of the social-media decade,  but is it working?  Or rather, how is it playing out? (more…)

Mitchell Hinz

Isn’t it just a little too easy to opt out of charitable giving?

Surely we all want to be charitable, to make a difference with the small amount of money we can spare each month? It’s not even that it’s a selfless gift… signing-up to donate to charity on a regular basis makes us feel good and, provided it’s a cause we’re aligned to, provides a whole new area for research, reflection and discussion (who knows, we may even encourage our friends and family to commit to the cause too). (more…)

Emma Jhita

Fundraising on the edge

Just because they make verbs out of intuition and alchemy doesn’t mean they don’t know what they’re about.

 

I’m sitting in a circle of nine apparently sane people at a beach resort just outside San Diego, California and I’ve just been passed the talking stick. As I grasp its fur-covered handle the eagle’s feather attached to the other end wiggles slightly, indicating that I have to speak. I’m told I have to end my thought, which I’m not allowed to prepare in advance, by saying ‘I have spoken’, to which in unison the group will respond ‘A-ho’, Native American for ‘So you have’. In the near background a barefooted guy with bells on his feet is playing a didgeridoo. These are so-called ‘wisdom circles’ and I’m in a workshop on transforming philanthropy, where on their business cards the organisers have job titles such as the questor, the integrator, the potentiator, the torchbearer and the tribal chief. Fear grips me as I grip the talking stick and wonder ‘What, in the name of sanity, am I doing here?

(more…)

Ken Burnett Ken Burnett

The ‘F’ word

Taking risks and failure go with the territory. (Image © francesconegri) Coming back to the office after IFC, I made an overarching discovery that touches on everything else I learned: I am terrified of failure. Read more…

Alison McCants