By its nature, a crowdblog is a collective of ideas, case studies, best practices, and informed debate. But at its best, a crowdblog is an incubator of ideas, predications, innovation, and a rowdy good time Read more…
The year just passed will probably get, and deserve, some colourful descriptors from fundraisers, most of them uncomplimentary. In Britain particularly it was uncomfortable, to say the least. But as the year ended a number Read more…
Growth-oriented nonprofits will “discover” donor-centricity. In the quest for improved revenues, charities will switch from so-called “corporate” communications (where the organization is the hero; it’s how you raise the least amount of money) in favor Read more…
Happy new year! We wish you the best 2016 you can imagine! Before we share the Top 50 best blog posts of 2015, we want to thank our readers, bloggers, donors and 101 team. First of all, Read more…
Just before the holiday season starts we want to present you the best blog posts of the last quarter. And they are good. Half of this Top 10 is in response to everything that is happening in the Read more…
Christmas is coming and during the next month or so the final edits of this year’s TV appeals will be finished, cold mailings will be sent to fulfilment houses and telephone banks will be priming Read more…
Put your hand on your heart. This time last year did you honestly think fundraising was doing well? If your answer is ‘yes’ stop reading. Come back in the 5-10 years it’ll take you to Read more…
Please turn yourself into your Grandmother. This might be hard if she is no longer with us. I only met one of my Grandmothers and she was run over and killed by a Rolls Royce Read more…
… and one simple answer. The greatest fundraisers asked and answered only four questions, repeatedly, for a long time. These questions are: 1. How do we make our proposition even better? 2. How do we Read more…
It’s the busiest time of the fundraising year. We’re leveraging the giving spirit of the holiday season and the tax benefits of the end of the calendar year, and we’ve got appeals and asks coming Read more…
A couple of years’ ago, a wise and brilliant friend, also a fundraiser, said to me over coffee: ‘Relationship Fundraising only needed to be written because the invention of databases meant fundraising could be done Read more…
Apparently if you put a frog in a pot of boiling water it will jump out. Yet put a frog in a pot of water and gradually heat it up the frog will not jump out Read more…
Good news for major gift fundraisers: major donors feel (way) more engaged than NGOs think. Apart from giving money, major donors want to invest their time in, and share their network with, NGOs. Also, the Read more…
Pay it Forward I landed my first job in fundraising as an unprepared novice with big responsibilities and a bottom line to achieve. For the past seven years, I’d been home raising two children, doing Read more…
Think of some things that you would consider unethical for a fundraiser to do. You probably came up with stuff such as putting pressure on donors, making them feel guilty, targeting vulnerable people, using shock Read more…
On the real and virtual high streets of the UK, John Lewis – an employee owned UK department store – owns Christmas. The launch of the John Lewis Christmas advert has become an important part Read more…
A lot happens in one year… In 2014, I posted an article on the Top 5 Questions fundraisers should be asking in a job interview. Not realizing, at the time, I would get to put 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…
~Numerous Jedi Masters have translated this post from Yoda’s unique way of speaking to improve reading ease.~ There is much Dark Side fundraising being done in our sector. Yet no one fundraiser is to blame. Read more…
The Resource Alliance’s International Fundraising Congress is hands down the best investment a fundraiser can make in their career and themselves. Every year, some of the best minds in fundraising gather in Noordwijk to elevate Read more…
What a difference a year makes – last year I was in Malaysia working with a brilliant Buddhist charity that helps orphans and elderly people sadly neglected, when the ice-bucket challenge hit and all the Read more…
With so much concern about how the charity sector treats donors and those it hopes will become supporters, suddenly the donor is right there in the spotlight. What do donors want? How can we meet Read more…
Some years ago, I had a charity Board insist that my fundraising programme should deliver a return on investment, or fundraising ratio, of 4:1; that is, not cost more than 25% of gross income. On Read more…
One of my long term mantra’s has been to ‘use windows, not mirrors’, a simple way of reminding myself that truly to move forward, be in line with the market place and to have any Read more…
‘Two weeks of my time, completely wasted!’ The frustration was evident on the face of the corporate fundraiser. She had been telling me she had known from the start that the partnership she’d been told Read more…
