Fundraising's freshest thinkers take on the sector's toughest topics

By Margaret Battistelli Gardner

We need to be encouraging board members, and that can be scary because they start asking questions. But I think it makes for a much stronger organization.

One quick example: I was a one-person fundraising shop at a hospital. I had a financial planner on my board look at me and say, “The 17,000 people on our direct-mail database get the same exact letter?” I said, “Yes, they do.” He said, “I would go out of business if I did that. I need to know that my target …” and he started defining the target market for his business, and he said, “Why don’t we segment?”