Annual Campaigns

With the new year comes a sense of looking forward and leaving the past behind. You’ve just finished the year-end appeal and will now gear up for the next fundraising project. But not so fast—sorry to say, your year-end fund drive is not over. It’s actually never over. Let’s talk about some of the reasons…

It’s a busy time of year—for you and your donors. To get the most out of the effort you’re putting in to your campaigns, it’s important to focus in on the key elements that will move supporters to act and give before the ball drops on New Year’s Eve. Your mission: to stand out, inspire,…

The Pittsburgh Foundation raised more than $1 million to fight homelessness Tuesday in record time—four hours. This week marks the foundation's third Critical Needs Alert fundraising campaign. The focus is on solutions to addressing homelessness and housing insecurity. The online donation portal PittsburghGives.org opened at 8 a.m. By noon, more than 1,200 individual donors had…

With consumers shifting their shopping online and their in-store purchasing from cash to plastic, The Salvation Army’s familiar red kettle campaign isn’t the reliable source of donations it once was for the nonprofit. Local Salvation Army chapters, which on average raise between 40 to 50 percent of their annual budgets during the holiday season, are…

You know that you should have a solid communications calendar in place, one that combines touches with direct asks throughout the year. But if your organization relies on its year-end direct-mail appeals to raise the majority of its funding, here are seven tips to get you headed in the right direction...

If you’ve been on Wikipedia at any point last week, you probably noticed a dramatic, black-and-yellow banner plastered atop your screen: “DEAR WIKIPEDIA READERS,” it begins in all caps—before launching into a desperate, paragraph-long pitch for money. The banner heralds the start of the Wikimedia Foundation’s December fundraising drive, an annual Internet tradition as reliable…

Giving Tuesday, a charitable initiative that uses social media as its catalyst, raised nearly $117 million in online donations, a jump of 155 percent over last year, according to preliminary calculations exclusively provided to Reuters by the event's organizers. In the 24 hours starting at midnight Eastern time on Tuesday, U.S. charities reported receiving 1.08 million…

One day after Wreaths Across America told WTOP it still needed 8,000 wreaths to be able to afford putting one on each headstone at Arlington National Cemetery, the nonprofit has reached its goal. “We are very humbled by the response from so many and in such a short amount of time,” said organization chairman Wayne…

The Marine Corps League, organizing the annual "Toys for Tots" toy drive for families in need in the Reno/Sparks area, said local Wal-Mart stores have removed donation boxes from area locations. The group said it had donation boxes set up at area Wal-Mart locations, but has now learned that Wal-Mart has removed those boxes. A…

#GivingTuesday is almost here. You’ve spent countless hours planning your campaigns, crafting the perfect emails, prepping your donation pages, fashioning the perfect tweets (the day does have its own hashtag, after all). So, will it serve as a way to get those wily, social media-savvy millennials involved in philanthropy?...