Creative

A complete list of the 2010 FundRaising Success Gold Awards winners.

It's lurking. It's close. And it's deadly. It forces hundreds of nonprofit organizations out of business every year. It robs even more organizations of their resources and leaves them foundering, unable to fully accomplish their missions. It destroys the careers of 
hundreds of hardworking and idealistic people.

During the first-ever FundRaising Success Virtual Conference & Expo held on May 20 (and available on-demand until Aug. 24), FS columnist and creative director at TrueSense Marketing Jeff Brooks provided 25 good ideas and even one bad one for fundraisers. Here is a rundown of his ideas from his session, “Feel the Power!”

These days, people are bombarded with messaging from every angle, and with their precious little free time, it's easier for donors to hit the delete button or toss their mail in the recycling. To reach donors, you have to break through the noise with relevant, attention-getting communications. And you must have a way to measure their impact as well.

Remember Goofus and Gallant? They're two boys, brothers maybe, whose morality tales in children's magazine Highlights (that mainstay of doctors' waiting rooms) had a profound impact on the moral and behavioral development of many a boomer-aged kid — though not always the way the authors intended. (They are also, I'm compelled to mention, 
registered trademarks of Highlights for Children Inc.)

1. Write the call to action before you do anything else. It's very un-Zen to say it, but fundraising is more about the destination than the journey. You're going to arrive a lot more successfully when you know exactly where you're going.

Small details matter in direct mail — and, down to the tiniest of them, this Boys Town Christmas appeal gets it right.

Sixty-second TV spot. Scene: A blighted urban landscape. Soulful music. Camera pans right, and we see something odd about the buildings. They're turning into structures made of gigantic playing cards, and they're collapsing. Like, well, like houses of cards. Voice-over talks about the scope of the housing crisis, not in human terms, but in numbers.

Compelling profiles —of constituents, volunteers or donors — are powerful tools that a nonprofit can use to motivate donors and other supporters by illuminating its mission, demonstrating success and providing public recognition.

Unfortunately, a lot of these profiles — which appear in newsletters, on Web sites, and in PR/marketing materials and annual reports, among other places — are just boring and fall victim to what Kivi Leroux Miller calls the "tedious bio syndrome." Here, she recommends steps organizations can take to create powerful profiles that go to work for their causes.