Donor Relationship Management

Before organizations can properly engage women as donors, they need to assess their own readiness and capacity for cultivating them.

Great news! Your organization made it another year without a major disaster. No one spent your endowment funds on gin and Jacuzzis. No one hacked into your donor files, and, as far as you know, your celebrity spokesperson still wears underwear when she’s out in public.

How are you feeling about that headline? What if I went on to say, “And I wrote a really good book about nonprofit marketing that you should definitely buy. It’s a work of staggering genius.”

When it comes to donor giving, what triggers big spending are benefits that convey social status and offer visibility through opportunities to connect with other affluent and influential people, according to new research from the Tepper School of Business at Carnegie Mellon University.

It might be teddy boys, old episodes of the children's programme Andy Pandy or the original Star Wars movies that make you feel nostalgic.

I recently came across an announcement that Do Something, an organization missioned to empower teens to make a difference in their communities, is accepting applications for its annual Do Something Awards. Bulleted at the top of the announcement were three questions: "Have you identified a social problem and done something about it? Have you created measurable change that has tangibly improved the lives of people in your community? Are you 25 or under?"

Pork roll. Man, I hate that stuff. I’ve tried it a few times, but I just can’t get it down. Does it bother me that I can’t find an appreciation for it? Being a true-blue foodie, sure. Can I live with my anti-pork-roll predilection? Yes. I still manage to sleep pretty well at night knowing that lips that touch pork roll will never touch mine. (That’s not necessarily true, but it did have a nice little lilt to it, no?)

When I was new to fundraising, one thing about direct mail really bugged me: response rates. I’d look at the 5 percent to 8 percent response rates that are common and think, “That’s fine, but what about the 92 percent to 95 percent failure rate?”

Ask any direct-mail fundraiser, and she’ll tell you that the average donor age is approximately 60.* Sixty-year-olds give the most money and make up the bulk of volunteers. They also are most likely to serve on nonprofit boards.

Back in December, I wrote that the one thing I wanted to know before donating to a nonprofit was whether it was achieving its goals. Since it's hard to find that information, I was happy to see that Charity Navigator is exploring how to integrate data on outcomes — progress in achieving goals — into its notoriously distorted rating system for nonprofits. This has the potential to increase the total social good produced by the sector: Rating nonprofits based on outcomes will direct more donor dollars to the nonprofits with the greatest positive impact and will encourage all nonprofits to improve their outcomes.