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While freezing temperatures continue to chill many in the U.S., the boys of summer have nevertheless returned for the start of the 2016 baseball season. What better way to mark the occasion than drawing a parallel between the baseball book and movie, "Moneyball," and fundraising? OK, enjoying a hot dog and beer at a ballpark…

Some readers will say a newsletter is old-fashioned and irrelevant, but I believe it is one important tool...

Your donors are constantly on the move. On a daily basis, they need to: Pay the bills. Make lunches. Drop off the kids at school. Meet work deadlines. Pick up the kids. Drive to soccer practice. Cook dinner. Do laundry. And that’s just Monday! There’s hardly a second to breathe, much less time to write,…

Millennials are now the largest working generation in the U.S., and their habits are very different than those of earlier generations. Direct marketers who have constructed an email program to address earlier generational cohorts will find that their campaigns increasingly fall flat without some key strategic changes. Social and mobile media are much more popular…

I have a favorite charity that regularly demands I buy from it, but rarely asks that I support it. Since September, I have received 23 emails from this organization. Eight of those emails had the word "buy" or a cash prize for something in the subject line...

I must confess that I’m the kind of gal who wraps my gifts in newspaper because "it’s what’s inside that matters" and why waste resources? And too often I applied this same misguided philosophy to sending out fundraising emails. I just didn’t spend much time on the subject line. I didn’t spend much time tracking open rates either...

Ah, April—flowers blooming, birds chirping, and mailboxes and inboxes overflowing. But wait, there’s something new—the seasonal arrival of requests to fund a school event, mission trip, service project or a similar extracurricular activity for a Gen Y or Gen Z overachiever...

When you reflect on how your own mission isn’t an easy sell, remember that running for president in this country is not for the faint of heart. The cost of running in this year’s election could potentially reach $5 billion! What’s a candidate who bases his very message on refusing to accept corporate contributions to do? Here are some key takeaways from Sanders’ email fundraising campaign...

You don’t need to be an email marketing expert to know that you don’t want people to unsubscribe from your emails. However, an unsubscribe isn’t the end of the world. In fact, it can actually serve as a helpful signal. For example, if you notice that your unsubscribe rate is starting to climb, it might…

Recognition is at the heart of everything Turnkey provides for peer-to-peer clients. Recognition manifests in many forms—products, personal outreach, social media call outs, thank-you notes and more. The whole point of recognition is to install and reinforce a self-label...