Public Relations

Don't ever forget to market yourself. You are your most important product and key to your ultimate institutional success. No less than 100 percent daily effort will do. People are watching you—and you set your own performance bar.

A man dressed in jeans and a rumpled shirt walked into the lobby and asked to see the executive director. Thankfully the receptionist greeted him and found the executive director who was willing to go out and greet the plainly dressed visitor. It is a good thing she did—he proceeded to give her a check.

Did you take the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge? Even if you didn’t, I’ll bet you at least talked about it. Sure, the crazy-viral, social-media-based fundraiser has its critics. But come on! It was creative. It was fun. It was engaging. It was nothing short of a phenomenon! Wow!

One real reason renewal rates, retention rates and long-term loyalty stubbornly remain so abysmally low is because donor scepticism has been left to fester. What an opportunity.

Yes, we need to keep developing networks of peers and supporting each other. We need to keep patting ourselves on the back and giving out awards for excellence and "badges of awesomeness." However, I think the time has come for us to do more. We must start 
to change the negative public perception of this 
profession.

An innovative capcity-building grant from Sutter Medical Center, Sacramento helps small nonprofits learn to become self-sustaining organizations built for the long haul.

Here are six more online fundraising communications takeaways gleaned from the 2010 elections.

Here are three of the main ways marketing was turned on its head in 2010, and what that means for fundraisers.

It's 2010, and it's getting easier to tell the story about the people you serve. All you need is a cheap Flip Video camera, a social-media platform and a few solid questions to ask. The story is just waiting to be told. Unfortunately, it's much harder to tell a story your donors will identify with.

At the 2010 Bridge Conference in National Harbor, Md., last Wednesday, Tony Elischer, managing director of Think Consulting Solutions, said fundraisers should focus on the third “R” — rewriting, as in rewriting how you think and how you fundraise. To do that, he proposed looking at fundraising as four babies — brave baby, baby and the bathwater, looking to the future baby, and fully managed baby — in his keynote presentation, “Futurology 2010: Focus, Determination & Transformation."