August 4, 2009, The Chronicle of Philanthropy — The home-repair and construction company Home Depot is pledging $30-million to help Habitat for Humanity International build affordable housing that is environmentally friendly.
ATLANTA, May 14, 2009, Associated Press — The housing market may be sputtering, but Habitat for Humanity International is getting a $100 million gift from an Atlanta developer who said his work has offered him a look at the struggle of poor people to find decent housing.
I’m beginning to think I’ve been placed on the equivalent of a No Fly List in one nonprofit’s direct-marketing database. Here’s what happened …
Judging for the Gold Awards was a little more low-key this year, it seems. (We think it might be because the ASPCA’s Steve Froehlich couldn’t make it. But please … don’t tell him we said so.) Also, there was no hotly contested tie for Package of the Year that had us seeking tiebreaker after tiebreaker like last year. But the competition was just as fierce.
Grueling is the word that crossed the lips of the intrepid judges for our 2006 Gold Awards for Fundraising Excellence as they made their way out of our offices one hot afternoon in August.
Not that we’re particularly demanding taskmasters, but the competition was, indeed, fierce. Much to our glee, it grew from 33 packages in 2005 to nearly 90 this year (sent in by 21 agencies and four nonprofit organizations). Some of the categories remained the same, but we added a few and tweaked a few others.
Few organizations make constituents feel as much a part of the mission as Habitat for Humanity does. That involvement is intrinsic to its mission. A Christian organization dedicated to eliminating substandard housing and homelessness throughout the world, Habitat relies both on financial support and help from volunteers in its effort to build homes. These are the two key components to achieving the goals of its mission. Without the funds, the houses wouldn’t be able to be built, nor would they be built were it not for volunteers’ helping hands. This mailing is a great display of how the organization connects donors to the home builds
Children are starving, but the show must go on. And if you're raising money to support a symphony, how do you convince donors that they should not only give to your cause — perhaps in lieu of helping hungry children — but also feel good about it?
A Three-Step Conversion Strategy FS Advisor: March 21, 2006 By Abny Santicola, editor, FundRaising Success Advisor In a presentation at the DMANF 2006 Washington Nonprofit Conference last month, representatives from the American Red Cross and Habitat for Humanity shared the multi-channel fundraising strategies that helped them raise massive amounts of money to respond to 2005’s various natural disasters. For both organizations, the multi-channel effort began with contacting donors via the method with which they seemed most comfortable. According to Tim Daugherty, Habitat’s senior director of direct marketing, the organization’s “Integrated Agency Campaign” was comprised of three parts: Step One: Reach out to donors via
As your mother said, saying “thank you” is really important. For nonprofit organizations, it’s essential. In fact, if you don’t express gratitude quickly and well, your donors are likely to give somewhere else.
By ELIZABETH KORSUN and ERIN DOLAN Even in the face of diminishing returns, fundraisers tend to stick with a “safe” group of prospect lists — in other words, donor files. But these days, if you’re only working with primary-market data to grow your membership, you’re fighting a war of attrition. What an organization really needs to flourish is new blood, an infusion of new people excited to learn about how it’s making the world a better place. Americans already have shown how spontaneously charitable they can be. A tremendous outpouring of support for tsunami victims came from a staggering number of American households,
