LW Robbins Associates

Even in a “healthy” fundraising program, only 30 percent of newly acquired donors give again after their original gift! What can you do to keep more of your new donors interested in your cause and eager to support you again and again? You have a critical window of opportunity to motivate donors to give a second gift — usually within three months of their first gifts. As more time passes, it’s less and less likely that new donors will give again. But if they do, they’re much more likely to turn into generous, loyal supporters. Here are five essential things you must do

Fundraisers who want board members and upper management singing the praises of direct-response fundraising have to convert them. In the session “Managing Up: Helping Your Board and Senior Management Become Direct Response Evangelists” during the 2008 New York Nonprofit Conference earlier this month, co-presenter Bryan Terpstra, vice president of client services for Holliston, Mass.-based direct-response marketing firm L.W. Robbins Associates, said that fundraisers must change board members’ minds by speaking their language. First and foremost, fundraisers who want board members on their side need to avoid fundraising jargon. Board members and senior managers can’t relate to terms like “donor retention” and “donor pyramid,”

Let me preface this by saying that I’ve been told that I’m too hard on myself (and, unfortunately, on everyone around me — but that’s another story). I hope you’ll agree (with the first part, anyway) when I fess up to the misgivings I’ve been having about some of our editorial content. I’m mainly talking about our weekly e-letter, the FS Advisor, and our newest e-letter, Giving 2.0. We’ve been rather short-staffed for what seems like forever, and I’ve been losing sleep (yes, literally — how sad is that?) over the fact that a lot of our e-letter content has been picked up

When violence erupted in Kenya in late December 2007 following disputed national election results, relief organization Medical Assistance Programs International quickly launched a multipronged response. The MAP relief team rushed emergency blankets, food, lifesaving medicines and basic health care to meet the immediate survival needs of up to 10,000 people in the Kibera slums outside of Nairobi, one of the hardest-hit areas.

There’s a lot to be said about failure. Mainly that it stinks. No, seriously — failure helps you appreciate success a little more, right? And on a less existential level, it can teach you a lot about what not to do next time around. That’s no more apparent than in the world of direct-mail fundraising efforts. And from what we hear, it happens to the best of them. So to prove you’re not alone when one of your ideas isn’t as all-fire successful as you had hoped, here are a few failure stories from fundraising pros. Hear Ye, Hear Ye … Don’t Traumatize Your

Editor’s Note: What’s changed in the fundraising landscape over the past year, and what’s ahead for fundraisers in 2008? To find out, we hosted a virtual roundtable with four fundraising professionals whose names you probably know.

In a recent post on the DMA Nonprofit Federation’s Integrator blog (www.nonprofitintegrator.org), Christopher Noble of LW Robbins Associates summed up the session on DRTV at the New York Nonprofit Conference: “A few of the things that stuck-out for me in this session were: * The changing landscape of TV consumption has evolved with DVR technology like TiVo, which allows viewers to by-pass your commercial — this is a key challenge for this medium. * Your telemarketing partner is a very critical component of success in DRTV campaigns. They need to be on 24/7 while your infomercial is running, they need to have multiple sites,

Ah … it was a great run. But a tricky one. For the past few years, I’ve been wrestling with the challenge of letting FundRaising Success Senior Editor Abny Santicola do her thing without the rest of the Target Marketing Group catching on to how fabulous she is.

Wow! Who ever thought the Gold Awards could be so exciting? The sun was setting on judgement day, and we had a tie for Package of the Year. A first! So, I polled our four judges — Steve Froehlich, director of development analytics at the ASPCA; Tim O’Leary, vice president of McPherson Associates; Paul Bobnak, director of North American Publishing Co.’s Who’s Mailing What! Archive; and FS Senior Editor Abny Santicola. After some soul searching and spirited debate, they weighed in: two for one package and the other two for the other package.

Nonprofit direct-response fundraising programs historically have centered around one channel, usually direct mail. But as other channels become more viable and new ones emerge — can you say W-E-B? — innovative organizations have become aggressive in incorporating them into their fundraising mix.