Mal Warwick Associates

As FundRaising Success gears up for the ninth annual Gold Awards for Fundraising Excellence, take a look back last year's Grand Control of the Year from Union of Concerned Scientists.

In fundraising direct mail, the letter is the thing. You have just a matter of seconds to grab the reader’s attention — or wind up in the trash bin. We scanned Who’s Mailing What!, the world’s largest library of direct-mail and e-mail samples, to share with you these top fundraising letters and the stories behind them.

FundRaising Success announces the winner of the 2013 Gold Awards for Fundraising Excellence Grand Control of the Year: Union of Concerned Scientists.

Ted Hart speaks with fundraising guru Mal Warwick, founder and chairman of Mal Warwick Associates, in this archived episode of his Nonprofit Coach radio show.

Blackbaud announced the availability of Loyalty Insights and Lapsed Insights data services, designed to help nonprofits better understand their prospective donors based on behavioral segmentation. The services are the first of their kind available to the nonprofit market and are the latest offerings from Target Analytics, a Blackbaud company, which offers solutions for donor acquisition, prospect research, donor benchmarking, custom modeling, and data enrichment services to more than 6,000 nonprofits.

It was a big year for the Gold Awards, folks! 2010 marked the year with the largest number of entries to date. All told, the 108 submissions represented 15 nonprofit organizations and 30 agencies. We're thrilled, and want to say congratulations to the winners and thank you to everyone who participated.

There’s no denying that the recession is adversely affecting most, if not all, nonprofit organizations — whether they care to admit it or not. Donors are harder to come by, dollars are being spread thinner and fundraisers are feeling the pinch.

Fundraising today is a mixed bag where results for some organizations are down, others are holding steady, and still others are at record highs. And falling acquisition rates seem to be the norm almost across the board.

Still, most major organizations are resisting cuts in fundraising, and many top nonprofits are stepping up efforts online — all sound reactions to these shaky economic times, said Mal Warwick, founder and chairman of direct-response fundraising firm Mal Warwick Associates, in his session "Fighting the Recession With Online Tools" last week at the first International Fundraising eConference May 12 to 14, which was held completely online.

Donors want newsletters. Research has told us so. But most donor newsletters go unread. In last month’s Forum For Fundraising webinar on creating highly profitable donor newsletters, Tom Ahern, principal at Ahern | Communications | Ink, explained the disconnect and the reader psychology behind it, told attendees how to speak to donors' personalities, and shared some key secrets behind great donor newsletters.

The Resource Alliance (RA) is announcing the launch of IFC Online — a virtual fundraising conference that will take place on May 12-14, 2009