The Management Centre

Fundraisers spend time and resources creating messages for cases, proposals and campaigns. But how many of them actually stick?

In his session "Sticky Ideas: How to Make Your Fundraising Messages Powerful and Persuasive" at the 2009 Bridge Conference held last week near Washington, D.C., consultant Bernard Ross defined what makes ideas stick, why sticky ideas work and why they're essential to fundraising, and how they can be applied by fundraisers in their work with donors, board members and others.

Every fundraiser has his or her tried-and-true bag of tricks. But in this day of donors seeking to be more actively involved with the charities they support, it might be time to bury those bags and try a fresh approach.

You’ve almost certainly had the meeting. You know, the one about how to survive the crunch, the crisis, the catastrophe — or whatever you want to call it. The meeting where you probably were uncertain about what to do and even about what the impact might be on your organization. Maybe the only thing everyone agreed on was that it’s a difficult situation in fundraising at the moment with few clear answers on how to survive.