When making an organizational shift, we almost always want to start with a process, a thing that is easy to see and, hopefully, immediate in its impact. The place to begin, however, is with understanding the principles that are involved and operating in the situation.
For many organizations, it's easy to take that initial credit card transactions contract for granted and basically forget about it. But that may be a mistake, as many nonprofits pay higher rates than they need to, meaning less money going to the mission and more money going to payment processing fees.
Although the outcomes of any given fundraising effort cannot be known with absolute certainty, assessing the probability of success isn't entirely guesswork, either.
How can you understand the communication experience your donors are having if you don't have it all written down?
We believe that managers actually need to manage their major-gifts officers. Sadly, the state of management in the nonprofit sector is sorely lacking. It's just very rare to come across a good manager who really knows how to develop people.
Stopping a downward spiral is doable — but not without investing time and effort, and enduring some short-term pain.
It takes an investment of time and money and a commitment of focus to achieve transformational fundraising results. But isn't that what your mission deserves?
How do you handle donor requests to be removed from your list? This may surprise some of you, but, "Duh! We remove them!" isn't always the right answer. Given that your donor file is so valuable, a well-thought-out strategy is needed for responding in a way that both honors the donor's intent and safeguards your asset.
When we cave in and take shortcuts, we truly shortchange the project at hand, the mission of our organization, those we serve, ourselves and our noble profession!
Am I too old or just not opening my eyes to see the fundraising opportunity of Bitcoin?
