This is a question every nonprofit staff and board has at one time or another, and in this helpful guide, we will walk you through how to determine a goal that is challenging enough to grab the attention of your community, but not so large that it is unachievable.

Focus Your Efforts on a Campaign – Rather than spending time on many small and scattered fundraising efforts, a campaign helps rally more people behind a meaningful cause and creates a deadline to inspire action. Multi-year projects will always yield bigger results through the ability to ask for larger gifts, thus securing more and larger multi-year pledge commitments.

Chances are if you’re a non-profit fundraiser, you’re overworked, overwhelmed, and looking for a light at the end of a tunnel filled with annual appeals, donor demands, and operational needs. Is a fundraising consultant the light at the end of the tunnel? Quite possibly!

Look at the calendar and map out a timeline for your year-end activities remembering that most electronic messages can be scheduled in advance. Don’t plan so much that you can’t execute it well if you’re just starting now, but pick 4 activities, integrate them into one theme and do them well! Do something that will result in revenue coming in the door every week during the month of December.

There are a few basic boxes to check before you make your ask, and they’re sure to give you the confidence you need to be bold in asking for the support needed to further your organization’s mission.

We are huge proponents for saying thank you to our donors, and have written at length about why demonstrating gift impact is important and how to retain your donors by saying "thank you" effectively. Thanking your donors and interacting with them continuously throughout the year is paramount if you want to continue to give to your nonprofit, but we want to distinguish the difference between stewardship and recognition.

A nonprofit culture of philanthropy is your organization's collective perception and participation in advancing the fundraising efforts of the entire charity. It's less about your actual designated fundraising team/department and more about total knowledge and buy-in from everyone in the organization family.

Prospect research in philanthropy is the practice of identifying, qualifying, and gathering information on prospective donors to prepare an ask for a charitable contribution. Professional fundraisers use this technique to find donors who have three specific things when determining if a person, business, or foundation is a good candidate for giving a gift to their charity.

Start with seeking to recapture your lapsed donors. Look at lists of those who have given in the last 5-10 years but not this or last year, and conduct a targeted giving drive or targeted mailing/email blast to this group. When you reach out, be sure to acknowledge their support in the past, and offer for them to join your new campaign/giving club while you introduce new perks that weren’t offered before…

In this blog, we will be covering our favorite options out of the ones our team of fundraising professionals have actually tried, plus listing the pros and cons, so that you can make the best decision for your organization and specific needs, desired features, and pricing.

Board members join your organization as a way of demonstrating they would like to help with your mission, but what if they need help? Not everyone who joins a board for the first time is a seasoned nonprofit professional. They may not know what they don't know, or they may be unwilling to ask for help, training, and support.

How they give: They give big - They give in the now, and they plan their gifts through legacy and planned gifts. Arguably the most popular philanthropist right now is Mackenzie Scott, who has been in the news recently for gifts to the Girl Scouts, siting “REASON”. Her monumental and transformational giving shows powerful belief in missions.

We suggest blocking out time on your calendar each week for specific areas of your role. If this is difficult, start with one hour for each. That’s five hours total of the minimum forty hours a week you’re dedicating to your mission. Doable, right? Especially if you start seeing the fruits of your labor in measurable ways.

For many non-profits, the fundraising role is lumped in with multiple other job duties, equating to less than one full time equivalent staff member dedicated to this important role. It isn’t enough to say that fundraising is a priority, in order to find success in this realm, you’ve got to dedicate time and resources to move the needle.

If you're like most nonprofits, your team is gearing up for the year-end fundraising push! With economic uncertainty, we know many donors will be a little more conservative with their year end gifts, but thankfully, there is a long list of alternatives to cash giving that your donors may not even know about.

If you’re like most fundraisers, you quickly realize that events are a LOT of time and work. When you look at time spent and event expenses, a majority of events don’t yield enough revenue to make much of an impact at all.

I want to let you in on a little secret – minimizing the number of fundraiser events you host will not only free up precious time for you to do other tasks, but it will actually enable you to build a robust fundraising program that yields the financial results needed to make a much bigger impact.

If you ask Oxford...

Philanthropy is the desire to promote the welfare of others, expressed especially by the generous donation of money to good cases

So...just the desire to help others? And does it HAVE to be to good causes? What if the donor gives only for personal recognition and prestige? Does that make what they are doing not philanthropy? Hard to say.

Remember that they are likely already giving - Giving to charitable causes feels good. Very good. In fact, so good that a majority of Americans do it every year regardless of income level. Six out of ten (or 60%) of American households participate in some sort of charitable giving annually, and giving continues to increase every year despite the pandemic. So don’t think in terms of “Will you give?” but rather “Will you give to my charity over the other charities in town?”.

In the nonprofit world, a Feasibility Study is a detailed analysis for a proposed project or fundraising campaign to determine how much can be raised in donations, what initiatives a donor base would support, and who to solicit for gifts to support the project.

With the 2020 pandemic, healthcare was top of mind for every community across the country, and in-kind donations were at an all time high, topping $170,000,000 nationally, but even though charitable giving has grown over the last few years (even through the pandemic) healthcare philanthropy has seen much smaller jump in cash donations, when compared to the 10 other top charity subsectors.