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Beyond the Status Quo: Reimagining Donor Engagement
Philanthropy is facing a significant challenge: donor engagement is dwindling. The critical question we must ask ourselves is: “Why?”
Could we be the issue?
The nonprofit sector not only struggles to advance social good but even to maintain it. This reality is well documented: In 2023, charitable giving, when adjusted for inflation, fell by 2.1%. But our response has increasingly focused on major donors and institutional giving, a strategy comparable to burning more fossil fuels to combat global warming.
So why are we doing this?
Unveiling the Joint Impact of Environment and Donation History on Charitable Giving
Let’s say you’re a chief development officer. I ask you to describe your ideal donor. What would you say?
You’d probably use words like “big-hearted,” “empathetic,” “socially responsible,” and “generous,” among others.
But what does psychology tell us about seeking these people out? Personality alone is not enough to predict donors’ likelihood to give. Yet, setting outreach and appeal strategies without a better grasp of supporters’ potential to donate is inefficient and ineffective. So, how can we better understand supporters’ willingness and ability to donate, beyond just defining their personalities?
Facebook Challenge Groups Build Long-Term Revenue Pipeline
Ian Joyce showed up at Pediatric Brain Tumor Foundation after a robust and distinguished career in corporate marketing and communications. He brought that mindset to his new work in social good. But he found there was a missing piece—a pipeline.
Republican Party Shows Us How to Fundraise
History is unfolding before us; it’s on C-SPAN and most cable news outlets. How can we use what we’re witnessing to help us in social good? Repeat to yourself... people respond to situations. Great marketing and program design create situations that trigger the types of attitudes and behaviors that we’re seeing as a result of the January 6th hearings.
Helicopter Event Leadership Creates Participants, Not Constituents
We recently wrote about the unfortunate results of “siloing” events and event participants. By doing so we prevent the participant from connecting to the mission, to make the mission a part of their identity.
Let Us Talk For a Minute About What a Community Is
We have defined “our community” as “the people on our email list” for a long time, but that’s not what community is all about. To our credit, we knew that they (people on our email list) cared about one thing—our mission.
Students Raise Funds For Kids With Cancer
It was addictive. I wanted to continue that feeling. It was such an incredible feeling. I wanted more and more. It became something that I loved.
6 Lessons We Learned From the Pandemic
In the past months, we’ve read a lot of “takeaways from the pandemic” articles. So many, in fact, that we thought adding one more to the conversation might be redundant. At the same time, we are still reading them, and it looks like you are too. So here is our take on what we learned.
In the Weeds of Facebook Fundraising
Every day, Facebook throws new challenges and opportunities in the nonprofit sector. From creating an environment in which we don’t get to know our fundraisers and donors, to changing the rules of engagement inside their environment on a sporadic and unexpected basis, Facebook delivers frustration along with new opportunities.