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Getting Your (Potential) Donors To Want To Give

Last week the focus was on learning about and understanding what your constituents and potential donors like about you. Now, assuming that you’ve mastered that aspect of the development process, let’s look at what else you need to know about your potential donors; and, what you would have to do to influence those potential donors. …

The Best and Worst of Customer Service

Bad customer service inevitably leads to reputation damage Treating your customers poorly isn’t something that can be swept under the rug anymore. Besides being called out on review sites, in blogs, and across social media, you’ll also wind up on lists creating by organizations like 24/7 Wall Street, which uses survey data to assemble what …

Communicating Error Messages

Technical Writers describe error messages that appear within many documents and applications. They are useful, necessary, and required. Without these warning messages, readers\users would not know that, e.g., an incorrect key was pressed or that some information was missing to complete a task. Error messages describe what to do (or not), what information is required, …

A CEO’s Impact on Reputation

Exploring the effect company leaders have on your good name CEOs are the most public face of an organization, and as such they play a major role in its overall reputation. While in the past it was possible for a CEO to “fly below the radar” except when paraded out for investor-related meetings or major …

Do You Know What Your Donors Like About You?

Fundraising is all about getting your potential donors to want to give to you — if they want to, they will; if they don’t, they won’t !! Too many nonprofit board and staff members don’t understand that little bit of rocket science. Too many board and staff members are focused on “how wonderful the organization …

Major Donor Stewardship

For this discussion, I refer you to one of my earliest postings, What Is A Major Gift? for a definition of that term, and I add one additional criterion … that it is not a one-time gift “Stewardship,” in the context of development/fundraising, is doing what needs to be done to keep donors feeling good …