Robert Poole is one our country’s top advancement professionals. Read how he engages the President and Board at Meharry Medical College and apply his suggestions to your institution or organization. Experience has shown us that engaging top leadership is a prerequisite for fundraising success. Poole achieves this on a consistent basis.
Learn how to create or revise your case for support. Learn the basic ingredients needed to create a compelling case for support. Communicate where your organization is headed and what it will cost to get there. Proactively answer questions that donors and funders need answered before they can make a decision regarding whether or not to give and how much to give.
Organizations often face a dilemma about fundraising: which should we do first – hire development staff or create a fund development plan? We believe that creating a development plan should come before hiring development staff. The high demand for experienced fund development professionals requires you to be strategic in recruiting and retaining staff. Competition for
Learn what you need to know to conduct a successful fundraising campaign. Fundraising requires much more than a willingness to ask others for funds. Learn the details and see how your organization measures up and how you can improve your fundraising.
Community foundations play a major role in communities across the country. They are a vehicle for organized giving that primarily benefits a specific geographic area. They bring together individual donors, local businesses, families, and others to pool their resources and make grants. Here is how the Austin Community Foundation defines what a community foundation is:
How do you know if your organization is headed in the right direction? Who do you talk to? How do you know whether or not to believe what people say? What would it mean if you knew what people think of your organization? Would you offer different services? Engage in new forms of advocacy? Host
Too often organizations are focused on how quickly they can begin fundraising. “We need the money now!” is a common cry. Our response is simply it’s not how quickly you begin raising money, it’s how quickly you reach your fundraising goal. If you start your fund-raising without finding out how local stakeholders and potential donors
A key element to successful fundraising is accurately judging how your efforts will be received by potential donors and your community at large. Your board, executive director and development director can make decisions about the amount of funds to be raised and how they should be used — but will people outside your organization or
Let’s start at the end: You can’t ask someone else to give until you have made your gift first. Now, for how I got there. When considering how to secure funds for a non-profit organization or institution many people first think about “rich” people who could give such as Oprah, Bill Gates, or Bill Cosby.
The San Francisco Bay Area lost an icon and hero last month when we lost Dr. George Davis. Dr. Davis was a true visionary, a community leader, renowned gerontologist, minister, soul food connoisseur, sports fanatic, and devoted husband. First there are his many worldly accomplishments: He led San Francisco’s Bayview-Hunters Point Multipurpose Senior Center for
