Wednesday, April 11, 2012

We are working on the next manual in the Prospect Research series, and we need your ideas! The focus of this book is on those of you in fundraising who do not have "research" in your job title. Perhaps you are a small organization and someone adds research projects as an additional activity, or perhaps you do have a researcher but are in need of some ideas for what you can ask them to find for you. This manual will answer those questions and give you a set of resources to use, whether you're doing the research on the fly, or want to ask the best questions of the researchers around you.

Monday, April 02, 2012

This month I get to dive into an online workshop on Private Company research and valuation. These types of companies are generally pretty tough to find information about, since they tend to publish only want they want the outside world to know. So I am very curious to learn about new sources for locating information.

Wednesday, March 07, 2012

Writing about writing is fun for me, and allows a way to look at what I'm doing in a different way and see whether it makes sense. In this post, I summarize some of the current writing projects I've got on my plate right now, and discuss some thoughts on the value of writing many things at once.

Monday, March 05, 2012

First-time author Kent Stroman really got my attention when he mentioned that he had set the goal, in writing the book, of putting his first book, Asking about Asking: Mastering the Art of Conversational Fundraising, into the hands of one-thousand colleagues by the end of the first year. So we checked on sales numbers, and found that he was almost there!

Tuesday, February 28, 2012

There are many reasons why you might wish to write and publish a book: to enhance your professional reputation, improve your career opportunities, supplement your income, achieve a lifelong dream, or just give back to the world in some way. For me, I had always dreamed of....

Wednesday, February 22, 2012

Fundraising is NOT about money. It is about meeting mission. And mission is about meeting needs – meeting the needs of your donor and meeting the needs of your organization. If you meet the needs of your donor, they will respond by meeting the needs of your organization which, in turn, meets the needs of your clients, thus fulfilling your mission. Today, I am going to talk about meeting the needs of one type of donor: foundations.

Monday, February 13, 2012

Fundraising is not all about asking for money. Fundraising is about forming those relationships that best promote fulfillment of your mission. It is about forming partnerships. Partnerships where all parties get something of value. And the first step in structuring such partnerships is by identifying what who your potential partners might be.

Friday, February 10, 2012

Trying to determine what a donor's goals were when they gave you a gift decades ago can be a challenging task. Especially when you don't have all the original information, no family members to contact, and the donors are deceased. In this post I briefly explore the journey from the sale of land and creation of the  "James and Judy Mars Endowment Fund for Educational Research" (names changed) to the eventual realization that James and Joyce wanted students to be able to study local plant and animal life.