Online Giving Metrics Your Annual Fund Team Should Start Tracking
More and more of our daily activities take place online: we shop, we converse, we share, and most importantly for advancement professionals, we give. Last year, online gifts represented 7.9% of all gifts made to charitable organizations—which may not seem like a large number, but that’s up from just 4.9% in 2013. And that number […]
Are Your Annual Fund Solicitations Actually Donor Centric?
Words are a powerful tool. We are taught from a young age to respect the power of our words and the impact they might have on others. Our words especially make a difference when it comes to fundraising. Our industry talks about being donor centric in the words we use to engage and solicit our […]
A Simple Framework for Empowering and Managing Your Annual Fund Volunteers
As an annual giving professional, the most common thing I hear from others in the industry is how much they need volunteers, but how difficult it is to properly engage them and enlist their help. There are hundreds of articles online that offer advice for managing annual fund volunteers. Most of these are written from […]
Key Questions Every Annual Fund Leader Should Ask When Planning a Solicitation Calendar
Planning is hard work. Make no bones about it—creating a yearlong outreach plan for your annual giving program can be the most difficult task you perform all year. Too often, though, I see shops using the results they need (number of donors and number of dollars) as a guiding light. Instead of tying the year […]
Why Restricted Giving Is the Way Forward for Higher Education
According to National Philanthropic Trust, Americans gave over $373 billion dollars in 2015 (a more than four percent increase since 2014). Fifteen percent of those philanthropic dollars, or $55 billion, went to education—some of which landed at your institution! What isn’t tracked in this data, however, is the percentage of total giving that went to educational institutions […]
Ditch the Script—and Other Ways to Rekindle Your Phonathon Program
How does the phonathon fit into the new age of fundraising? Does it still have any value? It’s a question that everyone in fundraising has been asking for the past few years—including our annual giving team at Hobart and William Smith Colleges (HWS). For a long period of time, traditional call centers raised lot of money for institutions. Alumni, friends, […]
Could Giving History Be the Best Way to Segment Donors?
Who are your constituents? How do you speak to them? What stories should you tell? Are you sure? Each summer, annual fund teams sit down and plan out the year—what they’ll send, who will get it, and how they’ll receive it. And each year (if you’re like me), you think about who your constituents really […]
Lessons From Our Most Successful Annual Fund Campaign Ever
“Well they can give, but why should they?” Anyone who works in annual giving has been asked this question, or a version of it, at least a thousand times. We all know that our constituents are capable of giving. The key issue is never the “can,” but always the “should.” When I began my role […]
