Well I talked about the easy thing first and that was professional development and now comes the hard one – budgets and goals.  Having spent a large number of years in non-profit, these are never easy items to talk about but obviously so necessary in your day to day work.  As I mentioned in Part [...]

Last month, the Oregon and SW Washington Chapter of the Association of Fundraising Professionals released its third annual survey of Nonprofit Fundraising Trends from among its member organizations.  The survey asked development and leadership professionals to review their 2010 fundraising results in a variety of areas.  The report is extensive and interesting to read, yet, [...]

We would like to thank Phyllis Freedman for focusing her recent blog posting on prospect research and, in particular, ResearchPoint, a Target Analytics’ product. Her post, “Streamlining the Donor Visit,” directs fundraisers and researchers on how to streamline the process of developing and maintaining a relationship with donors. Please feel free to leave comments and questions [...]

In Part 1 of this series we looked at the differences between data mining and predictive modeling.  We identified how they both take a look at “commonalities” or characteristics of individuals in your data base to identify patterns of behavior.  Both can be extremely useful when trying to enhance your overall fund raising effectiveness, as [...]

In Part 1 of this article we learned about The Luxury Institute and its new whitepaper titled “Wealth and Luxury Trends 2011 and Beyond” .We also introduced the first trend noted in the whitepaper, which I want to explore further in this part of the article.  To remind you, Trend 1 is Luxury CRM Culture [...]

Last month, The Luxury Institute published a new whitepaper titled “Wealth and Luxury Trends 2011 and Beyond” .  Who is The Luxury Institute?  Their website states that “The Luxury Institute is the uniquely impartial, independent and objective ratings and research and CRM consulting organization that is the global voice of the high net-worth consumer.”   What [...]

A key factor to success for any non-profit is retention of donors and staff.  In order to achieve a high retention we have to be conscious of the messaging we transmit not only outside of the organization but within.  This two-part paper will look at seven key factors that we should be messaging to donors [...]

Occasionally when reviewing the wealth screening results of an organization, I find that there are assets posted that suggest the extreme wealth of a young person.  At these times, the development office may be discouraged once they discover that the assets are identified due to the primary address, last name and sometimes matching first name [...]

Take a moment to think about the entry points for data collection within your organization.  Is the data that you need to operate effectively being collected consistently?  Are you hindering your work by not standardizing the entry points for data collection? It is easy to overlook the value in collecting multiple pieces of data.  Are [...]