The strategic importance of valuing your donors
Strategy is a complicated beast at the best of times. Try developing one for a charity and you really start to understand the meaning of the phrase ‘a little tricky’. Most organisational strategies tend to concentrate on how the charity is going to tackle the…
Does your tagline have any clout?
Whatever you call it, your tagline, slogan or strapline can make a significant contribution to your communication strategy. It can help a donor identify both what you do and what benefits they’ll gain from supporting you. If you think your charity has a great tagline,…
Create great appeals using T.R.U.T.H
There’s a handy mnemonic that’s taught to trainee journalists to help them identify a good story. Journalists, just like fundraisers, can’t just write about what interests them, they have to focus on what will interest their readers. As a result, the mnemonic works for us…
How to reduce face to face attrition by up to half
One of the problems of using face-to-face techniques to recruit donors has been the high cancellation rates. It’s not unusual to see more than 50% of all supporters recruited in this way cancel their regular gift in the first year. The fundraising industry has always…
How to supercharge your charity newsletter
When it comes to charity communications, I’ve long thought magazines and newsletters are a waste of time. In comparison to appeals, they don’t bring in much money and research into evaluating their impact points to the same inevitable conclusion – donors say that they quite…
How to make Twitter more effective for your charity
At the end of last month I posted a piece on how charities seemed stuck on broadcast mode when it came to Twitter. Click through and you'll see I tweeted that I was thinking of giving to a few charities but didn't get much response…
Why I love branding
There was a cracking post from Jeff Brooks on Future Fundraising Now last week. It tells the story of how two senior marketing people at General Motors came up with the almost unbelievable idea (now reversed) of banning the word Chevy when talking about Chevrolet…
How do donors choose which charities they support?
I spent an interesting day at the CGAP conference in London on Friday. The highlight was Beth Breeze's presentation on how donors choose charities. I wrote about her initial findings back in February and now I've had an opportunity to read her final paper I'm…
What’s different about See The Difference?
I gave my first gift via See The Difference on Monday. If you haven’t heard of them, let me explain who they are. The people who run the organisation see themselves as being at the forefront of a revolution in charity giving. Dominic Vallely, one…
Why do we treat donors like mushrooms?
YouGov published an interestingpiece of research last week looking at attitudes to charity performance. They found that just 40% of British adults were interested in a grading system (something similar to Charity Navigator in the USA) that would allow potential donors to assess the relative…
