Welcome to 2020!

One way to make it more likely that your emails are seen (and opened) this year is to employ personalization. Personalization makes your emails feel more like one-to-one conversations instead of a generic, mass communication.

So what is personalization? Basically, it’s taking what you know about your audiences and leveraging that information to make your emails more personal. The simplest version of personalization is using a person’s name in the email...

The end of the year is almost here and while I’m guessing you are deep into your final fundraising push for 2019, I’d like you to take a quick little break with me to think about the coming year. 

I don’t know about you, but thinking about the new year always gets me ramped up. It’s like when I was little and getting ready for the first day of school and I had my new clothes and notebooks and pencil carrier and Fraggle Rock lunch box and - oh my gosh,...

I suspect all of us in the nonprofit sector have asked ourselves this question at one time or another: are annual reports worth it? All the time researching and writing, coming up with an engaging way to share the highlights of the past year - and that nagging feeling that no one really reads them.

I believe annual reports still have value, but you might want to consider moving from a more traditional printed publication (even if “printing” for you is creating a PDF and...

In the nonprofit marketing world, content is king. It's what emotionally connects your cause to your audience, helping you retain current supporters - and find new ones. 

And content creation has amazing ROI - it’s something that you (or a talented volunteer) can develop at little to no cost, other than the time you take to do it. 

Today’s episode covers three key aspects of your nonprofit's content: 

• how to audit what you have to make sure it is current...

I got a surprise not too long ago when I opened up MailChimp to create a mass email for a nonprofit client. The e-communication platform was promoting its latest innovation…

Postcards. (Or as they put it - “email for mailboxes.”)

It turns out that rising response rates for snail mail plus lower production costs for creating postcards equals a classic marketing strategy that deserves a look by your nonprofit as you create your marketing mix. I go over why in...

One of the most important assets your website can have is a well-developed pressroom, a virtual space that serves as a one-stop shop for information about your organization created with the media in mind.

Your pressroom will make it easier for members of the media to cover your nonprofit and it can position your group as experts on the issue you are addressing. 

In today's episode, I cover:

• What is a virtual pressroom and why it’s important
• What items should be included in...

How many times have you heard this OR even said it yourself - we don’t have money for marketing.

My answer is ALWAYS, oh yes you do.

And it doesn’t come by way of pressuring anyone into ‘finding’ the dollars in their tight budgets to market their mission.

Instead, it’s about leaning into a value-proposition process that can very well amount to thousands of dollars of marketing support for your nonprofit.

I’m not kidding. $5,000 to $10,000 of...

The evidence shows that email communication is still a vital tool in your nonprofit’s strategy to raise awareness, retain donors and find new supporters.

To tap into the true potential for email marketing, you need to keep building your email list. It’s a question you should ask yourself - what could your nonprofit do if you had more people to contact?

There’s some right ways (and a couple of very wrong ones) to go about growing your contact list and in this...

Retention rules.

It’s not just that it’s cheaper to retain a donor than to acquire a new one. That’s true, but there are some other reasons as well. Jay Love, legendary co-founder of Bloomerang noted in a blog that most major gifts come after a donor has been giving to an organization for five years. And even if your repeat donor’s gift is modest, you need to think about the lifetime impact this person could have; those small annual gifts surely do add...

Marketing automation has really ramped up nonprofits’ ability to reach more people more often and to keep in touch with your donors, volunteers, partners, and supporters. Even on those days when there’s no chance to make a call or send a personal missive, automation makes sure you are top of mind through texts, emails or social media posts.

But is all this automation a bad thing? Do you sacrifice effectiveness in order to get efficiency? Does it make things too...