It’s high time you started a major gifts program for your organization. While perusing donor lists of event keepsake booklets, you’re surprised that some of your low-level donors give much higher gifts to organizations of similar size or even cause areas. Starting a major gift program would allow you to ask those donors to increase their generosity.
In a digital world fighting for our attention, the number of push notifications, pop-ups, and emails continues to grow at an unprecedented rate. Both for-profit enterprises and nonprofit organizations are competing for the public’s attention and their wallets. It’s challenging to stand out digitally when the average American receives 126 emails and 46 notifications per day. This has nothing to do with how critical, memorable or meaningful your mission is. Your donors are being overloaded with a barrage of impersonal communication. Nonprofits contribute by sending on average 66 emails per donor per year, of which 25 are fundraising-related.
Many nonprofits have changed the way they think about fundraisers, leading many to wonder if passive fundraisers are a good choice for their organization. Some professionals may be unfamiliar with this fundraising approach and aren’t exactly sure how it works, let alone how they can get started.
Technology has changed the nonprofit fundraising landscape time and again. In the not-so-distant past, fundraisers were divided over whether to accept online credit card donations. Today, there’s similar intrigue about the use of cryptocurrency and NFTs (aka “non-fungible tokens”) in fundraising practices. For nonprofits eager to explore the fundraising possibilities of NFTs, the first step is all a matter of getting the basic facts down first. Common questions include: Where do the donations come from? Is my nonprofit responsible for creating the NFTs? Can my nonprofit really benefit from NFT fundraising?
For almost twenty years, Charity Navigator has provided donors with ratings to guide their giving toward the most effective and impactful nonprofits. With the launch of the Encompass Rating System, our ratings have become deeper with more areas of performance explored. Earlier this month, we began scoring nonprofits on their diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) practices.
Giving back is crucial to my wife and me. We use a disciplined process to identify nonprofits for investment and collaboration. Several questions drive the best fit for us, especially given unique issues and opportunities for international organizations. The key questions we ask when determining what international organizations to support:
