Nonprofit fundraising trips can be an excellent way of raising money and forming lifelong connections, but too many nonprofits are missing the opportunity to do both when they fail to follow up. Business and sales professionals often hear the phrase “the fortune is in the follow-up” but rarely do I see this idea germinate in fundraising.
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Following up with participants after a fundraising trip is one of the most important things your organization will do…and one of the easiest to mess up. Here are 7 Faux Pas organizations make in their follow-up approach after a trip. Follow-up is bad when it: 1. Is Not Prompt While you were away the work has been piling
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The theme for today’s article is challenges. Why challenges and not solutions? Based on my experience, every organization’s solutions are unique, but the problems are all quite similar. Just defining the problem in a clear and simple way can help better point us to a solution. I’ve already addressed the two kinds of donor travel challenges most organizations have: that
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Something I’ve learned doing this work is that most organizations face similar donor travel challenges and yet every organization needs tailored solutions. The challenge usually boils down to one of two things: 1) an organization has never done a donor trip and doesn’t know how to build an effective program from the ground up; or 2)
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What Happens When a Fundraising Copywriter Goes to Nepal… Plus: Dan’s Top 5 Suggestions for What You Should Do Before Every Overseas Trip So far in my career as a fundraising copywriter and strategist, the project I’m most happy to have worked on is a human trafficking safe home in Hetauda, Nepal. We spent about 18 months planning,
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I’ve written extensively about the importance and benefits of taking major donors to the field. In this article, I’d like to highlight the value that your organization can gain from sending board and staff members. In some organizations with international missions, it is routine for executive and development teams to make multiple site visits. In others,
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When planning to take donors or volunteers to the field, it is imperative that the trip aligns with your organization’s Mission, Strategic Plan, and Development Plan. Failure to think through a travel program’s role in each of these three could result in creating unachievable goals for the trip - or worse - no goals at all.
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Part 1 of this article focuses on why it is imperative to ask for the gift during a donor trip. Not before - when the donor has yet to see the incredible impact, and not after - when the climactic moment has passed and their attention may have shifted. Making the ask on the trip requires
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Everyday nonprofits are running travel programs for donors, board members, and volunteers without having any metrics in place to determine the program’s success. We’re all very familiar with the metrics and measurements we use in our mission-related work (also called Monitoring & Evaluation), as well as the benchmarks and goals we set for fundraising (as
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