Know Where You Are Going When I was a kid, my dad loved to get us all in the car on a beautiful summer day and go for a drive. This was back in the days before cell phones, so there was no GPS to… Read More »Mapping Out Your Fiscal Year Begins with Preparing Your Portfolios
Year-end fundraising is always a frenzy. In this Water Cooler Chat, our special guest Maya Gasuk, Managing Partner at West Wind Consulting, shares some best practices for making sure that your year-end annual giving program.
Nonprofits are continuously combing through various lists of constituents in order to find those who will be the right prospects for a particular initiative. They may be looking for those who can make a certain sized gift, those who can give to a particular… Read More »Proactive Prospecting: Prioritizing Prospects by Removing an Internal Bias
What kind of prospecting can you do to get the maximum benefit at the end of the calendar year? Join us at May’s Water Cooler Chat, where our special guest Jen Filla will be joining the discussion. Jen will present a few ways to help… Read More »Water Cooler Chat Replay: Proactive Prospecting That Supports End of Year Fundraising
The old saying “April showers bring May flowers” holds true in fundraising. Join us for this Water Cooler Chat as we discuss last-minute prospecting techniques to bring in last-minute gifts.
We always want to create the best portfolios for our front-line fundraisers, to position them for success. In our quest to create high quality portfolios, we often encounter obstacles that make it challenging or even halt our progress entirely. Three of the most common obstacles… Read More »Overcoming Obstacles to Position Portfolios for Success
Any good gift officer would always want to be the one who is managing that one prospect who makes a transformational gift. And I’m assuming that’s why a lot of gift officers I speak to tend to keep prospects in their portfolios, even those that… Read More »Letting Go of Your Too Big Portfolio
In conversations at conferences and with clients I hear that, in fundraising, there appears to be a great divide between research officers and gift officers. And the divide itself is made up of capacity ratings. Do you run into these scenarios? If you have encountered… Read More »Are Capacity Ratings Rate-able?
This post was written for Prospect Research Pride Month in 2019. It is a celebration of what we do and how integral our work is in the success of our organizations. Let’s take a look at our work from a bird’s eye view instead of… Read More »Prospect Research Is More Than Studying Wealth
While driving home from Apra Prospect Development, I listened to this TED talk: https://www.npr.org/2017/01/13/509358157/is-there-a-limit-to-how-many-friends-we-can-have . The article brought my mind back to some work I’m doing on estimating the number of gift officers needed to meet a campaign goal. For analytics projects like this, I… Read More »Of William the Conqueror and Gift Officers: A Look Again at Portfolio Size
