I’m blogging today and tomorrow from the North Carolina Center for Nonprofits Annual Conference in Winston-Salem. This morning, I attended a great session called “Building and Sustaining Your Individual Donor Base through Effective Stewardship.” The two speakers were Amanda Osborne, Director of Development for Fellowship Hall, Inc., an alcohol and drug treatment program, and Peggy…
Independent Sector has just released Principles for Good Governance and Ethical Practice, after three years of discussion on the best ways to encourage self-governance and self-regulation in the nonprofit sector. If you receive any foundation funding, you can bet that those funders will insist you adopt these practices and work toward their full implementation. Several…
Feedback on the annual reports e-book I released in August has been great. Here are a few of the comments I’ve received in the last month from people who have purchased “How to Write a Nonprofit Annual Report.” “I found your book to be a tremendous help. Each year I have the challenge of producing…
One of the easiest ways that nonprofit communicators can go green in their operations is to use recycled paper all the time — in your office equipment and office supplies like folders and when you buy print. Long gone are the excuses about paper quality and, for the most part, price (or at least they…
The North Carolina Center for Nonprofits (one of the leading state nonprofit associations) has just published Principles and Practices for Nonprofit Excellence: A Self-Help Tool for Organizational Effectiveness. Several other state associations have similar guides for their members. You’ll find several communications and marketing best practices included in the NC guide and most others: —…
Are the copy and images in your nonprofit marketing materials drugging readers into ignoring you and your issue entirely? It’s a process called narcotization. Here’s how it works. People were shown pictures of gum disease. One group saw photos of a mouth just a little rotten. The second saw photos of moderately rotten gums. The…
Jeff Brooks at Donor Power Blog is looking for posts on what’s good or bad about fundraising for next week’s Carnival of Nonprofit Consultants. Here’s what’s bad about fundraising from my perspective as a nonprofit marketing and communications consultant. These are the three reasons that I nearly always turn down requests to write grant applications…
As I was looking over annual reports from environmental groups this week, I noticed that both Environmental Defense (ED) and the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) claimed that they were largely responsible for getting California’s law on global warming passed. Now, I really have no idea who did what or how much, and I am…
Michele Martin at the Bamboo Project asked about our favorite learning resources and what gets us excited about learning new things. I get tons of great information from reading other people’s blogs, but I saw that Rosetta Thurman wrote a great post about that already, so I’ll go with another favorite learning tool of mine:…
I’ve just released my new e-book, “How to Write a Nonprofit Annual Report” and am offering you, my blog readers, a $5 off coupon, if you download the e-book by August 31, 2007. Here is the coupon code you’ll need: 329855 The e-book is compilation of practically everything I have written to date on nonprofit…
Last week I taught my “Strategies for Successful Nonprofit Newsletters” workshop through Duke University’s certificate program in nonprofit management. The workshop focuses mostly on print newsletters, and here are the top five questions that participants said they wanted answered during the course. You get my bottom-line, three-second answers here. Follow the links to www.nonprofitmarketingguide.com for…
Here are my replies to the five top questions I get about the lists that you find in the back of nonprofit annual reports. DONOR LIST: Do we need to list absolutely everyone who donated any amount of money? No. Many organizations set a minimum dollar amount for inclusion in the annual report to keep…
