3 min read
Spring gala season has wound down, and if you're like most fundraising teams right now, you're probably tired. Really tired. Months of planning, coordinating sponsors, recruiting volunteers, managing...
2 min read
If your organization performs any of its mission-driven work at your facility, then you should be using donor tours as a potential touchpoint in your plans. At Veritus, we often talk about taking the...
2 min read
There’s a feeling almost every major gift officer has at some point, but hardly anyone talks about it honestly. You sit in a donor meeting wondering if you’re asking the right questions. You stare at...
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3 min read
Last month at AFP ICON in San Diego, I sat in on a session with young, emerging fundraisers, many of them only a year or two into their careers, and I walked away feeling unsettled.
2 min read
A while back, I was scrolling through Apple News on my phone, and a headline from People Magazine caught my eye: “Carl Reiner's One Simple Question to 'Dick Van Dyke Show' Writers Changed the Way...
2 min read
Do you find that first conversation with a donor you haven’t met to be a bit, well, scary? I don’t mean shaking in your boots terrified. But enough that you have to inhale-exhale before you start...
2 min read
How many times has someone asked “How are you?” in greeting? How often was there any real interest in your answer? Now, I realize that there may be some caveats to that, especially for southerners...
3 min read
Talking is a big part of what a relationship fundraiser does. I wrote about that recently in a blog that focused on ensuring your “conversations” are not effectively serial monologues. I’m going to...
3 min read
In the first part of this blog series, I shared with you the importance of creating equivalency language and how to create it for your organization. That’s the hard part.
2 min read
If you go to the Feeding America website right now, the very first thing you will see is $1 = 20 meals. It’s simple and effective. The organization is showing you the actual impact of every dollar...
2 min read
As a Veritus coach, it seems like leadership and fundraisers are obsessed with speed. How can we make the research go faster? How can we get the data faster? How can I find information faster? This...
2 min read
I was reviewing some of my go-to coaching resources recently and came across a great article from the Harvard Business Review on talking too much. The author refers to career coach Marty Nemko’s...
