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By Mary Hackett, Vice President

It’s that time of the year again. The leaves are changing colors, the aroma of pumpkin spice is in the air and year-end giving is once again upon us.

For those development professionals in the middle of a campaign, you might be wondering what best practices you should adopt as you close out the year. For others, you might be concerned about how to maintain the year-end giving momentum into the new year. And for others still, there’s an age-old question that always comes to mind during this time each year: how do I make sure that next year I’m more prepared to tackle year-end giving and all of the work that it entails?

Well, this is exactly where fundraising operations comes into play. By focusing on enhancing and improving your fundraising operations, you will strengthen every area of your development department and make sure that you and your development team feel better prepared to handle the flurry of year-end tasks and responsibilities.

Let’s take a look at some of the ways you can take your fundraising game to the next level! Continue reading “Fundraising Operations: Take Your Organization to the Next Level”

As a fundraiser in the rush of day-to-day operations, deadlines, meetings and metrics, it’s easy to lose sight of the motivations and interests of your donors. Sometimes, fundraising can become more about reaching goals than relating to donors. And it can be a slippery slope – the results of which we’ve seen documented in UnderDeveloped: A National Study of Challenges Facing Nonprofit Fundraising, which outlined various problems arising in the nonprofit industry, including decreasing retention of fundraising employees and donors. There will be no cure-all for the industry as a whole, but there are steps individual fundraisers can take to see better results in fundraising. Those steps have nothing to do with “doing more” or “doing better”…they are related to an organization-wide shift toward a culture of philanthropy. Continue reading “We’re All in This Together: Creating a Culture of Philanthropy”