Baggage-Free Fundraising – 4 Questions to Reveal and Dispel Your Negative Beliefs about Money How to Prevent Your Personal Feelings about Money and Wealth from Crippling Your Fundraising Imagine a person who loves organic food, but dislikes farmers. Seems kind of silly, right? But when it comes to money and fundraising, a lot of fundraisers […]
You are browsing archives for
Tag: donor communication
5 Ideas Nonprofits Can Use to Revive the Economy After COVID
5 Ideas Nonprofits Can Use to Revive the Economy After COVID The Coin Has Flipped – Now Businesses Need Nonprofits to Help Them! Businesses are hurting, and ProActive Content is feeling their pain. While a good portion of our copywriting and strategic consulting work is devoted to nonprofits, we also work with a fair number […]
14 Fundraising Writing Tips – How to Raise More Money without Spending More
14 Fundraising Writing Tips – How to Raise More Money without Spending More If you’re doing your own fundraising writing, you probably wonder sometimes if you’re doing it ‘right.’ Or if there even is a ‘right’ way to do it. Perhaps a better way to think of it is, there are more effective ways to […]
Off-Season Fundraising Ideas that Deepen Donor Loyalty
Off-Season Fundraising Ideas that Deepen Donor Loyalty 9 Things Mid-size and Small Nonprofits Can Do the Rest of the Year If you’re like most nonprofits, your best months for fundraising come at the end of the year. Other times of the year could be called the off-season for fundraising – times when fewer people give, […]
Help! Our Nonprofit Is Too Small to Write Emails Consistently
Help! Our Nonprofit Is Too Small to Write Emails Consistently Your Guide to Steady Donor Communication and Fundraising Through Email Email remains the single best media to frequently communicate with your donors and supporters. It costs nothing to send them. You can vary the length, content, purpose, and interactive features with relative ease. You can […]
16 Places You Can (and Should) Be Thanking Donors
16 Places You Can (and Should) Be Thanking Donors 6 Ways Donors Give, and How to Thank Them in Each Situation The data is clear: Thanking your donors early, often, and continuously pays you back many times over. Guidestar reports donor research that found that first-time donors who receive a personal thank you within 2 […]
How to Strengthen Donor Relationships: Applying Lessons from the Magnetic Marketing Growth Summit
How to Strengthen Donor Relationships: Applying Lessons from the Magnetic Marketing Growth Summit ProActive Content Founder Dan Magill Reports on Why and How Nonprofits Need to Prioritize Donor Relationships I recently attended the Magnetic Marketing Growth Summit in Denver, and though their emphasis is on marketing for businesses, so many of the principles I learned […]
Why You Should Rarely Use Jargon in Your Fundraising
Why You Should Rarely Use Jargon in Your Fundraising Don’t Let the Jargonasaur Scare Away Your Donors Maybe it’s my background in education, but I can’t stand jargon. I’ll never forget reading about the school board candidates in my voter’s pamphlet one year. One of their descriptions was so packed with industry jargon, buzzwords, and […]
Fundraising Tip: Aim for the Heart, Not the Head
Fundraising Tip: Aim for the Heart, Not the Head Behavior Research Confirms: Donors Don’t Care About Your Facts and Figures A more fun headline for this article might be this: Research confirms that donors don’t care about research. An article in The Guardian examines several research studies of donor behavior and concludes that donors respond […]
How to Write a Nonprofit Blog that Engages Supporters and Motivates Action
How to Write a Nonprofit Blog that Engages Supporters and Motivates Action Nonprofit Blog Writing Best Practices: Content, Structure, SEO, Growth, and Examples Many nonprofits struggle to write blogs consistently. Reasons why this happens include a lack of time, but also an uncertain confidence that blog writing accomplishes anything. However, another reason nonprofits fail to […]
5 Tips for Increasing Planned Giving Commitments to Your Nonprofit
5 Tips for Increasing Planned Giving Commitments to Your Nonprofit How to Motivate More Donors to Put Your Organization in Their Will In 2017, donors gave a total of $410 billion to charity. Of that, $35.7 billion came in the form of planned giving bequests. That means about 9% of charitable gifts are given in […]
Is Our Facebook Ad Copy Length Too Long? Online Fundraising Testing Series Part 4
Is Our Facebook Ad Copy Length Too Long? Online Fundraising Testing Series Part 4 In support of using data to make better fundraising decisions, ProActive Content has completed this 4-part series based on some online fundraising experiments from NextAfter. See Part 3 – Best Location for your Email Signup Form Today’s question: Why Doesn’t Anyone […]
Are Your Emails Overdesigned? Online Fundraising Testing Series Part 2
Are Your Fundraising Emails Over-Designed? See How Email Design Affects Donations Online Fundraising Testing Series Part 2 In support of using data to make better fundraising decisions, ProActive Content will be reporting on some online fundraising experiments from NextAfter for the next four weeks. See Part 1 – How Much Donation Page Copy Should We […]
Complete Guide to Donor Survey Best Practices and Question Ideas
Complete Guide to Donor Survey Best Practices and Question Ideas How to Acquire Survey Data that Strengthens Your Fundraising and Communications At the 2019 AFP Forum for Strategic Fundraising in Bellevue, Washington, Ariel Glassman from The Ostara Group led an outstanding presentation about donor survey best practices. She, along with the executive director from Kirkland Performance […]
How Nonprofits Can Increase Open Rates in 7 Seconds
How Nonprofits Can Increase Email Open Rates in 7 Seconds Changing Who Your Email is From Can Increase Opens by 18% Want to increase open rates for your nonprofit’s emails? There are three ways to do it that aren’t overly technical: 1) Write better subject lines 2) Add good pre-headers 3) Change your sender […]
Donors Who Don’t Get It & That You Can Afford to Lose
Donors Who Don’t Get It & That You Can Afford to Lose Don’t Let the Fear of Losing a Few Donors Cause You to Lose Many There’s a lot of fear in fundraising. If we send out too many emails, people will unsubscribe. If we ask for money too often, people will get angry. If […]
The Overlooked Secret to Fundraising Copywriting – Verbs
The Overlooked Secret to Fundraising Copywriting – Verbs Part 2: Fundraising Copywriting Smackdown: Verbs vs Adjectives See Part 1: 4 Copywriting Tips on How to Lasso Your Reader’s Attention with Verbs What language best engages readers and motivates them to give your cause How do you tell fundraising stories well enough to evoke a […]
The Overlooked Secret to Fundraising Copywriting – Verbs
The Overlooked Secret to Fundraising Copywriting – Verbs Part 1: 4 Fundraising Copywriting Tips on How to Use Verbs to Lasso Your Reader’s Attention “The little boy went far from home to look for food.” “The little boy traveled far from home to search for food.” Great fundraising copywriting shouldn’t be complicated. In fact, if […]
How to Attract, Convert, Cultivate, and Retain More Recurring Donors
How to Attract, Convert, Cultivate, and Retain More Recurring Donors 7 Sobering Recurring Donor Statistics, and the Action Steps You Need to Take In Response The Nonprofit Recurring Giving Benchmark Study from NextAfter contains some eye-opening data about how nonprofits could be doing a lot more to attract, convert, cultivate, and retain more recurring donors. Here’s […]
ProActive Content Is Speaking at the 2019 AFP NW Forum on Strategic Fundraising
ProActive Content Is Speaking at the 2019 AFP NW Forum on Strategic Fundraising Come Visit My Booth and Supercharge Your Fundraising Skills I’m pleased to announce that Dan Magill from ProActive Content has been chosen as a speaker at the upcoming Association of Fundraising Professionals Northwest’s annual Forum on Strategic Fundraising. The 2-day event happens […]
