10 Secrets to Blowing Past Your Matching Grant Fundraising Goals – Especially in the Covid Era Tips to Elevate Your Email and Direct Mail Match Campaigns Matching grants are a tried and true fundraising strategy. And for good reason. Whatever you give, the gift is doubled (or tripled, or whatever multiple you have secured). The […]
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Tag: fundraising
Baggage-Free Fundraising – 4 Questions to Reveal and Dispel Your Negative Beliefs about Money
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 […]
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 […]
GiveBIG 2020 – Everything You Need to Know for this Washington-Only Spring Fundraising Campaign
GiveBIG 2020 – Everything You Need to Know for this Washington-Only Spring Fundraising Campaign See Below for 7 GiveBIG Fundraising Campaign Ideas If you are a Washington-based nonprofit, you are probably eligible to participate in the 10th annual one-day GiveBIG fundraiser on May 6th, 2020. If you haven’t heard of it, GiveBIG began ten years […]
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 […]
Increase Your Online Donations by 284% in Less than 60 Minutes
Increase Your Online Donations by 284% in Less than 60 Minutes Use Real Experimental Data to Improve Your Online Donation Form and Remove Fields that Distract Would-be Donors Online donation forms represent one of the simplest ways to boost your donations. Why is this true? Because the hard part of fundraising comes in attracting and […]
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 […]
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 […]
9 Steps to Rediscover Your Passion for Your Nonprofit Work
9 Steps to Rediscover Your Passion for Your Nonprofit Work Remember Your ‘Why’, and You’ll Overcome Discouragement and Weariness Nonprofit work is hard. For most nonprofits, the difficulty doesn’t just relate to fundraising. Most of you are doing work that touches some part of this world that has great needs, experiences traumatic suffering, or endures […]
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 […]
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 […]
How Much Copy Should Be on Our Donation Page? Online Fundraising Testing Series Part 1
How Much Copy Should Be on Our Donation Page? Plus: 4 Donation Page Copywriting Tips –Online Fundraising Testing Series Part 1 NextAfter performs fundraising testing experiments to help nonprofits improve their online fundraising. In support of using data to make better fundraising decisions, ProActive Content will be reporting on some of NextAfter’s experiments for the […]
How to Create the Perfect Donate Button
How to Create the Perfect Donate Button A Quick Analysis of Color, Size, Placement, and Text for Nonprofit Call to Action Buttons, Plus a Free Button Evaluation The smallest parts of your website can produce the biggest change. Namely, the donate button. One of the missions of ProActive Content is to find ways to boost […]
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 […]
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 […]
How to Write ‘Can’t Look Away’ Headlines for Nonprofits
How to Write ‘Can’t Look Away’ Headlines for Nonprofits 6-Step Guide Reveals How to Engage and Inspire Your Readers to Action In this media-saturated age, getting anyone to read your nonprofit’s content and fundraising appeals presents an unending challenge. Each new piece of content you send out requires a fresh motivation to be read by […]
Make Them Hear You: Why Fundraising is Harder Than You Think
Why Fundraising is Harder Than You Think Lazy Marketing Projections and ‘Out-of-Thin-Air’ Goals Often Have No Relationship to Reality It’s a mistake made across all sectors of business in addition to nonprofits. We believe it’s easier to get people to do what we want than it really is. Read that again to make sure you […]