By now, all organizations should have closed off their 2020 (calendar) year. And what a year it was! I can confidently say that for every organization, there was some degree of uncertainty. There were probably some disappointments but, hopefully, there were also some pleasant surprises. But what should charities start examining when looking back...
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We are Family!
Welcome to 2021 — here’s hoping that this is a much better year than 2020! Over the break, I spent quite a lot of time chatting with former colleagues and new contacts about the wonderful world of fundraising and have further entrenched my notion that fundraisers belong to one big huge professional family. Not...
Continue reading...Fundraising Metrics Part 1
Peter Drucker, the famous management consultant, would often proclaim, “If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it.” Fundraising is chock-full of metrics, and in this article (and the next), I will explore the two major different types of fundraising metrics — financial and non-financial. Both are something that boards and bosses should be...
Continue reading...What Comes First — the Overhead, or the Revenue?
Every charity that I have worked with in my 25-plus years worries about overhead costs. As they should. The Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) also has a concern with overhead costs per dollar raised. As a result, they have set out some guidelines that it feels charities should strive for, namely: Generally acceptable costs are...
Continue reading...What you should be doing during COVID
I have seen so many articles and thoughts on the internet with respect to the next steps in the world of fundraising that I thought I would point out that for every piece of advice out there, one can find the exact opposite piece of advice. For the uninitiated, making these choices is like...
Continue reading...Who should be Driving Fundraising?
I have stated many times before that I am a huge fan of Jason Lewis. He is really making some of us stop and think about how fundraising really works (or, more aptly, he is confirming some of our theories). Jason talks about different ‘lanes’ of fundraising — from transactional to mid-level to campaign and...
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