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Is your nonprofit ready to tackle a new project, fundraising campaign, or just take things to the next level?
DonorPath offers service matchmaking based on the specific needs surrounding wherever your nonprofit is at and where you want to go.
The collective fundraising experts and team members at DonorPath have raised more than $1 billion for nonprofits and helped engage 17 million people with worthwhile organizations. Does that sound like a network you might like to leverage?
You may watch a brief YouTube video about another nonprofit, Rock for Kids, who took fundraising to the next level with DonorPath here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5CllSEVDj10
You may schedule a demo or setup a trial account to start to explore the DonorPath services available to you here: https://app.donorpath.org/enroll
Another blog with regular fundraising topics available from DonorPath may be found here: http://blog.donorpath.org/.
Photo credit above: http://www.flickr.com/photos/matthewdevalle/
Recently, I heard a firsthand account of a wonderful opportunity slipping through the cracks at a very volunteer-driven nonprofit.
Someone who's been regularly connected to this nonprofit approached one of its representatives at an event. This person explained to the nonprofit representative that she would like to connect soon regarding a gift she and her husband would like to make, with a significant corporate match opportunity that was only available for a limited time.
The nonprofit representative assured this person someone else would be in contact soon. As of this writing, three weeks have passed. Neither the nonprofit representative spoken with nor the person mentioned in the conversation has yet to contact her. With the match, this represents a lost gift of $1,000!
Volunteer driven nonprofits face massive challenges and limitations. Volunteers at these nonprofits deserve to be celebrated even more than they are.
However, it's important to keep an eye on what might be slipping through the cracks in the midst of those challenges and limitations.
As the year starts to wrap up, it might be valuable to have a critical conversation among your fellow nonprofit team members. Is there anything you have let slip through the cracks in 2013?
How can follow through, or whatever the slipped through the cracks, work better in 2014?
Photo credit above: http://www.flickr.com/photos/redfernstudio/
Recently, I had a stunning service experience. In short, Lauren Wiser and the team at Left Bank Books in St. Louis Missouri are incredibly helpful and customer focused. They were prompt, offered several options for me to connect and beautifully met a deep personal interest of mine. I highly recommend working with them! If you'd like to learn more about what these thoughtful folks have to say, you may visit their blog here.
The experience got me thinking: what is the current nonprofit service experience?Although answers to that question will vary wildly across specific nonprofits. What follows are some ideas and thoughts for small nonprofits to raise their service bar:
- Who are your most electronically connected board members or Who is attached to their smart phone? If they're not already, would these team members be willing to promptly respond to emails that come in through your website, Facebook page or other online presence points?
- How many options do you offer people to connect with you? Since not everyone is or likes to be online, at what phone number can someone reach your organization for more information?
- How are your follow through skills? If those interested in your organization pose questions, do you get back to them with confirmed answers?
Prompt response, options for connection and and follow through skills are the key elements to me of any worthwhile service experience, be it nonprofit or any other format.
Worthwhile service is a key building block for effective fundraising. Great service recipients are potential future donors.
What is the service experience of those looking to connect with your nonprofit? How could it be event better?
Photo credit above: http://www.flickr.com/photos/foundanimalsfoundation/
Currently, the book I am learning from is The Power of Full Engagement: Managing Energy, Not Time is the Key to High Performance and Personal Renewal by Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz. It's a straightforward and worthwhile read that offers relevant examples from a number of industries to challenge current thinking, or at least my thinking that time management needs to be at the center of what I do.
In the book, the authors quote Viktor E. Frankl, a psychologist who survived Nazi concentration camps and wrote Man's Search for Meaning, which was first published in 1959. Frankl's writings include the idea, "What man actually needs is not a tension-less state, but rather the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task."
This point got me to thinking about which volunteer and donation experience have given me the greatest joy. They are not the experiences my parents or anyone else wanted me to have, or the experiences where I have had incidental involvement due to a sense of obligation. They are the experiences I have freely chosen!
Sure, some of those experience have including striving and struggling. But in the end, free choice has given me great joy.
I intend to carry the message through of free choice to future fundraising and volunteer efforts.
If the options are obligation or free choice to invest in your nonprofit's mission, what option do you choose? What option to you want to experience?
Photo credit above: http://www.flickr.com/photos/koonisutra/
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