skip to main |
skip to sidebar
Successful fundraising is interconnected with effective listening. The most successful major gift fundraisers have hundreds of stories of how they listened the gift.
Listening is hard. The difference between typically speaking speed and our brains' capacity to understand creates the first gap. Distractions only add to the complexity.
How do you develop listening skills to be more effective in your fundraising, and, by extension, in moving your mission forward? A few online resources for your consideration:
1. A Developing Listening Skills video from Cambridge University Press ELT.
2. A blog post from Gaily Perry: A Fundraiser's #1 Skill: The Lost Art of Listening.
3. A blog post from Vanessa Chase: Why Listening Trumps All Else in Fundraising.
4. Tips for Active Listening are available on the Mind Tools website.
5. Rick Goodfriend offers practicing better listening thoughts on this YouTube video.
What are your favorite listening tips?
How has applying listening skills moved your mission forward?
Photo credit above: http://www.flickr.com/photos/baejaar/
Last week's post explored the importance of video and and ideas for a basic online presence to move your nonprofit forward, using the backdrop of a recent Google study. Once you apply those ideas, how do you avoid "low content," or having nothing to share?
Content topics for your nonprofit's online presence may include:
- A story from a beneficiary of your nonprofit about how the impact of the received support
- A story from a volunteer for your nonprofit about they he or she gives of available time to your mission
- A story from a donor about why he or she feels supporting your organization is a worthwhile investment
- Your mission statement
- A summary of your recently completed projects
- Information on your upcoming projects, to give donors a sense of what a gift would help do if they made one today
- Your Form 990 filed annually with the IRS. Instead of making someone researching your organization go to other publicly available sources for this information, why not make it easy in the interest of transparency?
- Any opportunities for involvement: what are the three most valuable things someone interested in your organization could do today to help you move your mission forward?
- Your meeting minutes and other reports or updates. Transparency breeds trust
What content additions do you have to this list?
What nonprofit content do you recall from your time online this week?
Photo credit above: http://www.flickr.com/photos/smemon/with/4855136300/
Posts
