by Richard Perry and Jeff Schreifels | Oct 14, 2020 | Philanthropy, Value | Communication, Passions and Interests
Most of what you’re telling your donor, she does NOT care about. The end of your fiscal year. The money you need to raise. The building you need to buy or rent. The new staff member. The financial difficulty you’re facing. Your overhead percentage. The number of...
by Richard Perry and Jeff Schreifels | Sep 21, 2020 | Plan for every donor | Cultivation, Passions and Interests, Planning
Stop and take a look at the plan you’ve made for one of your active caseload donors. Note how you’ve organized it – for most people, it’s linear. In other words, it goes from today through a bunch of future actions and, somewhere in there, there’s an ask. This is...
by Richard Perry and Jeff Schreifels | Sep 16, 2020 | Cultivation, Year-end | Annual Fund, Budgets, Passions and Interests
“We’re finding that donors are willing to make their gifts earlier this year to help with this crisis, but we worry about the impact on our budget and cash flow at the end of the year. Any suggestions?” That’s the question that recently came in from one of our webinar...
by Richard Perry and Jeff Schreifels | Aug 31, 2020 | campaigns, multi-year pledges, Pledges | Asking, Donor Offers, Passions and Interests
“Let’s see. Should I ask for a single gift or a multi-year gift?” This is the question posed to Jeff and me and our team almost every week. Often, it’s the struggle of how to balance multi-year larger campaign solicitations with the need to be asking donors for their...
by Richard Perry and Jeff Schreifels | Aug 28, 2020 | Asking, It’s not JUST about the money | Donor-Centered, Passions and Interests
You’re connecting with your major or planned gift donor for the first time. And you’ve planned to say a lot of things. But there’s one thing you do NOT want to say. You don’t want to say anything about money. Why? Because money is the result of your helping the donor...
by Richard Perry and Jeff Schreifels | Aug 19, 2020 | Cultivation, Stewardship | Donor Offers, Donor-Centered, Passions and Interests
I’ve experienced it many times. So have you. A well-meaning person in our lives comes to us with a lot of energy and excitement about the wonderful thing they’ve acquired for us. They hand it to us – it might be wrapped or in a bag – and they wait, excitedly, to see...