Story brings us together. It solidifies our place in the world, helps identify a common purpose, and provides meaning to our work of creating social change.

We often think about our donor relationships from a unilateral perspective. Our organization needs money to meet our mission. Our funders and donors help us meet that mission by supporting us financially.

While that’s true, it’s important that we see our relationships as symbiotic. That we see them as a way to help the donor get their own needs met while helping us meet ours. We can only grow our impact in our communities by sharing with each other stories that are compelling and effective.

Join Sue and me for this FREE webinar and learn to develop a stronger understanding of the role of story in building relationships with our donors and other stakeholders on Monday, February 13th at 1pm ET.

Are your board members not getting out to cultivate relationships and ask for gifts? Do you find it difficult to get your board to understand its role in "giving and getting"?

We can help change that…

Just in time for Spring are our highly-praised Fundraising 101 webinars, created to teach your board how they can play a bigger role and make an impact.

If your board members struggle to… 

	“give and get” to the best of their ability
	feel comfortable being involved in fundraising
	understand the impact of having everyone actively involved in fundraising

…then our Fundraising 101 webinars are for you!

We introverts don’t like events. Too many people. Too many conversations crisscrossing each other. The schmoozing takes too much energy! We’d rather be anywhere else.

Yet the reality for fundraisers is events come with the territory and we can’t avoid them. Chances are our organization has at least one “big” fundraising event a year – a gala (cringe!) or something with food, entertainment, an auction, etc. We might have walkathons, lectures, cocktail parties, and so on.

Given the reality, how do we make it work for us? Read the full post for my tips based on 30 years of dealing with events.

Introducing a year-long series of brief videos on the topics you care most about. Here I tackle the importance of board training.  

The results are in…and they did surprise me. A full 4.1% of you said you knew you wanted to be a non-profit fundraiser when you were 18 (and another 8% said you wanted to do something else in the non-profit world).

Now, you might be saying that 4.1% seems low, but I was expecting something on the order of 1%!  Every time I present to a room of fundraisers I ask if anyone grew up wanting to be a fundraiser, and among the thousands in those rooms I have found just one! One woman said she wanted to be a fundraiser when growing up.

So the fact that 26 out of 634 respondents knew they wanted to be fundraisers is amazing…and we thank you for leading the way for the rest of us!

What careers were most popular? Here you go:

Arts 16.4%
Business 10.9%
Medicine 8.4 %
Law 8.0%
Psychology 8.0%
Something else in the non-profit world 8.0%

Hope you're having a great year of fundraising,

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