A new survey from the University of Pennsylvania's Center for High Impact Philanthropy provides insight into how philanthropists select charities to support, view overhead costs, obtain information about nonprofits, and assess the impact of their philanthropy. Researchers interviewed 33 … [Read more...]
How Charities Use Screening Tools to Find Donors
According to a study commissioned by The Chronicle of Philanthropy, large charities are much more likely than small ones to use wealth screening services. Approximately 1,300 fundraisers answered a survey asking whether they use screening services to identify prospective donors or likely upgrade … [Read more...]
Association of Advancement Services Professionals Conference
The Association of Advancement Services Professionals was launched just over a year ago. Their first conference and annual membership meeting will take place November 6 - 7, 2008 at the Holiday Inn Chicago Mart Plaza. Information is at … [Read more...]
Transcript from my Network for Good teleconference
Network for Good transcribed the teleconference I did for them in April, 2008 and turned it into two articles. They're posted as Choosing a Donor Database: Steps to Success and Why You Need a Donor Database. … [Read more...]
Convio Releases “Common Ground” Donor Database
In June I mentioned that Convio had announced the beta release of a donor database it was calling Aikido, built on the SalesForce platform. This is not a new template for SalesForce, but a product built from the ground up. At the time, they said it would be a separate product from their online … [Read more...]
Duplicates in your Database?
There's been a series of discussions on the FUNDSVCS and PRSPCT-L lists about dealing with duplicates in a database, and preventing new dupes from being created. Melissa Graves from The Village for Families and Children suggested the following routine steps: A) Search for a matching record before … [Read more...]
2008 Data Breaches Have Surpassed All of 2007
According to the Identity Theft Resource Center in San Diego, 449 data breaches have been reported as of August 22 2008, compared to 446 in all of 2007. The breaches included consumer data as well as data from nonprofit and educational organizations. Lost and stolen laptops (and other digital … [Read more...]
Getting Fundraisers to Write Contact Reports
Jim Moore of CommUlinks posted a wonderful response to the following question on a mailing list for prospect researchers. He granted me permission to repost it here. Q: Can anyone share with me ways to ensure development officers are submitting contact reports? Or tools that you have provided … [Read more...]
Showcase of Fundraising Innovation & Inspiration (sofii.org)
I've been watching SOFII develop over the past few months, and it's having an amazing growth spurt. It was set up to "provide charitable fundraisers everywhere with an easily accessible archive of the best fundraising creativity from around the world." The quote from George Bernard Shaw on their … [Read more...]
Stop Sending Vacation Replies to Mailing Lists
Anyone who's a member of a listserve has spent the summer deleting vacation replies from list members. Here's my approach to preventing this: Before a vacation I used to manually visit every one of the more than 30 lists I'm on and set my status to No Mail (or unsubscribe … [Read more...]