Author: LAPA

Grateful Person

What’s Your Answer?

For me, I am a fundraiser because I believe the nonprofit sector can do a lot more to reduce poverty; so I raise funds toward achieving that aim, toward securing the necessary capital for designing and implementing anti-poverty policies and program solutions. With Gandhi, I believe that “Poverty is the worst form of violence.” That’s why I’m a fundraiser, and why I’m also committed to the constant improvement of my vocation. I wrote more about what a fundraiser does at this blog post.

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Giving Tuesday

Giving Tuesday

GivingTuesday 2022 is coming up, Tuesday, November 29th, and it’s a banner day for many nonprofits. Some use it to launch their year-end campaign. No other day creates the same worldwide feeling of philanthropy and good will. Often stylized as #GivingTuesday for the purposes of hashtag activism, GivingTuesday occurs on the Tuesday after Thanksgiving in the United States. It’s touted as a “global generosity movement unleashing the power of people and organizations to transform their communities and the world.” Perhaps these LAPA blog resources will help you harness the power of GivingTuesday: GivingTuesday: You Have A Decision To Make Countdown

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Donors Drop By 7% But Dollars Up 6.2%, Buoyed By Major Donors

U.S. charitable giving increased significantly in Q2 2022, but gains were accompanied by a continuing steep decline in donor acquisition and retention, particularly among new and newly retained donors, according to the Fundraising Effectiveness Project’s (FEP) Second Quarter Fundraising Report. The Fundraising Effectiveness Project (FEP) is a collaboration among fundraising data providers, researchers, analysts, associations, and consultants to empower the sector to track and evaluate trends in giving. The project offers one of the only views of the current year’s fundraising data in aggregate to provide the most recent trends for guiding nonprofit fundraising and donor engagement. The FEP releases

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What You Can Do to Plan for the Next Generation of Nonprofit Fundraisers

We Baby Boomers are rapidly aging out of nonprofit leadership. Meaning, there’s a huge impending leadership void in the sector that needs to be filled. Also, nonprofit board members tend to skew older and are often quietly distrustful of youth and “inexperience.” And so the cycle continues. Yet, in less than a decade, millennials will make up 75% of the workforce. It would behoove your nonprofit to upgrade any outmoded staffing practices to facilitate the growth of the organization’s next generation of leaders—many of whom may already be in your organization. Millennials care deeply about climate change because they are

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The Last Four Days: When Online Giving Quintuples

Your year-end fundraising strategy must pay special attention to the last four days of the year. December is the most lucrative giving month of the year, and especially so for online giving. Approximately one out of every three dollars in annual giving is donated in December. In fact, 28% of nonprofits raise between 26% and 50% of their annual funds from their year-end drive. An additional 36% of nonprofits raise nearly 10% of their annual funds from their year-end ask. For online giving, the figure is even higher, with 12% of all annual online giving coming in the last four days. (Statistics

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Advanced Tips For Your Year-End Appeal Letters

Can you imagine how many nonprofit appeal letters I receive after 40 years in fundraising? And yet I still open each one, relish most of them, and occasionally grimace. Here are advanced tips for crafting your year-end appeals that will help you raise more revenue.   1. Is direct mail dead? It most certainly is not. Direct mail is still the workhorse of fundraising. You’ll want to collaborate closely not just with your printer and mail house, but everyone on your team—including your copy editor and graphic designer. What’s a good response rate for direct-mail fundraising? A recent Direct Marketing

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Your Thanksgiving Thank-A-Thon

“If the only prayer you ever say in your entire life is thank you, it will be enough.” ~Meister Eckhart, (1260 – 1328) Your Thanksgiving Thank-A-Thon is critical to your year-end fundraising drive; but it’s also the penultimate moment for you to express unabashed gratitude to your donors and funders. My blog posts this month have been all about boosting your year-end giving. I’ve already described what’s ahead for year-end giving in 2022; you can read about that here. Last week, I wrote about empowering your board members to take leadership roles in year-end fundraising and recommended that you create

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Include Your Board Members In Your Year-End Giving Plan

Year-end giving is on all fundraisers’ minds right now—we all want to have the best returns possible. Last week, we described what’s ahead for year-end giving in 2022; you can read about that here. Over the next few weeks, I’ll examine various aspects of year-end giving, including the Thanksgiving Thank-A-Thon, year-end appeal letters, and the crucial last four days of the year. Stay tuned.   Today, let’s look at some tips for inviting your board to play a leadership role in your year-end drive. It’s our job as fundraisers to make it easy for board members to participate in fundraising,

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What’s Ahead In Year-End Giving?

By Laurence A. Pagnoni, MPA, Michael Taylor, CFRE, Brooke Bryant, CFRE, Alison Plott, MFA, Alexa Strautmanis, Alyssa Greengrass, MA, and Evan Northup, CFRE. Today’s blog post is a team effort as required by such an unwieldy subject: what’s ahead in year-end giving for 2022? We seven contributors are all senior fundraisers at LAPA Fundraising, and we’ve been pondering this question since spring. You can see our bios here. This is what we project for your 2022 year-end fundraising: Market Volatility We’ve been tracking market volatility, wondering what it will be like a years-end. Of note, we’re ending the year without

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