Hooray!

I'm happy to report some good year-end returns for several of my direct mail and grant development clients, including:

* A social services agency doubled their year-end mailing returns by following up the main appeal with a brief reminder a few weeks later to those who hadn't responded.

* A total of $650,000 raised in grants to date for a small renovation project -- more than half of the total needed, with 12 months more to go in the campaign.

* Increased year-end mailing returns for a nonprofit that supplements the high cost of energy through the winter months for low-income people.

Hopefully, as we move further into 2011, we'll see increases in returns from mailings and grant-seeking, with the economy improving and the stock market coming back, thereby increasing the endowments for many foundations that had pulled back on grant-making due to the shrinking of income from their assets.

Hooray for an encouraging end to 2010 and a good start to 2011 in fundraising through the mail and grants! If you have "Hooray" stories to share, I'd love to hear about them. Positive news cheers us all in this field.

Strategies of Grant-Seeking

While many courses are offered in writing actual grant proposals, few courses -- if any -- address the need to analyze the programs for which grants are being sought in the context of funders' current priorities and strategic links between a nonprofit's board and the decision-makers in foundations. It always surprises me that so much attention is paid to the word-smithing (not that careful writing isn't one of the strategic elements of grant-seeking), while so little is paid to the matching of prospects and outcomes, as well as the fundraising climate within which the grant-seeking nonprofit operates.

A few years ago, I wrote a grant proposal which received a few big grants, one of them for $400,000 (a challenge grant that represented 28% of the total cost of the project. We were all ecstatic, of course, but also realistic about what went into that award: the perfect moment in the nonprofit's history for such a project (a capital project), several local foundations with large endowments and narrow geographic scope, a well-written proposal package, a lean-and-mean operating budget that was a testament to good management, and -- drumroll here -- a strategic linkage between the nonprofit's board and that of the foundation.

Conditions like this rarely occur. And sometimes, when they do occur, those raising funds fail to recognize the opportunities. They may go to the well with the wrong project or a poorly executed proposal. They might mar the ideal climate of linkage and need with an unfortunate recent operating deficit. Or their board might be unwilling to help by using their linkages.

Good sources of training and consultation? Of course, I'm a great source of consultation on your grant strategies! But The Foundation Center is a wonderful source of high-quality grant development courses. Send your staff, yourself, your board.

Long Foundation website is back up & Pepsi tries cause-related marketing big-time (instead of half-time)

For those trying to complete an online application or LOI at the Thomas J. Long Foundation, the website is back up and functional this morning.

New style of corporate philanthropy being explored by Pepsi, who took big-bucks advertising budgets and tried cause-related marketing to win consumers by having a local, not a national, impact with their outreach activities. Pepsi Refresh is interactive, allowing participants to vote via Facebook for philanthropic ideas for Pepsi. Innovative, wave-of-future kind of thing. Pepsi is measuring response and analyzing whether this new approach will be better for them than Super Bowl ads. Prediction: it will be better.

Grant-seeking Tips & Updates

It's often in the fine print on foundation websites that you learn the most about what they're funding and looking for, and also about their grant cycles. Thorough research is key to winning grants; don't let yourself just salivate over the size of grants from a foundation that funds similar causes to yours. Dig in and find the hints and precedents that will help you hone your proposal and time it well.

Some foundation updates:

Alert: for those trying to upload an online application to the Thomas J. Long Foundation, the website appears to be down for the last few days. I have one in process and cannot get to the e-Grants area to continue to work on it, with a February 7 deadline approaching. The foundation has reported problems in the last two weeks with its site; I'm sure they'll be getting it fixed soon.


For those interested in applying to the Wayne and Gladys Valley Foundation, a big funding source in the East Bay of San Francisco Bay Area, you might have missed a key statement on the foundation's website announcing that the foundation is winding down its operations over a multi-year period, meaning that the size of grants may be larger than before:

To insure that the Foundation’s assets are distributed in the primary areas that the founders, Wayne and Gladys Valley, designated, and — equally as important — that grants are awarded on the basis consistent with the founders’ intentions, the Members have unanimously elected to wind-down and terminate the Wayne and Gladys Valley Foundation.

Due to the magnitude of the Foundation’s assets and to allow sufficient time to successfully complete the wind-down, a target date of September 2018 has been set. The Board of Directors and staff have been developing a Strategic Plan to accomplish the termination.

2011 - Anyone Have a Crystal Ball?

Apparently, The Chronicle of Philanthropy does, as they are predicting a tough year for nonprofits, due to flat foundation grants and corporation giving. But, as they used to say in the publishing industry, "Flat is the new up."

My clients have experienced a tougher grants climate, no doubt about that. Coupled with cutbacks in California's funding of social services and education, that spells the need to get more sophisticated in your fundraising strategies. Here are a few of the successful strategies some organizations report as boosting their donations:

* Recruit new donors more aggressively. While it seems counterproductive to spend more in a down economy, over a few years, many nonprofits find giving is up, due to expanding their donor universe.

* Be more aggressive in winning back lapsed donors. As they say in business, your past customers are your best prospects. In many, many ways, they're qualified prospects, known to have an interest in your cause, be willing to donate, and perhaps have a vested interest in seeing their previous investment expanded.

* Make it easier to donate online. More visibility translates to more donations. And the place to have more visibility these days is on the Internet.

Hope your year-end returns are more than you had hoped for!

For more ideas on planning your fundraising program for 2011, get in touch with me:  rachel@dacushome.com.

SEO for Nonprofits

Websites, donations, direct mail, newsletters, blog, brochures--how to make it all fit together?

For nonprofit organizations the new world of social media--fitting it all together seamlessly--is worse than a five-hundred-piece jigsaw puzzle. And the acronym SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is harder to grasp than a term in a foreign language. At least there's Babelfish for translating foreign languages!

But SEO is one of the keys to the onine kingdom, and online is increasingly where donations happen. SEO involves how you design your website so someone can find it, using the magic of strategically placed keywords that put your site in the first page of a Google search. Because if you're found on page 45, it's like not being found at all. But if you're Number Four n the first page, you're going to get a lot of newcomers browsing around your website. And that's partly why you have one, right?

I'm no SEO expert, but I know that this hidden dimension is often neglected when setting up a nonprofit's website. Here are a few sites that explain more:

The Nonprofit's Guide to SEM

Wild Apricot Blog (a great blog for many issues nonprofits deal with)

SEO Copy-writing Tips

And here's something you should also check out--Google Grants:

Google Grants

Getting record returns for a mailing

I'm happy to report that one of my year-end mailings is garnering record returns for the nonprofit organization. Of course, many factors play a part in the success or failure of a solicitation mailing, but one of them, I believe, is bringing together the right content and visuals to the right list.

The secret here is know your house list well. It's not a static commodity. Studying your database, keeping detailed notes, and reviewing the notes and other characteristics of your donorbase periodically helps tighten your focus. Who are these people you're writing to? What do they want to know about your agency? And what moves them to give?

So much of the conventional wisdom about direct mail is dated and generalized. For example, knowing that 90% of the audience into which we mailed this record-return letter was religious, but that that figure was down from previous percentage for that donorbase, helped to make the decision to modify the religious tone, so as to be more inclusive of non-religious people in the donorbase. That extra percentage may have responded more vigorously than before because the appeal was broadened to make them feel more included.

In times like these, when every edge you can get can make a big difference, it pays to analyze your donorbase often and to try new things.

Happy year-end mailings and returns! (And don't forget to send the follow-up letter a few weeks after the main mailing to those who didn't respond. Email me for wording ideas.)