How to Boost Your Email Open Rate

If there’s one thing that we’re not short of in this digital age, it’s marketing tactics. You can reach out via PPC advertising, mobile, social media, email, and so on. There are a lot of choices, and every day, a new expert pops up with the latest fad. Trying to keep up can be exhausting, […]

The role of prospect research in major donor fundraising

As part of an MA in Philanthropic Studies (undertaken at the Centre for Philanthropy at the University of Kent), Nicola Williams completed a study which aimed to identify the role that prospect research plays in major donor fundraising. The study involved a survey, undertaken in 2018, of major donor fundraisers and prospect researchers working in […]

How you can judge a major donor programme by a cup of tea

Mike Bartlett, a high value fundraising consultant, gets to meet a lot of fundraisers. He states: “Over the years I’ve got better at assessing early on whether a major donor programme is likely to be successful. I always kept an open mind and did my upmost to help each charity develop the tools and skills […]

21 Key Performance Indicators Nonprofit Management Needs to Track

When it comes to determining how efficiently your nonprofit operates, there’s nothing quite as helpful as a large pool of accurate, relevant performance indicators that can objectively show you exactly how well you’re doing. But sometimes, it can be tough to figure out exactly what measurements your organization needs in order to identify where your […]

Go Slow To Go Fast

The phrase resonates as a critical tool for project management. It is about client engagement, taking the time to scope projects with transparency – agreeing what isn’t in scope in order to create clarity about what is, minimizing assumptions, creating risk logs with agreed mitigation and contingency factors, managing performance of a project team. The […]

How to Focus on What’s Important, Not Just What’s Urgent

Do you get to the end of the day and feel that you’ve met your most pressing deadlines but haven’t accomplished anything that’s fundamentally important? You’re hardly alone. In a series of studies recently published in the Journal of Consumer Research, people typically chose to complete tasks that had very short deadlines attached to them, […]

“Waiting for Bono”

In the late 80s hit “Where the streets have no name” by U2, Bono doesn’t start to sing for nearly two minutes… In 2017, the typical song intro is 10 seconds. In this fun blog, Richard Sved discusses the lessons we can learn from music intros when preparing our case for support elevator pitches. https://www.3rdsectormissioncontrol.co.uk/charities-attention-span/

The lure of celebrity

Using celebrity endorsement in appeals can have a profound effect. A national treasure, someone who is trusted and loved by millions, can be responsible for attracting over half the responses to an appeal However, in tests comparing endorsements from celebrities against those of donors able to talk with authority about the work of the charity, […]

CASE-Ross Support of Education Survey, United Kingdom and Ireland

And we are off! The CASE-Ross survey for 2018-19 has been released. Continuing on from last year’s popular posting, here is the latest report as published by CASE. Following three years of hovering around the £1bn mark, in 2018-19 participating institutions’ new funds secured leapt to a total of £1.3bn secured. And for the first […]

Turn a New Subscriber into a Donor with an Email Nurture Sequence

What happens after someone subscribes to your email list? Does she simply get tossed into the general email list? Or do you have a special way of welcoming her into your nonprofit’s family? An email nurture sequence is an automated series of emails someone receives after taking a specific action on a website. Typically, the action is filling […]