Think Before You Endow
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I was recently asked at a public forum why I don’t like endowments. I answered: “It’s not so much that I don’t like endowments. It’s that nonprofits and their donors…
Read More Nothing To Be Afraid Of
I became much more comfortable with public speaking when I realized that the audience was rooting for me. Think about it. Someone stands up to address a group. It may…
Read More Endowments, Pro and Con
OK. I admit it. Sometimes I go a bit overboard to prove a point. A friend of mine made me realize this the other day. She chided me: “You’re always…
Read More Perfect Match
There’s something about a fundraising challenge grant that gets the juices flowing. The nonprofit announces, “If we manage to raise X dollars by such and such a date, then the…
Read More An Ahoy Moment
In the early years after Alexander Graham Bell’s big discovery, people couldn’t agree on how to respond when the telephone rang. About half the people said, “Hello!” (That was the…
Read More The Best Kind of “Ask”
I was giving a fundraising seminar a couple of weeks ago. Most of the audience members were nonprofit CEOs, development directors, and Board members. A woman asked me, “So the…
Read More An Approach to Funding That Might Actually Work
As you may know, I’m a bit of a skeptic about the efficacy of traditional endowments. In an earlier blog post, “THIS is the Rainy Day,” I urged nonprofits with…
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