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Nov 14, 2017

Change Your Name, Watch Revenue Drop

We recently did a Strategic Growth Analysis on a new client’s donor database. It looked awful.

The organization was rolling along and then one year, all of their metrics plummeted.

At first, we thought there must be a data issue. But when we talked with them, they happened to say, “We did change our name last year. Could that have had any effect?”

Why, yes, yes it could.

One of the great, sad, consistencies in this business is seeing good nonprofit organizations shoot themselves in the foot over and over again with poorly executed name changes.

If your organization is considering a name change, please do some research. I suggest reading our friend Jeff Brooks’ blogs on the topic. He has six:

http://www.futurefundraisingnow.com/.services/blog/6a0120a59ccea7970b0120a5f38fe5970c/search?filter.q=name+change

Hopefully, that will encourage to do some research of your own constituents so you completely understand how they are going to respond. There is a right way and a wrong way to do this. And the wrong way is very expensive.

One More Gift from Sustainers

I think we’d all agree that sustainers are great. Having a group of donors that have committed to giving every month is like money in the bank. And, not surprisingly, a lot of organizations are careful to limit additional appeals to this group so not to alienate any...

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Early Returns

We are knee-deep in analyzing last fall’s results. While there is of course some variation in results by organization, the general narrative is that last fall wasn’t great . . . but it wasn’t awful either. It was just OK. What we are seeing is that overall revenue was...

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How Fundraising Will Evolve

In honor of International Data Week, I’m sharing how the future of fundraising will evolve. Many people are concerned about fundraising (I’m not btw). For nearly two decades, the “experts” have been predicting the death of direct mail fundraising. Eventually, the...

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