Open thinking
Ideas and resources for rethinking your fundraising, served up by Parrish Consulting. Join us for thoughts on a variety of topics, including annual fundraising, events, capital campaigns, databases, board development and more.
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My name is Madeline Sagorski and I am excited to announce that I will be working as an intern at Parrish Consulting this summer.
This December I will be graduating with a Bachelor of Marketing from Ferris State University. I am a member of the school’s American Marketing Association, and I was recently involved in the development of an integrated marketing communications plan for a national... Read more »
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This is part 3 of 3 from our April Roundtable: Leveraging Your Marketing Dollars to Increase Fundraising Success
Decorating The Outside: Building a Cohesive Brand Identity
What is a brand? It’s not just your logo, tagline, or a particular graphic. These items are all parts of your brand, but not where it starts. A brand is whatever you are communicating to anyone – your clients, board,... Read more »
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This is part 2 of 3 from our April Roundtable: Leveraging Your Marketing Dollars to Increase Fundraising Success)
Building Your Walls: Marketing Tools
When it comes to creating your marketing tools, it’s important to know your audience. The audience you serve is going to care about different things than your donors care about. Talk to donors about impact and sustainability, not about your... Read more »
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(This is part 1 of 3 from our April Roundtable: Leveraging Your Marketing Dollars to Increase Fundraising Success)
Building Your Foundation: The Case for Support
The Case for Support is a document that explains the need for your work as an organization, the impact you make, and how you change people’s lives. It is normally about three pages long and provides the essence of what you do and why... Read more »
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Before your board can work for you and help move your mission forward, you have to ensure the right people are on board. You need diversity of skill set, connectivity, experience, and demographics. Many Parrish Consulting clients are familiar with our board composition piece. This allows us to identify that you have the right make up for your board. Generally speaking, boards are saturated... Read more »
With printing and mailing costs continuing to soar, the value of email newsletters is also on the rise. Email newsletters are an easy way to quickly dispense news about your organization, incurring minimal costs. Colorful images, graphics and videos are a breeze to include. You can keep clients, members, volunteers and donors in the loop of information. Depending on the size of your email... Read more »
When it comes to knowing who your donors are in your database, you may have heard of the term LYBUNT. Just in case you haven’t, a LYBUNT is a donor who gave “Last Year But Unfortunately Not This” Year.
If you’re looking at your donation reports for 2012 and want to get a jump on your donations in the first quarter of the year, why not look at LYBUNTs? This means you would look at all donors who... Read more »
Donors support nonprofits for a variety of reasons. Some will give simply because they love what you do. Some appreciate knowing your impact on specific numbers of people. Others will give because of those reasons, but only when they get a closer look at your business practices. Efficiency and transparency are key words among many of today’s savvy donors. They want to know that most of their... Read more »
What will jumpstart your fundraising efforts? Is it leadership, board involvement? A seasoned development director? Well, all of these components are great, but without a sharp administrative staff person, your efforts can lag and become easily bogged down. We know. It may not seem intuitive to invest in administrative support when what you really need is cash in the door to keep your mission... Read more »
Looking for a simple way to share your mission with your community? Isn’t it about time everyone knew how great you were and what services you offered?
Hosting a regular, monthly tour at your organization can do just that. A tour is a simple point of entry event designed to engage your local community to your mission. Your guests will leave with a clear understanding of who you are, what you... Read more »