In the fast-paced world of fundraising, identifying potential donors can often feel like searching for a needle in a haystack. But what if I told you there's a way to spot the needle without having to rummage through the haystack? This is where 'velocity' comes in.
'Velocity' is a term borrowed from physics, but in our context, it's used to denote the rate of change in a donor's giving year by year. An increase in velocity indicates increased engagement and a signal of readiness to give more. We measure velocity to track changes in donors' giving patterns. By evaluating the speed at which donors increase their contributions, we can identify those who are signaling that they are ready to become major donors.
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The holiday season is not only a time for joy and celebration but also an opportunity to effectively manage your prospects and continue your outreach efforts. Balancing the festive spirit with your prospecting goals can be challenging, but with the right strategies, you can make the most of this time while maintaining positive relationships. Here are some practical tips to help you stay organized and achieve your prospecting goals during the holiday season: 1. Plan Ahead and PrioritizeBefore the holiday season starts, take some time to plan and prioritize your outreach activities. Evaluate your prospect list and identify the most promising leads that you want to focus on during this period. By prioritizing your prospects, you can allocate your time and resources effectively, ensuring that you make the most impact with your outreach efforts.
By Gregory Duke, bCRE-PRO
While data cleanup and integrity are always important, the timing of focusing on it during the fall season might seem curious. October—and the last three months of the year in general—is typically a particularly busy time for non-profits. This is the season for sending holiday event invitations to our top prospects and preparing end-of-year mailing lists for nearly everyone in our database. Who has time in this season to perform any data auditing or cleanup? Since data is constantly being added to and changed in our databases, data integrity is an ongoing concern—even in the fourth quarter of the year. But since we also don’t have as much time to enforce that data integrity (as if we do in the other quarters of the year!), it’s imperative that we make the most of that time. By Marianne M. Pelletier When I was in college, I would walk past the science building on my way to take a drawing class at the arts building. In the drawing class, I learned how to hold up a pencil to find the angle of a line on the object that I was drawing.
That new skill came with me when I walked back past the science center, noticing its lines. On my last trip to visit my alma mater, my eyes immediately traced the roof lines of the science center while I flashed back to those January treks to the arts center. Even after 30 years, it was visceral for me to think of a 3-dimensional object as a series of lines in order to draw a 1-dimensional image of it. By Ruthie Giles Know Where You Are GoingWhen I was a kid, my dad loved to get us all in the car on a beautiful summer day and go for a drive. This was back in the days before cell phones, so there was no GPS to guide us. We almost never had a map in the car, so we relied solely on only my dad’s sense of direction and his recollection of roads once traveled in some prior decade.
He would never tell us the specific destination of these drives, we simply got in the car and off we went, full of wonder and excitement about where this drive might take us. And then he would inevitably turn onto a road that would prompt one of us to ask, “Where does this road go?” |
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