 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.
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 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?”  The summer is often a time for fundraising organizations to review their strengths and weaknesses, and to improve their tools, for the upcoming fiscal year. One of the most popular targets for this improvement is the organization’s database, as the database affects all aspects of fundraising activity. If your shop is considering a review of its database effectiveness—a process which is popularly called a data audit—there are three principles that will help guide the course of your work.
 By Ruthie GilesNonprofits are continuously combing through various lists of constituents in order to find those who will be the right prospects for a particular initiative. They may be looking for those who can make a certain sized gift, those who can give to a particular fundraising effort, those who may be able to step up their giving level, and those who might be able to become our major donors over time. Whatever the purpose is for this type of proactive prospecting, there also needs to be a strategy for how to approach the data in order to make informed decisions as to how to proceed. No fancy tools are necessary.
 As the end of the fiscal year approaches, there’s always a need for some last-minute prospecting strategies to help meet your fundraising goals. Learn to identify prospects who may be willing to give and how to use RFM values to support year-end prospecting. Additionally, understand the importance of going back to deferrers and how to keep your pipeline fed to avoid arriving at the end of the fiscal year with a deficit.
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Photos used under Creative Commons from jeffdjevdet, SMPAGWU
