According to Candid – Philanthropy News Digest, Giving Tuesday raised an estimated $2.7 billion in 2021 in the US alone. And in 2020, Giving Tuesday raised an estimated $2.47 billion. Giving Tuesday continues to grow year after year. What started out as a hashtag has blown all over the internet and is now-a-days the largest global movement of charity. It is amazing how kindness and solidarity can spread so fast around the world. The value of taking part in this campaign as a nonprofit organization is to raise money and awareness. Take on board this movement and increase your funding. I want t ..read more

Giving Tuesday is a great fundraising opportunity for nonprofit organizations if planned the right way. As nonprofit fundraisers, we’re constantly planning out different campaigns throughout the year. However, Giving Tuesday is now a common campaign across many non-profits thanks to it becoming a global movement that encourages people to show their generosity. Giving Tuesday is a great opportunity to get more people involved in your cause and help you to reach your organization’s goals during the very lucrative year-end fundraising season.  I want to help you to take on this opportunity a ..read more

Being a copywriter and fundraiser, I think about the pros and cons of telling stories quite a bit. After all, we’re here in 2022. It’s a competitive digital landscape for engaging people and converting engagement into donations. Everything that we put resources into in our fundraising programs has an opportunity cost. Naturally, I wonder, perhaps like you, is the time that we spend sourcing and crafting and writing fundraising appeals really steeped in stories worth it? Is storytelling a trend? Should we tell fewer stories? Should we focus on different types of content entirely? I have some t ..read more

The reality is, we all want to raise a lot of money for our non-profits. Ideally, we want to raise more money than we raised last year. And we’d love to raise more money with each fundraising campaign we run. But raising more money can be hard, especially if your nonprofit has a small donor file or you just have a small audience to begin with. Hard, but not impossible to crush your next fundraising campaign goal.  Maybe your non-profit is new and you're still working on kind of building out an audience and community around your cause. Maybe your organization doesn’t have a huge budget fo ..read more

Wondering how your non-profit can tell compelling stories that raise money? What exactly do you need to do to tell the story?  Over the years, I’ve created a step by step process that I use every time I help a client tell stories. In fact, it’s also what I teach my students inside my class called The Storytelling Nonprofit Masterclass. We’ve had over 200 organizations go through this class with some pretty amazing results. And today, I want to take you a little bit behind the scenes of my process and share with you the steps that I walk through when I do this myself. Before You Start, R ..read more

Translating a cause you care about into compelling words for a fundraising appeal can be a challenge. We can have all kinds of hang-ups about our writing, judgments about its quality, and whether or not we’re a good writer, to begin with. All of these things can get in the way of you actually writing the fundraising appeal that you need to write in order to raise money.  In case it’s any consolation, I’ve been professionally copywriting for over a decade at this point in my career and I still have a relationship to writing that I wouldn’t always describe as smooth. But this far into my c ..read more

In the nonprofit sector we are dealing with ever increasing competition for attention and donor dollars. Add to that that people’s attention spans are decreasing on digital platforms. And add to that that there seem to be endless ways we can market and fundraise for our non-profit, it’s clear that fundraising professionals have their work cut out for them when it comes to winning donors’ hearts and minds.  I see these challenges as a chance to flex my creative muscles, but I also know how frustrating they can be. Sometimes it seems that just when you have a strategy figured out, donor be ..read more

If you’re like most non-profit professionals, you’ve got a million things on your plate every week. You go between calling donors, entering data into the database, answering emails, and maybe even getting that social media post out. It’s a lot. And in the midst of having a million and one things to do, non-profit storytelling can feel like a “nice to have.”  But the reality is that storytelling for non-profits is a “must-have.” As I wrote in an article for Wild Apricot, Storytelling is a tool nonprofits can use in a variety of ways including to improve fundraising and communications, cre ..read more

In all my years of writing copy for non-profits, one of the biggest challenges I still face is distilling the essential information into a great story or compelling fundraising copy. Sometimes there is just a ton of information to work with and it can be easy to start thinking that all of it needs to be jam-packed into your appeal. But does it? Today let’s talk about what to do when there’s too much to communicate in a piece of non-profit content.  Nearly every time I sit down to write a client’s fundraising emails or work on a story for them for their website, one of the things I come up ..read more

As non-profit organizations we write and send lots of fundraising letters or appeals every year. These fundraising efforts with your donors are key for your non-profit goals. I think it's a really interesting piece of the work that we do, but I know that not everyone feels that way about writing. Sometimes it's difficult. Sometimes we run into writer's block. We have problems thinking of what to say. Sometimes it can feel really discouraging to feel like you're not really getting the results that you want from your writing. For this reason, I want to share with you my best fundraising writing ..read more