Lora Dow

Over the past few months, I’ve been in several conversations with nonprofit development and marketing staff about some of the newer social media tools, including the one that confounds and intrigues everyone the most: Snapchat.

This October, the Donor By Design team is tackling spooky situations in development. Join us this month for hair-raising stories and cautionary tales of frightful fundraising!

In this series, the DBD Team is taking a deeper look at some of the axioms we use when working with clients. In today’s blog, Lora explores our idea of “The Blue Flame Case.” To read other axiom blogs,  click here. 

In our work with nonprofits and churches, we focus on four key areas: leadership, case, prospects and a plan. When those four areas are well-executed, a campaign is much more likely to succeed.

For more than ten years, I’ve been talking to non-profits about social media. Best I can tell, the two things you really need to know are:

I was as shocked as anyone at the death of Prince, and deeply saddened at the news that he may have died without a will. The fact that his estate will now become part of the public record – and that any potential fight over it will be national news – is causing many people, not just in the nonprofit world, to have conversations about estate planning and protecting the assets they’ve built over the years.

We’ve all heard the stories.

Why do you do the work you do?

Pastor Andy Stanley is famous for saying “Vision is a mental picture of what could be, fueled by a passion that it should be.”

A lot of the nonprofits we work with are well-established organizations. They have a good grip on best practices and they execute the basic principles of fundraising well. But just as a start up can shake up a whole industry, so can a new nonprofit teach all of us old hands a few things.

Like all of us, I was stunned and saddened by the news out of Paris Friday night. Coming shortly on the heels of a similar attack in Beirut just hours before, the on-going refugee migration, and violence throughout the world and in our own country, it’s easy to be overwhelmed.