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The time between Thanksgiving and year-end offers a prime window for fundraising, as people often feel a heightened sense of generosity and motivation to support causes they care about. This season can be a tremendous opportunity to engage donors, share your mission’s impact, and inspire end-of-year contributions. Here are some practical fundraising strategies and tactics to maximize your campaign success during this season:

The Great Wealth Transfer is underway. Up to $90 trillion is expected to be passed on from wealthy, older generations over the next twenty years. $60 billion of that is predicted to be gifted in 2024.

If you’ve been neglecting your planned giving efforts - or putting them off entirely – it’s time to stop.

Besides the potential for transformational gifts, your organization should absolutely invest time in seeking planned gifts now for several compelling reasons:

August is Make-A-Will Month. What an opportunity for your organization to raise awareness about the importance of estate planning!

Using the concept of "Make-A-Will" to encourage donors can be a powerful strategy for your planned giving and endowment programs. Here are several ideas you can implement this month to capture donors' attention on this important topic.

Every nonprofit organization builds its success on well-defined strategies. But what happens when those strategies, once so promising, start to show cracks? Knowing when to adjust the strategies in your strategic plan and when to give your strategy time to play out can be a critical turning point for the leadership of your organization. How can you tell if something is amiss?

Congratulations! The gift agreement is signed, and the joyful donor has made a bequest in their will. As a result, they have become a member of your legacy giving society. They are looking forward to your annual dinner and receiving the regular newsletter. But is that all there is for the next, ten, fifteen, or twenty years?

If you’re anything like me you may have become used to – or perhaps dependent on – directional apps, like Google Maps. I even put on directions to pick up my son from daycare, just so I know exactly the best way to get there and when I will arrive. Evidently, I like having certainty and a plan.

These apps are written with algorithms that assess available routes (plus traffic or accidents) to produce the most efficient directions.  What if we could apply something similar for fundraising professionals?

Organizations with a strong endowment fund generally have a story about how they got there. It's a story of two parties.

In the world of fund development, endowment programs usually get the least amount of attention. This is a shame, because these gifts often represent a donor’s sense of legacy. Why do we put off the cultivation of endowment prospects? I propose that many of us are laboring under false beliefs about developing endowment program. It’s time to bust some myths!

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.

Thank you for asking, but we’ve already made an endowment commitment to your organization.

If you’re visiting with your best endowment prospects, invitations to become members of your legacy society quite often produce this response. And it is gratifying to hear! The challenge is to identify your best endowment prospects – your organization’s “best friends.”