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This January, the DBD Team is making resolutions to help us be better. Today Sara gives herself permission to say “no.”

This January, the DBD Team is making resolutions to help us be better. Today Mike offers a bold resolution… and a straightforward way to make it happen.  

How’s this for a bold resolution? Let’s all become richer, smarter and more emotionally intelligent.  The good news regarding this resolution is that there is an easy way to make it happen for all of us: resolve to spend more time reading.

This January, the DBD Team is making resolutions to help us be better. Today Thom tells us why we need to resolve to trust our volunteers.  

I love working with volunteers and, in the right circumstances, I love volunteering.

This January, the DBD Team is making resolutions to help us be better. Today Lora suggests that maybe we should resolve to fix things before they break.  

So much of fundraising work is cyclical. Annual campaigns, events, United Way campaigns, etc. all combine to give our yearly calendar a rhythm and sense of expectation. Rarely do nonprofit leaders find themselves with extra time on their hands, so it becomes very easy to take last year’s plan and polish it up for the new year. Why fix something that’s not broken?

This January, the DBD Team is making resolutions to help us be better. Today Jon gives us a short and sweet reminder to stay focused and have greater impact in the new year.  

In the spirit of my overarching goal to simplify in 2018, I have set an intention that I hope will be both impactful and achievable.

This January, the DBD Team is making resolutions to help us be better. Today Danny encourages all of us to try a new way to keep our resolutions – by being grateful. 

In this New Year, if you want to be successful in achieving your resolutions, don’t rely upon will power. Fewer than 10 percent of resolutions are maintained through will power. Instead, there’s a more powerful and successful way to change your life through a New Year’s resolution. Be grateful. How does gratitude figure into this equation?  Well, here is the research.  

This January, the DBD Team is making resolutions to help us be better. Today Jan encourages all of us to remember our mentors… and to be one for someone else. 

Who was it for you? That one person (or several people) who have been critical in shaping the success you have achieved in your life? Be it in your career, or church lay leadership, or that older mom who helped you see that “this is just a phase” when you were convinced that your kids were the only ones causing this much chaos in their family’s lives.

A lifetime of personal and professional goal setting has taught me that it is critically important to properly define success before setting goals or making resolutions.

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.

A few summers back while on vacation with friends I learned a great lesson. Well…two actually. The first was that cell phones and salt water don’t mix (and that phone insurance is a good thing). The second lesson came a few days later, about 48 hours after the phone-meets-ocean thing.