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Articles by Simone Joyaux
Great Reads from The Fundraisingology Lab Reading List
The fundraising profession is blessed with a lot of great books that can help you grow as a professional and as a person. A lot of books. So many that it can be hard to find the books you should read first. Here are four especially useful and inspiring books from The Fundraisingology Lab reading list. Looking for some “read right now” books?
Unraveling Development: Communications and Comprehensive Relationship-Building
Want to keep your donors? Want profitable relationships that last? Do it with a comprehensive relationship-building program that includes communications (this column) and cultivation (next column). Mostly organizations communicate through newsletters – and most newsletters are clueless. Wrong content. Poor writing. Lousy readability.
Are you just a great fundraising technician – or more? - Fundraising & Philanthropy Australasia Magazine
Simone Joyaux believed that being an enlightened fundraiser involved more than just raising funds. Here is an example of the wisdom she shared with the nonprofit community during her 35-year career. This article was originally published on 1 October, 2010. There are fundraisers, and then there are organisational development specialists: change agents serving the entire organisation and looking beyond the immediate need for funds.
Keep Your Donors by Building Profitable Relationships That Last
Fundraising is like any other business: customer loyalty is the Holy Grail. The local butcher needs loyal customers to flourish. The baker requires repeat customers to stay open. And charities need loyal donors to survive and thrive. That’s the job of fundraising: finding and retaining customers. We call them donors but they are customers, just the same. And loyalty is what matters. You keep your donors by focusing on them. First, you develop loyal donors by operating as a donor-centered organization.
How Professional Help Can End Board-Member Burn-Out ... and Keep Your Organization Alive and Well
Jeff Brooks is facing a problem — one that’s outside his area of expertise. He doesn’t know what to do, so he turned to the amazing Simone Joyaux for help. We thought you’d enjoy listening in on their conversation…. Jeff: Help me, Simone! I’m on the board of a small nonprofit. We are a community orchestra with an annual budget of about $100,000. Almost everything we do is done by volunteers, and the majority of the volunteers are board members. It’s always been this way.
What’s the Purpose of a Thank-you Letter?
Sure, the letter acknowledges receipt of the gift. Yes, the thank-you letter is part of tax reporting with government. But, certainly you realize that the donor thank-you letter is much more than either of these first two statements. Sadly, too many nonprofits behave as if the thank-you letter is a pro forma activity. This is so bad! Sometimes nonprofits treat the thank-you letter as the end of the relationship with the donor. We got the gift. Yippee! The donor is now ours.
Measuring Fundraising Performance vs. Fundraiser Performance—Part 1 - Non Profit News | Nonprofit Quarterly
This series was first published online on November 21, 2014. So I was doing a workshop about measuring fundraising results. I pursue this topic regularly. I write about it. I present. I modify. I love the topic and I know where I want to go and what I’m hoping the participants embrace. But guess what happened several months ago? I was talking about measuring fundraising results. However, the participants wanted to talk about measuring the fundraiser’s performance.
Channeling Real Human Beings in Multichannel Fundraising - Non Profit News For Nonprofit Organizations | Nonprofit Quarterly
I assume you’ve heard of “multichannel campaigns,” even if you don’t really know what the words mean. I imagine the hip people would say that you and I were pretty much “out of it” if we hadn’t heard the phrase. First, my confession: Yes, I use Wikipedia. Second, Wikipedia says: The data collection and analysis gurus at SAS note: Multichannel marketing is important for the simple reason that you must be where your customers are. And they are everywhere.
Donor Retention—A Call to Action and to Organization-wide Quality Performance - Non Profit News For Nonprofit Organizations | Nonprofit Quarterly
Are you as tired as I am of hearing about donor retention? Well, don’t get tired yet! Because charities do such a lousy job of retaining donors that writers and researchers and speakers and bloggers are going to keep banging this drum until the nonprofit charitable sector gets its act together…and actually retains donors! Talk. Talk. Talk. Beat the drum. Beat it over and over and over. But, the bottom line: Organizations (and fundraisers and bosses and boards) are not doing the work.
Fundraising on a Budget and Understanding the Fundraising Budget
Budgets are important because they allow people to have conversations based in reality. They are tools for learning and accountability, but only if staff people and boards are familiar, even intimate with them. So, yes, besides an overall budget, there needs to be a fundraising budget, both income and expense, and everyone has to understand that budget not just so that you can monitor the ROI of this year’s activities but so that you can become ever better at predicting costs and outcomes.
Executive Committees Beware!
Simone Joyaux is coming for you! She feels strongly about executive committees. Do you agree with her arguments? Read on and weigh in. And then take a look at BoardSource’s recommended governance practice pertaining to executive committees that we present below. And Simone Joyaux sits back, smirking with great satisfaction. You see, I’m on a worldwide mission to destroy all executive committees. I’ve been ranting and raving about this for years and years.“Why?” you ask.
Keep Your Donors: It’s the Right Thing to Do-And It Makes You More Money!
A decade ago, I co-wrote a book called Keep Your Donors: The Guide to Better Communications and Stronger Relationships. In it, I ask, “Why bother to keep your donors?” The answer? Because it’s the right thing to do, morally and ethically. Treat your donors well because you should, darn it. That’s common courtesy and appropriate behavior. Why else? Because it’s the smart business thing to do. Treat your donors well because that’s how you raise more money.
The Power of One and the Power of Community: Part 3
It’s May, and many schools are preparing to graduate their seniors. So let’s take a moment to revisit what they are being graduated into—an environment that challenges us each day to step up, even when it makes us uncomfortable or a laughingstock. Those are the tolls of real leadership, along with a bunch of other unpleasant stuff.
The Power of One and the Power of Community: Part 2
I ended Part 1 of this multipart column with two stories that I shared during the commencement address at Lincoln School back in 2004. Here are two more stories that I told during that address. Back in 2004, I quoted from a letter to the advice columnist, Abigail “Dear Abby” Van Buren: I am a 13-year-old girl in the 8th grade. For a class, I had to do an oral report about my future career. I have wanted to be president of the U.S. since 5th grade.
The Power of One and the Power of Community: Part 1
We elected a black man in 2008. Eight years later, maybe we’ll elect a woman. Elections make me think of values. The values of this country. Values I see elsewhere in the world. I’ve written about values in this column before. Values make me think of justice. And justice—which feels so absent in this election chatter—makes me think of injustice. NPQ regularly writes about justice and the implications and applications for the nonprofit sector. So, today I’m focusing on justice.
Keep Your Donors by Building Profitable Relationships That Last
Fundraising is like any other business: customer loyalty is the Holy Grail. The local butcher needs loyal customers to flourish. The baker requires repeat customers to stay open. And charities need loyal donors to survive and thrive. That’s the job of fundraising: finding and retaining customers. We call them donors but they are customers, just the same. And loyalty is what matters. You keep your donors by focusing on them. First, you develop loyal donors by operating as a donor-centered organization.
Fundraising Isn’t about Money…Neither Is Giving: Part 4
Welcome to Part 4 of the “Fundraising Isn’t about Money…Neither Is Giving” series. Please make sure you’ve read Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3 before going on to this final section. Sometimes, my audiences deny me my stories Several years ago, I was presenting in Illinois. Maybe 100 people were in the room for this six-hour workshop on keeping your donors through relationship building. Audience members participated actively.
Building a Culture of Philanthropy in Your Organization
Where was my office? At the end of a dead-end hallway. Very few people ever came to my office. Unless they were specifically looking for me. No one ever wandered by. That was a bit of a metaphor back in 1981 when I started my job at the theatre company. The art—and the directors, actors, and tech staff—were the important people. The rest of us—administration—were the necessary evil. And the fundraising operation? Oh my gosh. Worse than a necessary evil! Rather ironic, eh?
Working for Social Justice with Social Change Philanthropy
While going through some old files, I encountered one of my original print “newsyletters” from July 2004, which was devoted to social justice. That was eight years ago. Things haven’t changed much and I think that’s sad. So here goes…July 2004 revisited… I’m concerned about the growing disparity between the haves and the have-nots in America. And for me, that’s a social justice issue. I believe that progressive public policy is co-opted each day. And that, too, is a social justice issue.
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