Showing posts tagged fundraising

Top Ten Grant Proposal Mistakes

Writing a grant and feeling like it’s not quite there? Here are some top mistakes to check your proposal for and fix before you submit!

  1. TYPOS!
  2. Redundancy
  3. Length (too short if it’s missing components; too long if I forgot what I read 5 minutes ago)
  4. Vague (use examples! numbers! color!)
  5. Dry (a little passion is good)
  6. Leaving the reader with questions (anticipate and attack!)
  7. Generic (target your funder)
  8. Confusing goals and objectives
  9. Not following directions
  10. Inconsistencies (are all of your numbers and program names the same?)

These are my personal observations and suggestions that I share in my class How to Write a Grant Proposal at the Brooklyn Brainery. If you want more tips like these, stay tuned for the next class and browse my other nonprofit blog posts!

12 free ebooks on nonprofits, social media, and fundraising

YouTube Seeks to Improve Nonprofit Videos

YouTube in recent weeks has turned its focus to helping nonprofits create more powerful, effective videos, with a new “playbook” guide and a chance to participate in a one-day video boot camp in San Francisco.

The free 24-page guide, “YouTube for Good,” helps nonprofits devise attention-grabbing names and code their videos’ descriptions to make them more visible to search engines,tell better stories, and use video as part of  broad campaign.

This is excellent. It drives me nuts when organizations have amazing tools at their fingertips but don’t use them well; this is a wonderful effort that both makes YouTube a more accessible tool to nonprofits and also improves YouTube’s brand from being just the source of LOL videos.

(via Chronicle of Philanthropy)

Ecards like this from Tufts University actually make my day and are great for donor relations. Plus, ecards require virtually no money, so gifted money can actually go towards university programs instead of towards superfluous thank you gifts. And who doesn’t love a Jumbo? View high resolution

Ecards like this from Tufts University actually make my day and are great for donor relations. Plus, ecards require virtually no money, so gifted money can actually go towards university programs instead of towards superfluous thank you gifts. And who doesn’t love a Jumbo?

Social Media Increases Alumni Engagement more than 400%

The Thunderbird School of Global Management enjoyed a 400 percent increase in the number of donors – many of them alumni – to its annual end-of-fiscal-year campaign 2010. Everything they did that year was the same, with one exception – Thunderbird had a small team of social media managers creating and monitoring conversations with the school’s supporters for about a year leading up to the campaign.

(via warehousemedia)

(Reblogged from warehousemedia)

Nonprofit Board Variance by City

Interesting study, and I’d love to see some of the raw data. Also, nonprofits, given this data, do you think it will influence your Board governance in any way?

Thanks Taproot!

I was interviewed about university giving and young alumni engagement.

Know any good raffle prizes?

I’m planning an event for early April for Young Friends of Tufts Advancement and am taking donations of sweet raffle prizes. I’m also curious what you think an enticing raffle prize would be. Your thoughts? Your items? Your connections?