Back to School Week – Who’s Your Target?

Here’s a challenge that many organizations have when it comes to choosing fundraising techniques: not spending enough time identifying their target donors for a given strategy. For any initiative, you MUST be able to answer the question: who do you expect to give you money?

It matters, and when you don’t ask that question, you’re setting yourself up to damage morale, leave a bad taste in the mouth of community members without kids, and fall short of your goals. Here’s a handy guide to help you figure out WHO you should be asking for money, and HOW you should do it. These tips guaranteed* to make you sound super smart at the next PTO meeting.

*Development Shrink cannot be held responsible for your getting elected fundraising chair or given other leadership roles as the result of the wisdom contained in this post.

Accounting vs. Plain English – the problem with “unearned” revenue

I went to business school. I learned a lot of very useful things there, but when I give people the 30 second version of why it was so important to me and my career, it all boils down to this: college taught me how to speak French and Latin and a little Old English…but in business school, I learned how to speak Accountant and Consultant and a little Finance. And a good part of what I do professionally is translating from one of these business languages into plain english.

Many folks get frustrated that such translation is necessary. Can’t we all just use a common language for all this? Read more