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New offering: Boost your email efforts in 5 minutes a week- for free!
Email is critical to a nonprofit's success. It helps with fundraising, marketing and much more. It's a great tool for connecting with individuals, building relationships and converting subscribers into donors. I am thrilled to share with you a new project launched in partnership with Foundant Technologies: The Weekly SEND…
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Mind the GAP – how gift acceptance policies make you the superhero!
I recently wrote a blog that you may find interesting. If you don't have gift acceptance policies, you should. If you do, have you reviewed them recently and do you follow them? This is a quick and informative read. Community Foundations need a good GAP as well as any nonprofit. Thanks. Kent C. Weimer, Chartered Advisor in…
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Unique situation for donors
We have a set of donors who are making their post-lifetime plans for their donor advised fund. The fund is currently non-endowed and will have ~$40M added to the fund after the donors’ lifetimes. It has a very narrow area of interest for the grant funding (retrofitting homes for seniors and people with disabilities). The…
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Procedure for updating fund record in the event of death of advisor(s) or other life-changing event
Hello, Would you be willing to share your process/procedure on how you document and update aspects to a fund record, in the event of fund advisor(s) death, divorce, or any other life-changing event? Thank you! Sally Hermann St. Croix Valley Foundation
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Leveraging Donation Portal to Support Fundraising Efforts
Outside of COVID19 disaster relief funds, we've never really leveraged the customization of the donation portal through CSuite/Stripe to highlight other funds and their work. As we are looking to grow our development team and the ways in which we support donors and fund holders interested in fundraising, I've wondered…
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Do you have a collaborative giving group (i.e. Giving Circle or Funder Forum) at your organization?
We would love to hear more about what your organization is doing! Join us for this week's Coffee Talk! Register Here
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Fund liaison assignments for donor stewardship
We are developing a "fund liaison" program at our community foundation to more proactively serve our fund holders and make sure they know their "person" at the Foundation and we can provide more personalized, ongoing stewardship. Most of our fund liaisons are in our philanthropic services department and a few from…
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Community Indicator Reports
Hi all! I received lots of good help and feedback on my last post, so I thought I'd post again. We are looking in to conducting a community indicator report/needs assessment for our region. I know a lot of other foundations have engaged in this area, so I would love to hear any thoughts on best practices! Any information…
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Adjusted Follow Up Form Collecting photos and messages (Coffee Talk)
On today's Coffee Talk @LisaStachula shared about some changes they made in their follow up form to collect photos and more structured thank you messages from their students to create donor packets. She also talked about using a tool called ThankView. I've attached the follow up form here. Feel free to take a look.
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Young Professionals Giving Group
I am curious if any other Foundations are doing a young professionals giving group or similar group? If so, I would love to hear more about best practices, guidelines, and giving levels! Thanks, Eliana
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Bequest Best Practices
Hi there! I am hoping to learn more about bequest practices from other community foundations. I am curious as to what internal forms/process are used by other foundations? Is there anything others have found to be particularly useful in navigating planned giving, particularly if there is no signed fund agreement? Are…
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Coffee Talk: Annual Report planning starts now! Strategies to tell meaningful stories year after
We had a great and lively coffee talk exploring how foundations plan and deliver their Annual Report. Let's continue the discussion here - especially for everyone who wanted to share examples with one another!
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Five Creative Virtual Fundraising Ideas
What virtual events have you held?
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Have any of you celebrated financial milestones at your Foundation?
We are almost at $100 million and are trying to find a way to celebrate this in a meaningful way with our donors and our community.
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Family Foundation - Unrestricted DAF
Hi, Our foundation is looking to expand our fund offerings to include a Family Foundation (essentially a Unrestricted DAF). The option has been requested by two different families who wish to establish a fund over $1 million and grant out based on a grant and/or RFP cycle. The fund would have high influx of the principal…
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Looking for how to's and tips re beginning Professional Advisor engagement
We are looking for ideas, and resource samples - if you are willing, regarding Professional Advisor engagement. We don't have a formal "program" but would like to begin reaching out to Advisors to form partnerships. Can you share any info re the below? Your answer may fit in several of questions - just posing the questions…
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Coffee Talk: A Goal, a Path, and a Mission: Communications Planning at Your Foundation.
We had a great and lively coffee talk exploring how community foundations do communications planning and implementation. Let's continue the discussion here - especially for everyone who shared plans for their anniversary events! Here is the link to the recording: Thank you to all who participated and joined us and special…
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Identifying Volunteer Stewards
We would like to identify our Volunteer Stewards in CSuite and wonder how others might be doing this. We don't want to make them Foundant users. Currently I have them set up in the Relationship tab with a Relationship Type of 'Volunteer Steward'. With the addition of Custom Fields I'm wondering if there is a more efficient…
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Field of Interest Fund
Our foundation has one field of interest fund and we have had a question about Board insurance come up. The field of interest fund has it's own Board of directors and committees and they are overseen by the foundation staff and BOD. The fund has been paying D&O insurance which can be quite expense for a small organization…
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Does anyone have an example of a Donor Survey or Donor Intake Form that they are willing to share?
We would like to use this to, not only update Donor Profiles, e-mails, phone numbers, etc, but would like to to engage and track donor interests. Thank you. Renee
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Sharing information when working with Fundraisers for Fiscal Sponsorships and Designated Funds
Hello! Can you tell me how your community foundation handles sharing donation information for designated fund holders (e.g. outside giving to funds for designated organizations) and fiscal sponsor fundraising specialists? Do you allow fundraisers and designated beneficiary organizations write thank-you's for gifts made to…
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Database Ranking - Development Plan
Hello, I have been working our Development Committee to put a system together to rank our database and determine categories and scoring for follow-up and marketing based on a profiles score. We have been progressing along but I have hit a bit of a hurdle. Our database is very large, 14,000+ donor profiles to export,…
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Using Technology to Support Asset Growth Through Challenging Times
Thank you to everyone who joined us today for our Donor Management Coffee Talk: Using Technology to Support Asset Growth Through Challenging Times! We had a few requests for those who raised their hands and shared their projects with us to share some examples of the work that they have been doing. We are creating this…
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Do your (DAF) fund fees contribute to discretionary grantmaking?
Hi Compass, Triangle Community Foundation is looking to benchmark our funding peers who attribute a part of their fund fees directly into their discretionary grantmaking program. This has arisen as one of many potential ways to operationalize our values of equity and community directly into our fund policies. What, if any,…
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Donor Management Coffee Talk: Stewardship Strategies for New Donors in The New Normal 01-06-21
Thank you to everyone who joined us for our Donor Management Coffee Talk: Stewardship Strategies for New Donors in The New Normal today! We loved hearing about what you are all doing: that a few of you are having big year-end returns from your direct mailings, some fantastic virtual tour ideas for engaging your donors,…
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Setting a campaign to sell Pavers
Has anyone set up a campaign to sell custom Pavers to sell to support community projects? By Pavers I mean bricks that are customized, usually with people's names, to be places at a location. Do you have any suggestions or resources from your experience? Thank you very much. Pam
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Funder Styles: Alignment towards Impact and Outcomes
Our guide to Funder Styles - Connecting Purpose to Evaluation was created to help our community of funders create alignment and set expectations around measurement and evaluation efforts. In our work with different funders over the years, we've noticed some organizations take a storytelling approach, others track with…
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Fund Types
Good afternoon, I have a few questions regarding field of interest and designated funds. Do any of you allow a field of interest fund to have more than one field of interest? Example: Smith Field of Interest fund, grants for animal welfare and education. Do any of you allow designated funds to benefit more than one agency?…
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Fund Types
Good afternoon, I have a few questions regarding field of interest and designated funds. Do any of you allow a field of interest fund to have more than one field of interest? Example: Smith Field of Interest fund, grants for animal welfare and education. Do any of you allow designated funds to benefit more than one agency?…
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Multi-fund signature page
I would like to ask if anybody has and/or is drafting fund agreements with a signature page to accommodate when donors would like to establish multiple funds? We recently had a donor that was interested in establishing a scholarship, field of interest (with multiple purposes,) and designated (with multiple purposes.) Thank…
