8 days and counting

Fiscal year end for most of us is next week. We saw increases in both donors and dollars this year and did so on a reduced budget and hope that many of you are also seeing some positive signs from your constituencies.

I will keep this short as I am sure that many of you have phone calls to make, emails to send and other final push efforts to get the gifts that you usually get this week in the door. I have a simple and direct suggestion for you to implement the second week of July - a fiscal year end/start postcard.

The postcard goes to anyone who has ever given to your organization that you still feel you have a good address for. It contains a fun image of your students (have used thank you images, graduation images, event images, classroom images) and very simple text on the back - Thanks to you or thanks to our donors we achieved our goal of XXXX last year and have begun the new academic year so are once again counting on your support.

Sending this message out has substantially reduced fiscal year confusion for donors, serves as an additional thank you and contributes around 150 gifts each year (include a unique trackable link to your giving pages and watch the mail to see who gives in the week after this goes out.)

As importantly, it allows you to reset the counter with your donors the same way that you do on your tracking reports. It is a new year, we are starting over with an empty bucket and counting on your support to fill it up. This same approach can certainly be done on social media - try running it as a facebook ad and via email if cost is a substantial concern.