Communications Audits: Your Customers Speak
Ever ask the question — what’s wrong with this picture? A communications audit is the way to find out. For alumni associations, fundraising organizations and advancement offices striving to cultivate more effective engagement and support, a communications audit will help you assess your staff structures and the effectiveness of your communications programs. What’s more, you...
Read MoreAlumni Communicators: Reframe Your “Case for Support”
Evolving technologies keep alumni communicators on a reactive whirl. A new idea to test, a new format to try — all with the purpose of keeping the alumni information “churn” going. But what’s the communications strategy that will both create value for alumni and yield ROI for the institution’s overall goals for increased support of various forms? Alumni as a whole...
Read MoreFundraising is Business!
There’s been a lively debate underway in the Chronicle of Philanthropy about whether about fundraisers are “selling” a product. Putting money at the center of the development relationship taints the process, argues veteran fundraiser Jennifer McCrea in her Exponential Fundraising blog. Yet the notion of “selling” shouldn’t be a dirty word because it solves...
Read More3 Steps to Rebound Your Marketing for the Recovery
It’s time to end recession thinking with the official close of winter — and spring forward with marketing for the economic recovery. Several of my nonprofit, small business and independent consultant clients have spent the last weeks of winter taking the 3 critical steps to rebound their activity in activity in 2010: Focus Focus Focus Communications activities suffered badly...
Read MoreDuke Mag & UVA President Share “Brutal Facts” with Alumni
With increased focus on alumni associations as portals for support for university strategic priorities, Duke and the University of Virginia have come forward with best practice communications worthy of serious notice. Both elite institutions with significant endowments, in 2009 they wrestled with what Jim Collins calls “the brutal facts” that “great” organizations...
Read MoreThe Latest Buzz on Thought Leadership
Consultants and entrepreneurs are typically thought leaders, but may not realize or appreciate it, so they miss personal marketing opportunities. That’s often true of marketing consultants, who excel at marketing their clients but not themselves. And it’s even worse for many women consultants, according to Kate Purmal, a consultant in the San Francisco Bay Area, told the Women in...
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