What would you do if you were less than 60-days into your new fiscal year and landed a ONE MILLION DOLLAR gift?

I know. You’d take that problem, right? Well, that’s just what happened to my well-deserving client. That’s not even the best part! . . .

Has this ever happened to you?

My client secured a $100K gift from an individual donor.

The only catch? The donor wanted to use it as a matching gift to inspire others to give . . .

Do you ever feel like you’re stuck in the friend zone? Not in your dating life… but with a donor?

That’s exactly the challenge my client articulated to me recently. Here’s what was happening:

I was on a panel discussion recently and a leader sent me this private message. For context, we were discussing nonprofit’s need for greater amounts of general-operating income.

"Hi, Sherry - A question for later...I follow you on LinkedIn and saw recently you posted that many fundraisers do not know how to ask donors for unrestricted general operating support. Can you please elaborate and provide an example of what a successful request for general operating support looks like?"

If I had to summarize one of the most rewarding things I do for nonprofits, it would be this:
I see an organization’s revenue potential and help them achieve it.

Here’s what type of growth is possible for your small nonprofit organization . . . 

You want to know one of my secret weapons to helping organizations grow by millions? And the funny thing is boards are really nervous about it . . .

I’m industry agnostic when it comes to your nonprofits’ missions.

Fundraising is practical. It's identifying what you need to STOP doing so that you can START doing higher-ROI activities.

That's really the reason I started posting my reframe series on LinkedIn that I often share on Fridays!

Here are a few more examples of these important shifts we all must make...

I made a bold, blanket statement the other day. 

I said “the average nonprofit needs to add $100K - $500K to their marketing/comms budget”.

You know why I said it? Well, every day I see Fundraising staff . . .

I dropped my oldest child off at college on Tuesday. Sigh.

I’ve worked hard to make this shift away from worrier mom to warrior mom. The latter is WAY MORE motivating, isn’t it?

I think we can make this shift in so many areas when you’re trying to scale your nonprofit . . .

What does donor segmentation have to do with my world-famous enchiladas? Ok, not world famous…but famous in my house!

Stay with me a moment on this analogy…Here’s what I mean…

My client called me the other day to tell me he had grown a $1K gift to a $5K gift using the strategy tools we’d created together. I celebrated big time!

The reason?

Well, the process of increasing a gift from $1K to $5K is the SAME as growing a gift from $100K to $500K.