Prospects Most Likely to Go MGO

A list of companies most likely to go IPO came across my Facebook wall the other day, and this list was created by Goldman Sachs. Now, most of you will say, “Well, so what, it’s another list.” But something caught my eye in this piece, as the companies listed are STARTUPS: “So why hold a conference for early stage companies if you’re an IPO underwriter? Well, the event basically functions as an extremely foresighted form of lead generation. According to multiple people I spoke to, these are the 30 or so startups Goldman has designated as potential IPO candidates. And it wants to make a relationship as early on as possible, in case some of them actually do and need Goldman’s services in the process.” Oddly enough, nonprofits might be able to learn a thing or two from GS… What are your organization’s steps to identify who, amongst your constituents, members, and prospects, are most likely to go MGO (major gift offering)? Has your organization developed...
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Holiday Giving

So, here it is, two days post Thanksgiving weekend - yes, we've successfully prolonged this one-day holiday into an entire weekend, and if your school system is like ours, it's a 5-day weekend, according to my teenage son, which made yesterday quite the rude awakening for said teenage son. In reflecting on our holiday, and writing this blog post, I came across my dinner preparation to-do list, as follows: Make cranberry sauce  Start turkey  Put turkey in oven no later than 2 p.m. Mix together mama’s sweet potato casserole Take rolls out of freezer Start Brussels sprouts Start pumpkin soup when turkey is resting Open pinot noir Make turkey gravy Put in rolls and sweet potato casserole Of course, as with all cooks, the recipes were tweaked to the tastes of the cook (moi) and the family members. We enjoyed our Thanksgiving meal in the evening, which is unlike my traditional family T-day schedule, a noonish feasting so one may graze the rest of the day. Why, you ask, did we...
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The 80/20 Rule Fundraisers Don’t Know About

When it comes to data most fundraisers would just like their queries to be faster and their reports on time.  Sadly they are often disappointed on both fronts so it's no wonder they are not asking the most important question: "Are my queries and reports accessing all of our data?" The answer is “No!” Before you send this to your intrepid database administrator let's take a quick trip in the tech time machine to when donor management systems started to proliferate. It is the 80's and entrepreneurs are beginning to use relational databases to create software to store information on donors. Contact information and gifts are the first to be digitized and fundraisers comment that this is not much better than the 3x5 cards that had served them so well before the Jobs/Gates era. Over the next 25 years data fields grew like kudzu and so did the size of our databases. It is understandable then that users assume when they ask a...
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