My son, who is 6, likes to refer to any nice suit of clothes as “handsome clothes.” So, when I travel to visit with clients, or when we get ready for church, or head out for a nice event, he will ask me, “Daddy, which handsome clothes are you going to wear? I want to…
Author: Jason McNeal
I provide leadership, advancement and fundraising consulting services to educational, healthcare, and non-profit organizations.
What Are You Promoting?
The ineffective advancement professional promotes their institution. The average advancement professional promotes what their institution does. The artful advancement professional promotes why their institution does it.
How Much Does It Take To Feel Wealthy?
I recall some years ago working with a major donor who, after making it through the shuttering of one of his businesses and selling one of his four homes, said to me, “These days, I’m not feeling quite as wealthy as I used to.” His remark wasn’t born out of arrogance, he actually was a…
Attracting the Attention of New Donors
You may recall some year’s back, the experiment in which the task is to count how many times the players wearing white passed the basketball. If you have not seen the video or do not know about the purpose of the study by Chabris and Simons, click the link now and participate. Focus on…
Donor Engagement as Coaching
Last night, Pat Summitt, the legendary women’s basketball coach from the University of Tennessee received the Arthur Ashe Award for Courage at the ESPY awards. If you missed the live broadcast, you would do well to take a few minutes and watch the video here. For those that may not know, Coach Summitt recently retired…
Searching for the Major Donor Higgs Boson
Last week, to international scientific acclaim, physicists from Geneva’s CERN announced they had discovered a new subatomic particle which holds the promise to help explain all life on earth. The Higgs boson particle – or the “God Particle” as it has become known – has been theorized since the 1960s. But it wasn’t until a mountain’s…
Focused On The Mountain
“The culture and history of our Board has never been to raise big dollars.” “Our endowment needs to be twice what it is currently, and we just don’t have the donors for that.” “We are in year 4 of our 5-year campaign and we still have 30% of the money to raise. We’ll never get…
The Human Storyline
Advancement professionals regularly are looking for ways to “better tell our institution’s story.” I have written in the past about how better storytelling alone won’t lead to larger gifts. Instead, I’ve suggested that the concept of story-listening is a much better way to go about attracting larger gifts. It is the donor’s story that is…
A Report on Reports
Bruce Cameron is credited with the quote, “Not everything that can be counted counts. And not everything that counts can be counted.” In the world of measuring and evaluating development officer performance, we have many variables which we could employ to judge effectiveness. But just because we can track something and report it, doesn’t mean that we…
Bringing Your Umbrella
There is a often-told story about the distinction between activity and belief: “A rural church in the middle of farming country had a special service to pray for rain. A drought had hit the area hard and the farmers and community were suffering financially and spiritually. Many people came to the service to pray and,…