Congratulations! You worked diligently to secure calendar year-end donations for your charitable organization and ended the year with increased support in terms of both donors and dollars. Take your team to lunch to celebrate, and then get ready to develop and implement a solid stewardship strategy. Follow these best practices to ramp up your stewardship program.

Whether you’re just starting your grant funding strategy or have created a well-oiled grant funding machine, you still are likely asking the same questions to ensure efficiency: “Which grants should we apply for?” While it is a complex topic and one that requires a clear understanding of your organization’s capacity, position in the nonprofit sector, and budgetary needs, the root of my answer is the same: choose funders with whom you have relationships or with whom you can create relationships.

As a nonprofit professional, Halloween may only be scary because it means you have a lot of prepping on your plate for year-end giving. (Calendar year-end is never a surprise, but it still surprises a lot of organizations! You’re not alone!) This year don’t let year-end giving scare you. Instead, let’s use the latest giving data and apply universal truths of fundraising with these four steps to maximize your time, effort and, ultimately, donations.

The nonprofit busy season is upon us! If your board has met more sporadically in the summer months or you’re noticing some fatigue amongst board members in the midst of a campaign, now is the time to re-engage and re-invigorate your board to prepare for a successful season! So, where do you start? It’s easy – at a regularly scheduled board meeting.

In response to dozens of inquiries from our partners and colleagues, last month, Bob Carter, CFRE, Chairman, was interviewed by Steve Higgins, CFRE, President & CEO of Carter, in a webinar conversation detailing how to successfully fundraise in a recession based on both of their decades-long careers in the nonprofit sector and experience fundraising throughout multiple recessions. In this month’s blog post, we’re highlighting the top 10 takeaways from the conversation.

An often overlooked and undercooked component of a campaign is its branding. In this month’s blog post, Carter’s Managing Director Beverly Brooks Thompson, Ph.D., CFRE, and Marketing & Communications Director Becky Brandt offer a step-by-step guide that you can use to create the most effective campaign brand possible and help you determine if you even need a campaign brand. Plus, we’ve included Carter’s downloadable campaign brand vehicle checklist to make sure you’re spreading your message as far and wide as possible!

Embarking on a major campaign can be intimidating. It is a huge, often multi-year endeavor, and you have just one chance to execute it properly. But there are tried and true methods to perfecting campaigns, and if your organization has not started a capital or endowment campaign recently, now is the time to seriously consider it. The campaign marketplace is ripe due to today’s philanthropic trends.

In my career as a fundraising and development professional and consultant, and as a mother myself, I have found so often that a mother’s best advice is development’s best advice. As moms, we have a little saying for everything to help our children remember the important life lessons we teach them, and many of these sayings work perfectly for adult development professionals looking for counsel or answers.

Far too often, it can be a comic and tragic reality that we mistake relationships for something we work to cultivate and not something we work to develop and nurture. Nonprofits do not have the luxury of being able to make this mistake.

It can be the best of years; it can be the worst of years, but 2022 is our year. What happens in the next 12 months is up to us to deal with, overcome, and hopefully we will celebrate the hand we are dealt. Without further ado, please enjoy my (foggy) crystal ball view of 2022.