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Strategic Research for Transformative Gifts

By Elisa Shoenberger

Asking for a major or transformative gift is a little bit like asking someone to marry you. You’ve (likely) been dating one another for a while and know quite a bit about your respective interests. Maybe you’ve discussed marriage; perhaps you haven’t. Ideally, you have an idea that the other person will actually say “yes.”

But timing is everything. You probably don’t want to ask your beloved to marry you when they are dealing with their dying father or in front of a crowd of people if they’ve told you that public proposals are not their thing. Maybe you want to ask their father and/or mother for their hand in marriage. The way you approach the proposal may say a lot about the response.

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Finding the Right Cheese for the Cracker: Using Research to Create Strategies and Tactics for Cultivating Prospects

By Elisa Shoenberger

Most of us have eaten cheese in our lives. Some of us may have grown up with American cheese, string cheese, and cheddar cheese. Maybe you’ve tried mozzarella, spreadable goat cheese, and a bleu cheese. While all of those cheeses are delicious, it can be a little intimidating to walk into the cheese aisle or a cheese shop. Suddenly there are tens, even hundreds of cheeses in all different colors and shapes. So how do you figure out what goes best on a salad or on a steak?

That’s what it might feel like when you’ve met with prospects in your portfolio. You know something about them; maybe you even requested an Aspire Snap Bio on them before meeting them. But what do you do next? How do you cultivate them towards a major gift in the next few years or so? How do you fit the cheese to the cracker or side?

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Neon One’s Donors: Understanding The Future of Individual Giving – Part 2

NeonOne set out to understand what individual giving looks like in the post-pandemic world. By reviewing many sources including academic journals, industry reports, blogs, and more, they have synthesized six questions:

  • Who are our donors?
  • What do our donors support?
  • When do our donors give?
  • Where are our donors?
  • Why do our donors give?
  • How do our donors give?

In Neon One’s Donors: Understanding The Future of Individual Giving – Part 1, we focused on the first three questions. In this Part 2, we are focusing on the last three questions.

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Charities Aid Foundation World Giving Index 2022

What is this Report?

The report is an annual report that looks at global giving focusing on three areas: helping strangers, donating money to charity and volunteering time. The report has surveyed 1.95 million people since 2009. For 2022, CAF included data from 119 countries, which was 90%+ of the total adult population on the earth.

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