Fundraising Strategy For Beginners: How To Raise Money For Your Cause
A strong fundraising strategy is the engine behind every successful nonprofit. It defines how you’ll raise money, engage donors, and turn every campaign into measurable impact and ROI. However, designing and deploying a comprehensive fundraising strategy can be challenging, and many nonprofits make mistakes that impact their performance. This guide explores how to create or…
Nonprofit Analytics: How to Use Data to Drive Donations
Nonprofits are sitting on a goldmine of data—but many aren’t using it to its full potential. Analytics can reveal who your donors are, where you stand in the market, and what it’ll take to drive long-term growth. Nearly 80% of nonprofits don’t have a solid analytics strategy in place. And while fewer than one in…
What is Charity Marketing? The Complete Guide + Strategies
Every nonprofit has a story worth sharing. The challenge? Getting it in front of the right people and inspiring them to act. That’s where charity marketing comes in. Done well, it connects your mission with the people who care most, building trust, loyalty, and lasting support. Whether it’s sparking conversations on social media, sharing impact…
The Ultimate Guide To Nonprofit Fundraising
Fundraising is how nonprofits grow, scale their impact, and build a loyal supporter base. The most successful organizations treat fundraising as a strategic function, not an afterthought. In this guide, we’ll break down the most effective fundraising strategies, along with the challenges and opportunities, to help you unlock consistent growth. Ready to grow your nonprofit…
The Complete Nonprofit Data Management Guide
Data is one of the most powerful tools you can use to drive your nonprofit mission. Proper data management allows nonprofits to make informed decisions, optimize operations, enhance reporting, and improve donor engagement. Ultimately, this can expand your reach and impact, giving you the insights you need to understand your supporters, build a thriving community,…
Donor Retention Strategies: 8 Expert Tactics to Retain Your Donors
Nonprofits often make the mistake of focusing only on acquiring new donors rather than retaining existing supporters, which can be a far more cost-effective and impactful approach. With the average donor retention rate around 46% as of 2024, it’s become more crucial than ever to focus on keeping your supporters engaged and aligned with your…
Top Nonprofit Marketing Tips To Boost Donations
Donor expectations are changing, and so is the way nonprofits need to market themselves. Today’s most successful organizations build relationships, personalize outreach, and use data to understand what supporters care about. In a competitive nonprofit landscape, marketing is more than promotion—it’s how you retain donors, reduce churn, and increase lifetime value. This guide shares 10…
40 Corporate Fundraising Ideas to Power Your Nonprofit Mission
Corporate fundraising is a powerful way for nonprofits to scale their impact while building meaningful partnerships with businesses. By leveraging corporate resources and networks, your organization can find new ways to raise money, amplify its reach, and create lasting relationships with stakeholders. This guide explores your nonprofit organization’s top 40 corporate fundraising ideas, how to…
How to Calculate Donor Retention Rate for Your Nonprofit in 2025
Donor retention is one of the most crucial metrics for any nonprofit organization. Organizations must know how to calculate the donor retention rate to determine whether their current supporters are loyal and how to keep them engaged for a longer period. This guide explores how to calculate donor retention, the top metrics to track, strategies…
Fundraising for Nonprofits: 25 Creative Campaigns That Work
Fundraising for nonprofits can be challenging, especially if you’re new to this space or have run out of ideas to engage donors and raise money for your cause. Fortunately, there are many proven strategies that are easy to implement, low-cost, and can be started with few resources. This guide explores the top 25 creative fundraising…
Nonprofit Marketing Plan: How to Build a Winning Strategy in 2025
Every nonprofit organization needs a clear marketing plan to help it raise money, drive awareness, and strengthen donor and member relationships. Without a well-detailed plan, it’s difficult to get the most out of fundraising efforts and grow the organization. This nonprofit marketing guide will explore nonprofit marketing plans, how to develop one, the key elements…
A Guide To Donor Retention: Why It Matters For Nonprofits
Donor retention is among the most critical yet often overlooked factors in nonprofit success. While acquiring new donors is exciting, keeping existing donors engaged and giving consistently to reduce donor churn sustains organizations in the long term. However, donor retention is challenging; organizations must find methods to boost it. This is why you need proven…
10 Winning Strategies for Nonprofit Marketing
Securing donations and members for your nonprofit organization can be challenging. You have to consider your competitors and declining giving rates during the year. Nonprofits often have limited budgets and resources, making fundraising critical to fulfill their mission. That’s why you need to use nonprofit marketing strategies that work. This nonprofit marketing guide unpacks the…
114 Fundraising Ideas to Help You Raise Money
Fundraising takes a lot of work and dedication to raise the money your nonprofit needs to make a difference. In 2023, Americans donated $557.16 billion, with the largest source of donations coming from individuals. Your organization can get in on those donations by hosting impactful events that gather like-minded supporters, excite them, and spread awareness…
The Ultimate Donor Engagement Guide [+ Top Strategies]
Engaging donors and members is more than asking for money. It’s about building meaningful, lasting relationships that inspire ongoing support and advocacy. A sound donor engagement strategy makes it easier to attract higher contributions from donors and members and increases their likelihood of getting their friends and family involved in your organization. This guide provides…
5 Best Practices of Highly Effective Direct Mail Marketing Strategies
Direct mail marketing provides unique opportunities to connect with your audience in impactful ways. Check out our top five tips to elevate your campaigns and boost engagement!
Leveraging Lift Notes in Direct Mail
Lift Notes are a very powerful device and should be included in direct mail campaigns whenever possible. Check out our tactics for strategically leveraging them.
Direct Mail Bakers Dozen for Increasing Response
Here’s a checklist to go through for all direct mail campaigns to help lift response rates on any direct mail package.
Navigating Digital Advertising During Election Season
We’re experiencing a historically unprecedented campaign. Time to buckle up and prepare ourselves with the key strategies that will help your nonprofit thrive before, during, and after election season.
Case Study: WHYY
If you have ever been on a ship in a storm at sea, you know how challenging it can be to maintain course while minimizing risk. For fundraisers, the past several years have pummeled non-profit programs with a series of storms: political chaos, economic uncertainty, emerging technology, changing donor behavior, supply chain issues, and a…
Case Study: MPT PBS App Promotion
At a time when people are “cutting the cord,” there is a need to convert traditional cable watchers to streamers. Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) member stations direct plenty of time and effort into promoting paid Passport memberships. However, PBS identified a lack of awareness/education about the free PBS App. NextGen believes in a strategic balance between…
Redefining Public Media Engagement: PBS’s Digital Evolution
Measuring audiences and engagement is becoming increasingly sophisticated as more content is produced and redistributed across an ever-increasing number of digital streaming platforms.
Creating a User-Centric Experience With YouTube Advertising
We all know the public media landscape is rapidly changing. We have entered what’s known as the “user-centric period” of media consumption and see great opportunity with advertising on YouTube.
Budgeting Is a Balancing Act
Here are the broad brushstrokes of how to think about budgeting—a refresher for some, new tools for others, and some general guidelines as we navigate the impact of global events.
Budgeting is a Bargaining Process
We’ve spent many years where you sit now, running direct-response fundraising programs for nonprofits we believed in. As fiscal year planning deadlines approach, here are some important principles.
12 Key Fundraising Insights From 2024 M+R Benchmarks
The 2024 M+R Benchmarks Study is finally here! Use these key insights to assess your nonprofit’s performance by comparing your results with this year’s pool of participants.
5 Tips to Help Prepare for USPS Rate Increases
USPS announced proposed increases for some mailing rate, including a 5-cent increase in first-class mail stamps from 68 to 73 cents. Here are some tips to save money and prepare.
4 Tips to Boost Your Matching Gift Campaigns
How do you stand out and connect with donor audiences to strategically boost your matching gift opportunities? Here are some of our best tips.
Stop the Churn With These Simple Strategies
One of the challenges to building a successful email program is frequent and attentive list hygiene. At NextGen, we focus on several key areas to revitalize dormant programs.
2024 Fundraising Forecast: What Should Be Top of Mind?
You’ve likely seen countless 2024 fundraising forecasts over the past few weeks. Don’t worry, this is not a laundry list of the same old regurgitated predictions.
Why NextGen’s Texting Solution Is Perfect for Your Nonprofit
As digital channels evolve and grow, it is important for nonprofits to stay ahead of the curve and find new ways to engage with their donors and prospects.
How Texting Can Supercharge Your Fundraising Program
As digital channels evolve and grow, it is important for nonprofits to stay ahead of the curve and find new ways to engage with their donors and prospects.
Best Practices for Email Marketing
Consistent and strategic email communication is critical to a robust, successful digital program. But it takes more than just sending any generic email.
Digital Fundraising Program: 14 Strategies to Maximize Your Success
Online donors act differently than direct mail donors. As we move towards an increasingly digital world, it’s important to have a solid digital fundraising program.
Don’t Trust Your Open Rates: Understanding Changes in Email KPIs
As any good digital marketer or fundraiser knows, you live and die by your KPIs. But what if one of the most important email metrics may not be accurate?
Case Study: Contributor Development Partnership
Against the backdrop of all that has happened in our region and the world the past couple of years, we believe there has never been a more important time to aggressively invest in digital fundraising and realize diversified revenue possibilities. At NextGen, we espouse guiding principles to lead our work in digital fundraising. These philosophies…
Case Study: Vietnam Veterans of America
While there is no such thing as a 100% conversion rate, NextGen provides strategy, technical support, and turn-key solutions to boost performance and improve donor experience. Our partnership with Fundraise Up ensures the fullest array of tools and integrations to best match your goals and personalize the donor experience. The Client As a nationwide service…
Case Study: Colorado Public Radio
Against the backdrop of all that has happened in our region and the world the past couple of years, we believe there has never been a more important time to aggressively invest in digital fundraising and realize diversified revenue possibilities. At NextGen, we espouse guiding principles to lead our work in digital fundraising. These philosophies…
Case Study: Peninsula Humane Society & SPCA
As we move into an increasingly digital world, organizations now find they must adapt to donors’ changing behaviors. While direct mail still is a powerful and effective medium, more organizations are seeing first-hand the effectiveness of multichannel campaigns. At NextGen, we are effectively implementing campaigns that combine the ease of online donations with the longstanding…
Don’t Get Hung Up on Attribution
We no longer live in a world where attribution is clear cut, so don’t get hung up on attribution. Your donors aren’t giving how you want them to.
Full-Funnel Approach: Building Bridges Across Teams
Many organizations struggle to evolve beyond a siloed approach that inevitably fragments branding, messaging, and donor conversion. How do we know? Because we’ve been there.
2022 Fundraising Trends: Journey Into the Mind of a Donor
As fundraisers and marketers, we’re always excited to learn about the latest trends and statistics that give us better insight into how donors behave, what they prefer, and how to adjust our strategy accordingly.
Navigating Postal Price Increases
While it may be tempting to significantly scale back direct mail, here are some tips on how to navigate new price increases and keep your direct mailings manageable and effective.
Planning for Planned Giving
If you are not actively building a Planned Giving pipeline through targeted lead generation, who will capture these gifts from your donor file?
Supply Chain & Paper Shortages
Over the past two years, we have proactivity tracked and responded to the economic supply-chain and paper shortages to minimize impact for our direct marketing print clients, working to ensure a consistent, compelling, and high-quality donor experience.
Digital Acquisition Tactics
Going into FY23, it’s critical to build recognition with new audiences, establish brand affinity, and convert prospects to supporters.
Stay Ahead of Public Media Fundraising Trends
Public media is changing. Now, digital acquisition channels are a low-barrier, low-cost way to build brand affinity and attract new donors.
M+R Benchmarks 2022: Everything You Need To know
In case you missed it, M+R released its annual study containing comprehensive data about online fundraising, advocacy, and marketing.
Think Like an Investor: Managing Donor Segments
Understanding the value of your donor base—along with its segments and audiences—is critical for both fundraisers and nonprofit leaders.
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