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…
Donor Stewardship: How to Build Long-Term Relationships with Donors
In the nonprofit sector, cultivating lasting relationships with donors is paramount. While every contribution makes a difference, you need long-term relationships with supporters to sustain your cause. This is where donor stewardship comes in. It builds long-term relationships, increases donor retention, and ensures funding for your organization. In this guide, we explore how donor stewardship…
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…
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…
Storytelling in Fundraising: How to Create a Human-Centric Strategy
Whether you’re crafting a welcome series, designing an appeal, or stewarding longtime donors, your most powerful tool is the human story. At the heart of every nonprofit mission is an authentic, life-changing impact, and at the heart of every charitable gift is someone choosing to help. No matter your organization’s size, there is one fundamental…
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…
Nonprofit Email Marketing: The Essential Guide
Nonprofit email marketing is cost-effective for communicating with volunteers, members, and donors, improving fundraising efforts, and establishing long-term relationships with constituents. By sharing relevant content and personalized emails, nonprofit organizations can maximize donations and membership signups using this digital marketing technique. This guide explores why email marketing matters for nonprofits, the best practices for nonprofit…
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.
Color Theory in Practice: Color Temperature
Color Temperature is a vital element of Color Harmony, corresponding to the perceived warmth or coolness of a color. Shifting the color temperature within a palette can dramatically influence the mood and perception of a brand or design Warm Colors Warm Colors are inspired by elements like fire, sunsets, and autumn leaves, and are known…
Color Theory in Practice: Color Schemes
Color schemes are intentional combinations of colors that create harmony and balanced design based on their placement on the color wheel. Monochromatic A Monochromatic Color Scheme revolves around a single base hue, with variations achieved by altering lightness or darkness through the addition of black (to create Shades) or white (to create Tints). This approach…
Color Theory in Practice: Color Harmony
Color Theory is a fundamental element of design and branding. Often overlooked, It’s important to understand that colors have a powerful ability to evoke emotions, set moods, and shape how people perceive products and services. What is Color Theory? Color Theory is a comprehensive framework that explains how colors interact based on principles derived from…
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.
Don’t Lose Your Google Data: Universal Analytics Shut Down
Google is discontinuing Universal Analytics on July 1, 2024, meaning users will finally loose access to the interface and their data will be permanately deleted.
10 Ways to Maximize AI Potential in Nonprofits
Successfully implementing AI in a nonprofit setting requires thoughtful planning and strategic execution. Use this comprehensive guide to guide your organization toward a more technically advanced workflow.
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.
Display Ads 101: A Beginner’s Guide
Display advertising is a powerful tool with wide reach, precise targeting, and, arguably most importantly, creative capabilities beyond what a text-forward search ad offers.
Display Ads Design Guide: Tips for High-Performing Creative
From crafting compelling visuals and messaging to choosing how to reconfigure certain elements of that design to fit all dimensions, here are some tips to create display ads.
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.
NextGen Fundraising Leadership Transition
NextGen Fundraising’s Carol Leister has transitioned from ownership to a consulting role, leaving CEO Tim Oleary as the company’s sole owner.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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