This BLOG is intended to help conservation organizations and land trusts pursue excellence in all aspects of their conservation endeavors. I welcome your comments and feedback to these posts.
By David Allen, Development for Conservation Planned gifts can be a game changer for your land trust when they come in unexpectedly and are not restricted by the donor. Ninety-plus percent of all planned gifts are bequests or named beneficiaries on various insurance policies. So, if you...
By David Allen, Development for Conservation As I reported in my study of five-year values, (see 5Yr Value: The Metric that Tells You the Most About Your Fundraising), organizations with a higher-than median five-year value (2014 donors) tended to be actively engaged in raising money (from...
By David Allen, Development for Conservation Last week I attended the Pennsylvania Land Conservation Conference about an hour up into the Poconos from Scranton. (Gorgeous spot!) One of the rules I live by is to always attend a workshop on social media and fundraising if I...
By David Allen, Development for Conservation This week, I’m continuing a series about recruitment strategies. The series stems from a post I wrote two weeks ago called the 300-Member trap – the phenomenon that many organizations face where they have essentially the same number of members...
By David Allen, Development for Conservation Last week, I wrote about the 300-Member trap – the phenomenon that many organizations face where they have essentially the same number of members each year – about 300 – regardless of what they do to grow. The trap exists because...
By David Allen, Development for Conservation I’m closing in on ten years in the consulting business. Along the way, I have worked with dozens of land trusts, and doing so has afforded me an interesting vertical window into the land trust community. In other words, because I...
By David Allen, Development for Conservation As soon as I learn what the fundraising goal is, my brain kicks into overdrive. OK, we’re going to need three gifts of this amount and 5 gifts of that amount. Sam could do $$$$, and Jill will probably come in...
By David Allen, Development for Conservation One feature of the blog world that I have found academically interesting over the years is the “hits per page.” This is the metric that tells the writer which pages or posts attract the most readers, whether it’s because they...
By David Allen, Development for Conservation I have this image I like a lot. It’s an image of a campfire somewhere on a moonless night. The fire creates light which illuminates everything that is relatively close. It also warms everything relatively close to it. But if you get...
By David Allen, Development for Conservation Earlier this year, I posted the results from my annual survey of conservation organizations and their 5-Year Value of Membership. At that point in time, I had data from twenty different organizations, and the median value was $1,100. This means...