The Build Good Fundraising Podcast

Send us Fan Mail Have you ever used paid Facebook and Instagram ads to support your fundraising?  Ads can supercharge your donor acquisition strategy, but they can also be a little scary if you’re just starting out—and if you’re new to digital marketing. To continue our series on new donor acquisition, we’re chatting with Dana Snyder from Positive Equation, host of the Missions To Movements podcas...

Send us Fan Mail So you want to find new donors online? Then this is a foundational podcast episode for you to listen to. We’re beginning our series on online new donor acquisition with a master of digital fundraising: Jeff Giddens from NextAfter. In our chat, we get into:  Why sending prospective donors to a donation page might not be effective if you want to actually get a first gift from someon...

Send us Fan Mail You need to retain donors if you want to grow sustainably—but you also need to find new donors.  It seems simple enough, but we all want to skip to the “growing revenue” part without investing in both acquisition and retention. It doesn’t work. I’ve tried. You need to work on both, consistently and reliably.  If you’re a listener of this show, you already know that listening to do...

Send us Fan Mail Many nonprofits want to see 10-20% growth (or more!) year over year—and are tasking their fundraising team to make it happen without a clear-eyed view of what it takes.  It’s not that sustained growth is unrealistic, but it becomes harder to raise more money year after year without investing resources (read: money and time!) in the right things to support that growth. On today’s p...

Send us Fan Mail In today’s episode, we dive into the 5 key elements of crafting a winning and simple fundraising plan using the pre-loaded year methodology. It’s the same method we teach in the Fundraising Academy—and the same method we use with clients in our agency work. A lot of organizations struggle to create simple and actionable plans they can execute on. That’s because for most small-to-m...

Send us Fan Mail Do you feel like you have a focused fundraising strategy?  Or does it feel like you’re being asked to do something else every few months? Have you—or your leadership—been so derailed by that shiny, new opportunity (looking at you, TikTok) that you lose sight of what's important? A strategic plan might help—if you approach it the right way. Now, let’s be honest, you might alre...

Send us Fan Mail Today’s show is a special episode—a bit of a global journey of fundraising and discovery with one of Canada’s well known fundraisers.   Fresh off a trip to Europe—including stops in Romania, Slovakia and Holland—Michael Johnston joins us to have a chat about what the social impact sector outside of North America looks like. And what we can learn from it.  Michael was trained as a...

Send us Fan Mail What if you could create content for your ads, emails and social media that reached more people than organizations that have 10X your budget?  In our part 2 with Cameron Bartlett, we’ll into the formulas he’s used to reach over 125,000,000 people for social good.  And the best part? These frameworks work to build an engaged following, whether you have a team of 20—or it's jus...

Send us Fan Mail More people would give to your organization, if they could only find you. We know ads, emails, and organic social are great ways to reach new potential donors.  But some of the scrappiest, most creative nonprofits use SEO to attract new supporters to grow their cause.  How?  On this week’s BuildGood Live, we’re revealing the playbook you can use to optimize your nonprofit’s online...

Send us Fan Mail We live in the golden age of digital fundraising—the most efficient ecosystem in which to test, learn and refine.  Digital has immense power to drive strategies that scale and connect deeply with our donors. AND it plays nicely with so many other channels, including direct mail. Yet most organizations use it backwards. Instead of leading with digital, they’re bolting on digital st...

Send us Fan Mail Can the way you lead internally make your fundraising more effective?  On today’s podcast, we chat with Evan Wildstein about 10 core behaviours of servant leaders—and how they might just improve the way you fundraise. Behaviours like listening, empathy, healing, building community, and much more. We’ll also get into some super practical ways to activate servant-leadership in your...

Send us Fan Mail You’ve likely heard that the donor should be the hero in your fundraising messaging.  The phrase had a noble intent.  It was meant to encourage us to shift our perspective away from meeting revenue targets, and toward finding alignment with our ideal donors’ goals and values.  But over time, it became misunderstood. Misconstrued. And misapplied. The “donor as hero” metaphor turned...

Send us Fan Mail If you’ve ever tried running Facebook and Instagram ads to attract new donors, you may have realized it isn’t all that easy. Truth is, an effective paid ads strategy for nonprofits trying to attract new donors is a lot different than running ads for for-profits that are selling products. Yet most of the information you’ll find on running online ads is geared toward for-profits. On...

Send us Fan Mail Email remains one of the most effective digital fundraising channels—but how do you know you’re doing it right?  How do you balance asking for money, showing gratitude, reporting back on impact and surveying your donors?  How much email is too much…or too little?  On this week’s BG Live, we’re helping you audit your email marketing strategy—and give you some surefire ways to incre...

Send us Fan Mail How do you evaluate your email campaigns?   If you’re a nonprofit—especially one that doesn’t raise tens of millions every year—you may have a hard time finding benchmarks from organizations like yours.  Most of the data on benchmarks and proven practices comes from either very large organizations or from for-profit companies.  Until now.  On this week’s BuildGood Live, we’re talk...

Send us Fan Mail As passionate fundraisers, we’re all pretty good at thinking about how to talk to donors.   But sometimes, we're not the best listeners.   On this week’s BG Live, we’re joined by Just McCord from RKD about a brand new donor study that listened to donors across a variety of causes.   Turns out, donors need us to listen more. In our chat, we’ll talk about:   1. What donors say...

Send us Fan Mail Do you have donors on your file who could be making larger gifts…but you’ve just never asked?  Chances are, you do.  And chances are also, you might not even know where to begin to identify them and lead them toward greater generosity (otherwise you would’ve asked them already!). The good news is, it could be simpler than you think. Note: Simple, not easy. On this week’s podcast,...

Send us Fan Mail Humans are wired for stories, yet storytelling can be challenging.  That’s why on this week’s BuildGood Live, we’re talking to master storyteller—and founder of LemonSkies—Olga Moshinsky Woltman about how to harness the power of stories. She’s worked with some of the most inspiring and transformative causes, including American Heart Association, the ALS Association, American Diabe...

Send us Fan Mail In a new segment of the pod we’re calling How I Built Good, we interview nonprofit founders, entrepreneurs and leaders on how they’re building good in the world.  Starting with Becky Straw.  She never set out to become a founder.  But when she was let go from her job at fast-growing water charity, she bought a wireless printer the next day to start building The Adventure Project....

Send us Fan Mail Have you ever surveyed your donors?  We talk a lot about listening to donors through conversations. Surveys can be a great tool to compliment donor conversations, because they’re interviews at scale. They’re a great way to:  Engage Course-correct (are we going in the right direction?) Collect information Make donors feel valued and seen Identify donors for further cultivation and...

Send us Fan Mail Helping your donors feel like they belong might be your ultimate fundraising achievement. Why?  Years of stress, amplified by the pandemic, has created a “belonging crisis.” Record levels of mental health issues are putting an entire generation at risk. Many of us are more connected than ever before—and at the same time, lonelier than ever before.  So what if your nonprofit create...

Send us Fan Mail How often have you heard that you should “listen to your donors” and nodded along in agreement?  But how often have you actually sat down to implement a system to continually listen to donors in a structured way and gain new insights?  Make no mistake: getting to know your donors is a strategy with high returns. For-profit companies are investing in audience research like never be...

Send us Fan Mail The offer is one of the most foundational—yet most misunderstood—tools in fundraising. Get it wrong, and your fundraising can flop. Get it right, and watch the response rate go up. So what is an offer anyway? It’s the thing you're asking donors to help make happen. The outcome. The ultra-specific and tangible difference their gift can make. And that doesn't just apply to...

Send us Fan Mail How do you achieve predictable fundraising success?  Well, nobody can predict how much money you’re going to raise. But if you follow the 5 steps of the fundraising flywheel consistently—over time— your revenue will grow.  And so will your career as a leader and fundraiser!  So today we’ll walk through each of the 5 parts of the fundraising flywheel in detail.  They are: Listen En...

Send us Fan Mail Is it time we ditch the marketing funnel and replace it with a flywheel? Today we’re introducing the concept of the Fundraising Flywheel—a 5-step framework to help donors become an important part of the team and improve your fundraising.  The flywheel is simply our way of codifying the fundamentals of fundraising done well: Listen Engage Ask Celebrate  Report  A flywheel is like a...