There is a limit to human compassion. Understanding the hows and whys can help nonprofits raise revenue.

Let’s assume a LOT of people suffer from the condition your nonprofit exists to fix. Will that big number help in your copy for your appeals, or even your website?

No.

Ian Joyce showed up at Pediatric Brain Tumor Foundation after a robust and distinguished career in corporate marketing and communications. He brought that mindset to his new work in social good. But he found there was a missing piece—a pipeline.  

We want to talk about writing. Words. Language. The melodic string of letters and symbols pieced together to form coherent, crescendoing thoughts.

Written words are the transfer point for your passion—for your mission. Words encapsulate all your work, ideas, meetings, ponderings, agonies, and thoughts. They are the filter through which your work must go to get into the world.

Words have power. So we’re saying the quiet part out loud—you need a good copywriter.

To celebrate the upcoming release of Turnkey’s Katrina VanHuss & Otis Fulton, Ph.D.’s new book Social Fundraising: How to Mine the New Peer-to-Peer Landscape, we are giving you a sneak preview of one of our favorite topics; Recruiting (and Keeping) Volunteer Leaders & Fundraisers.

History is unfolding before us; it’s on C-SPAN and most cable news outlets. How can we use what we’re witnessing to help us in social good? Repeat to yourself... people respond to situations. Great marketing and program design create situations that trigger the types of attitudes and behaviors that we’re seeing as a result of the January 6th hearings.

We recently wrote about the unfortunate results of “siloing” events and event participants. By doing so we prevent the participant from connecting to the mission, to make the mission a part of their identity.

We have defined “our community” as “the people on our email list” for a long time, but that’s not what community is all about. To our credit, we knew that they (people on our email list) cared about one thing—our mission.

It was addictive. I wanted to continue that feeling. It was such an incredible feeling. I wanted more and more. It became something that I loved.