I joined over 1800 at last week’s Fundraising Day, sponsored by the Association of Development Professionals.   I focused on sessions covering online fundraising;  highlights are below:

• Many nonprofits are clearly still struggling to coordinate offline and online strategies.  Per Sheeraz Haji, President of Convio, only a handful of their clients are doing this well.  Steve Birnbaum of Jacobson Consulting suggested that the challenges are often not technical but organizational, e.g. getting people to talk to each other.
• Online fundraising continues to increase dramatically, but overall it’s still less than 1% of total fundraising revenues.  (Some large nonprofit organizations are doing much better than this, however.)
• Harry Lynch and Paul Habig of SankyNet offered a variety of techniques to accelerate online revenues – their presentation is available online.
• Tim Lash of International Rescue Committee offered tips on eadvocacy, and also suggested a simple three step approach currently in use by SaveDarfur.org
  1. sign a petition
  2. tell a friend
  3. donate
• A panel with representatives of Convio, Beaconfire Consulting & Carnegie Hall reiterated the need for synchronization of offline / online efforts, as well as how to make a site visitor ‘known’ by offering multiple reasons to submit an email address.  ASPCA is particularly good at doing this.
• Using peer to peer fundraising was also suggested since supporters will often prefer to use their own web pages for fundraising rather than an organization’s page created solely for an event or other fundraising initiative.