Are you ready for the year-end fundraising push? Before you finalize your plan, you may want to take a look at some of our findings from the 2010 end-of-year season.

You’ll find the post we published last January below. And if you have any questions, don’t forget to join us on Tuesday, November 15 for our free webinar on end-of-year fundraising – just RSVP here.

Enjoy!
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Want people to like you? Go on, don’t be shy. Just ask them!

Facebook “like” drives are an increasingly common practice for non-profits that want to connect with more supporters on Facebook. Most “like” drives offer an incentive of some kind in exchange for “liking” a Facebook fan page: A special offer where $1 will be donated to your organization for every “like;” some exclusive content that will be released once a page hits a certain threshold; or promising that your CEO will dye her hair blue when the “like” goal is reached. (Note: we have yet to convince any of our clients to try that last one.)

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M+R’s Colin Holtz and Steve Daigneault are helping give storytelling tips to the New Organizing Institute online community! Check out their most recent tip here, and cross-posted below.

Storytelling can take your online campaign to the next level. But are you using stories effectively? Groups regularly add stories to email appeals. The online team at M+R Strategic Services decided to put stories to the test, and discovered that story-based email appeals often performed worse than fundraising emails without a story.

But not all story-based appeals fall short. Steve Daigneault and Colin Holtz, online strategists at M+R set out to figure out what was going on. (more…)

U.S. farmworkers have an average life expectancy that’s 30 years less than the average American citizen. Pretty shocking, no?

Non-profits often rely on surprising statistics like this to motivate their supporters to act. But as M+R’s Colin Holtz and Steve Daigneault explained in their recent whitepaper, it’s often not numbers but stories that prove most memorable and compelling – as Oxfam America discovered in a recent test.
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So, how did the end of year season turn out for non-profits? With final results in, we decided to compare our clients’ end-of-year 2010 results to their 2009 figures. Here are the top findings on looking at aggregate stats from 13 clients we work with who conducted fundraising campaigns this past December as well as last December:
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