Every year, our client, the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), has to fight for its city funding – but this year the stakes were especially high.

While it was a tough year for a lot of local governments and many organizations were feeling the pain, the budget proposal in front of City Hall called for an especially severe cut of more than 50% for WCS’s Bronx Zoo and New York Aquarium.

We’d worked with WCS on a highly successful campaign to beat back similar cuts the year before, but with city officials scouring the budget for more and deeper cuts this time around, it was clear that we needed to pull out all the stops if we were going to have any chance of saving this funding this year.
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By now, everybody has heard about the historic victory for marriage equality in New York. Late on Friday, June 24, the New York State Senate passed this important piece of legislation and the Governor promptly signed it into law. A big win for progressives and for an important cause!

One major reason this success was so meaningful beyond state borders was because the Human Rights Campaign effectively engaged marriage equality supporters everywhere, not just in New York.

But how do you build a groundswell of support for a state-specific issue where only the state’s residents can directly advocate with state legislators – and then how do you capitalize on your victory? Partnering with longtime client HRC, M+R proudly took on this challenge to generate some awesome results.
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Organizations stand to gain a lot by promoting online videos that go “viral.” But what does “viral” really mean, and how can your organization increase the likelihood that a video will become an internet smash hit? This was the topic of a panel I attended at Netroots Nation called “Video Built To Spread: Creating Online Vids That Work”.

Coming out of the session, I realized that a lot of organizations are still very unsure how to effectively use video as a tool to achieve their goals. Over the years, we’ve worked with our clients to leverage video for a wide variety of opportunities, from advocacy to fundraising; list-building to branding. In the process, we’ve learned a lot – not just about creating “viral” videos, but about online videos in general and how to make the most effective use of them. Here are a few things every nonprofit should know before investing in an online video. (more…)

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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*Or, How to stop worrying and beat the recession.

The results rolling in from the fundraising appeal were… well, terrible.

It was mid-November, the economy was in shambles and getting worse by the day and Oxfam America’s first end-of-year email appeal of 2008 was tanking.

Oxfam America, an international relief and development organization, has a loyal donor base, and for the last several years similar early-bird emails – sent to a limited group of supporters – had done well.  This year, the appeal was generating 50% of last year’s total, even though the audience had grown by 50%.  Clearly, the recession was having a dramatic affect on Oxfam’s fundraising.

We were already into the last 45 days of the year – by far the most important period in the calendar for Oxfam’s fundraising – and we were in trouble.

So we called a planning meeting and started answering the question, “What more can we do?” And in the end, by shifting our approach, adding a handful of new elements and tweaking our tactics on the fly, we were able to increase end-of-year giving by almost $200,000 over 2007, bring in over 3,500 more donations and beat our goals.  Recession be damned.

Here’s what we did. (more…)