Helping You Raise More Money to Help More People
Welcome to the Nonprofit Answers Podcast where we answer your nonprofit marketing and fundraising questions. From acquiring new donors to nurturing long-term donor relationships, we’ve got the answers to your most pressing questions.
Hi, I’m Jeremy Reis, your Nonprofit Answers host. I’m the VP of Marketing at CRISTA Ministries, leading our direct response, radio, events, digital, and other fundraising initiatives. CRISTA is a family of five ministries including World Concern, an international relief and development organization. In my role, I face many of the same challenges you do and have to make decisions on how to raise the most funds, develop the deepest relationships, and market our organization with limited money, people and resources. In this podcast, I’ll answer your questions on nonprofit marketing and fundraising to help you raise the most money possible to help the most people you can.
Nonprofit Answers Episodes
Episode 011 – How Often Should My Nonprofit Blog?
Blogging is not dead. Far from it. In today’s episode, Jeremy answers a question from a nonprofit executive about how much blogging is right for his organization. This executive is being told by his team to blog every day, but doesn’t understand why.
Episode 010 – How Do We Stop Fighting Internally Over Income Sourcing?
In this special edition of Nonprofit Answers, Jeremy is live at the Christian Leadership Alliance with a timely question. At the conference, a nonprofit leader asked Jeremy how to properly give internal credit for income without causing problems with attribution and to reduce internal fighting over “credit” for donations.
Episode 009 – How Should I Clean My Email List?
Do you have a lot of email addresses on your file that aren’t responding? Speaking from personal experience, Jeremy explains to Grant the steps to re-engage email subscribers and what to do if they continue to be unresponsive.
Episode 008 – How Do I Create a Sense of Urgency in My Appeals?
Creating a sense of urgency in your appeal messaging will help move readers to become donors. What if you have a difficult time creating a sense of urgency? In episode 8 of Nonprofit Answers, Rob asks a question about how to create urgency in his appeals for a women’s shelter.
Episode 007 – My Executive Director Keeps Editing Out Fundraising Best Practices
Do you have someone who edits out fundraising best practice from your appeals? Someone who doesn’t like the urgency, postscripts, hyphens, folksy language, or handwritten notes? Is your fundraising suffering because of it? In episode 7, Jeremy answers a question from Julia about how to handle an Executive Director who doesn’t understand fundraising and is undermining her efforts.
Episode 006 – Why Don’t My Emails Perform As Well As My Direct Mail?
Direct mail is not dead. Far from it, direct mail still performs well if you have a good strategy behind it. Many nonprofits are transitioning more investment into digital but aren’t seeing the return in email that they’ve seen in direct mail. Today, we’re going to talk through the five Cs of successful email appeals, then we have a question from Marcy about why her emails don’t perform as well as her direct mail does.
Episode 005 – What to Do With 25,000 Email Addresses a Partner Offered Us?
Karen’s organization has a partner who offered them a list of 25,000 email addresses. Her boss wants to just add them to their email service provider, but Karen doesn’t agree. In episode 5, Jeremy gives Karen advice as to how to answer her boss and what to do with the opportunity.
Episode 004 – How Does Email Design Impact Response?
How does email design impact response in your emails? Often there are conflicting answers on blogs as different organizations experience different results when they change factors in their email marketing. In episode 4, Jeremy explores a question about graphics vs text emails and how you can test to determine the right factors to improve response for your nonprofit emails.
Episode 003 – How Do We Segment Our Emails?
Have you ever hired a consultant to help you with a project, but when it comes time to execute, they disappear? This happened to Holly when she brought in a consultant to look at her email fundraising program. The consultant told Holly she should improve her segmentation and then disappeared before sharing with her a direction to go. In episode 3 of the Nonprofit Answers Podcast, Jeremy teaches Holly about different ways to segment her email file to maximize response.
Episode 002 – How Do We Improve Our Turnaround Time for Sending Disaster Fundraising Appeals?
In episode two of the Nonprofit Answers Podcast, Jeremy Reis takes a question from Ryan who’s frustrated with their turnaround time on disaster response fundraising appeals. This is a topic that really hits home: how do we decide if we’re going to respond to a disaster and then get our appeals out the door quickly in email and direct mail? Jeremy shares how Food for the Hungry decides when to respond and how they send out emergency response fundraising appeals quickly.
Episode 001 – Facebook Algorithm Changes – Nonprofit Answers
In episode 1 of the Nonprofit Answers Podcast, Jeremy Reis answers a question from Helen, a nonprofit marketing manager in Nashville. Helen is concerned about the recent algorithm changes with Facebook and wants to know what she should do. Should she continue to invest time and resources into Facebook? What changes should she make to her social media strategy?