Thought Leadership

You’ve come a long way in a year as you prepare to launch your campaign. You’ve developed core messages, struck upon a powerful campaign theme, and created a graphic identity. As great as your achievements are, there is still a long way to go to launch. Now is the time to take your great concepts and turn them into products.

Equally important to an organization’s ability to reach increased fundraising goals is operational readiness. After all, even if an organization has an excellent relationship with a potential donor, a misspelled name in the database, a delay in processing a gift, ill-timed outreach, or multiple touchpoints to the same donor can all lead to embarrassing and potentially damaging incidents.

The communications countdown to a public campaign launch includes numerous critical steps that every organization must take to be successful. There is a tried-and-true approach, and there really aren’t shortcuts or workarounds that don’t come with some compromise or risk. Like the aerospace designers, engineers, and astronauts who are making plans to go into space, the initial steps are essential in ultimately achieving a successful liftoff and splashdown.

The recent meteoric rise of ChatGPT, a chatbot built by OpenAI, has generated a flurry of posts and articles about the future of machine learning technologies. The conversation has raised some important ethical questions.

Our newest white paper, Blending Data Governance and Constituent Engagement to Build an Inclusive Database, approaches this topic in-depth and concentrates on leveraging the union of data governance and constituent engagement to achieve data inclusivity for your organization.

Whether you are building a new grateful patient program or simply evolving one, the best prescription is a healthy dose of trust. It is not always easy to build trust with development professionals so that physicians feel comfortable entrusting fundraisers with the precious relationships they hold so dear when caring for a patient. BWF’s Kara Wagner describes potential obstacles and ways to overcome them.

For communications professionals caught in a crisis, nothing is straightforward and results for the organizations they represent range from embarrassing to catastrophic. Crisis communications plans are, at their core, highly detailed road maps designed to take you from the beginning of the crisis to its conclusion. BWF offers these five core components to help you get ahead of any crisis.

This partnership with BWF helped SDSU become more data driven, have clearer insights into its operations, have the ability to make strategic decisions and make them faster, and have a better way to validate its strategy, thereby saving both time and resources.

No longer is it enough to be the best fundraiser in the room. Leaders of the modern fundraising enterprise have the responsibility and privilege to be so much more. Through a commitment to character development, continual learning, confirming the fundamentals, innovation, and modeling excellence, the leader of a development program can bring out the best from their team and build a successful program of significance. This preview of BeneFactors showcases the depth this book offers.