Thanks for the great start to 2020. After taking two weeks off, I was wondering if you folks would remember me. You did!😊

Open Rate is the percentage of people who opened my newsletter. Most newsletters are lucky to get 15 to 20%! My highest open rate last year was almost 60%.

Click Rate is the percentage of subscribers who clicked on an article to read. The industry average is 2.5%.

Clicks is the total number of links that subscribers clicked on. 1,000+ is a lot for a niche newsletter.

This year is off to a great start! 🙏I even added 73 new subscribers last week. Check out the many ways you can sponsor my newsletter in 2020….

Happy New Year! Paris was great, and I was surprised that I actually enjoyed not publishing my newsletter.🤭

But it's time to get back to work! 

To kick-off the new year, let's take one last look back at 2019. Here are the top ten most-clicked posts from my 2019 newsletters. Enjoy!

1. How Much Do Partnership Professionals Make in 2019? [INFOGRAPHIC]

2. Should Your Nonprofit Require a Minimum Revenue Commitment from Corporate Partners?

3. Burger King Teaches You How to Do Cause Marketing Wrong…

With both Christmas and New Year's falling on Wednesday this year, I'm taking the next two weeks off. Woo-hoo! 🎉Truthfully, it's going to be weird not publishing my newsletter. It will be interesting to see if I can actually relax and not publish something.

Watch for my newsletter in your inbox again on Wednesday, January 8, 2020.

In the meantime, enjoy this awkward holiday photo of me and my twin brother, Jeff. Isn't it a classic? But which one is me? Am I on the right or the left? Hmmm....🤔I'm not sure I even know!

Three end of year housekeeping items...

You could learn a lot about influencer marketing from Lauren Lawson-Zilai, senior director of PR at Goodwill Industries International. The influencer marketing program she's developed is building an engaged audience for Goodwill®, particularly on Instagram, where the nonprofit has seen a 200% increase in followers.

Lauren's program is as much for local nonprofits as it is for national organizations. According to Lauren...

"We’ve started consultations with our local counterparts and implemented a model that they can replicate. We’ve given them talking points, taught them the difference between brand ambassadors and influencers, how to work with influencers on incentives, how influencer relationships benefit their social media channels, and how to measure impact."

And here's a big bonus of Lauren's program. It's focused on partnerships….

The holiday gifts 🎁are coming three weeks early thanks to Karen Wu at Perlman & Perlman!

Karen just finished the second installment of her four-part series on the four key legal issues you - my readers! - requested guidance on in the Selfish Giving / Accelerist Partnership Law Survey you completed earlier this year.

This week, Karen is answering your questions on registration and reporting requirements. She has separated the questions into two groups: Company questions and Charity questions.

The Charity questions Karen answers include…

This is the second-part of a four-part series on the four key legal issues you - my readers! - requested guidance on in the Selfish Giving / Accelerist Partnership Law Survey you completed last spring.

Today, our legal expert, Karen Wu of Perlman & Perlman, is answering your questions on registration and reporting requirements. Karen has broken the questions into two groups: “Company” questions and “Charity” questions.

The FAQ’s below were taken directly from the survey - although Karen and I modified some of the questions for the sake of clarity and completeness….

I've written before on how to turn your homepage into a lead-generating machine. You'll need an email pop-up and a service that pings you when a company visits your site (e.g. Leadfeeder, VisitorTrack, Leadberry).

The next step is to take a page from Wayfair's playbook. There was a report earlier this month that the online retailer was making unsolicited calls to customers while they were browsing the Wayfair website. Creepy, right?

I'm not suggesting you do the same thing.…

The second most popular article in last week's newsletter was Am I Too Small for a Corporate Partnership. I agree with everything the authors wrote. No nonprofit is too small for a corporate partnership! Yay...right?

But I would add a corollary to this: small nonprofits SHOULD NOT actively focus on corporate partnerships.

Yep, it's a waste for small nonprofits to dedicate so much time, resources and staff chasing and cold-calling potential corporate partnerships.

Why?…

Marie Curie, a UK-based nonprofit that runs hospices and supports people living with terminal illness, has launched Talkabout, a microsite to get people talking about everyone's favorite topic: dying and death. The site is resource-rich - even offering a downloadable set of playing cards to promote conversations around mortality.

On Twitter, I asked Meredith Niles, Executive Director of Fundraising & Engagement for the charity, if she had a specific audience in mind for Talkabout.

We were aiming for a broad audience (we think this is an issue that could impact anyone at any point in their lives) but we acknowledged that this was an issue that assumes greater salience as you age. So we focussed our testing and media buying on people 55+, with a slight lean towards women.

How will Talkabout raise more money for Marie Curie? I think there are three key opportunities…

Influencer marketing is hot right now! Did you see that 600 YouTubers are teaming up with the Arbor Day Foundation to raise $20 million to plant 20 million trees? And they plan to raise the money before the end of the year! I bet they'll do it too because these YouTubers have millions of followers. But the real key is that they have influence with these people.

When I read about this I thought: "Man, more nonprofits need to be working with influencers!"

I immediately called Rocket Social Impact. SVP Jenn DeBarge Goonan has been doing influencer campaigns for two decades, and she's agreed to do a FREE webinar on November 14th at 3pm EST…

Man, I am wicked scary excited by all of the cause campaigns coming up this year. Aren’t you?!

With Halloween tomorrow, and Thanksgiving and the holidays just around the corner, it’s prime time for cause products, signature partnerships, point-of-sale fundraising and yep – Giving Tuesday. You probably have a few partnerships of your own waiting in the wings!

Nonprofits such as Wounded Warrior, Big Brothers Big Sisters, Be The Match, and the Arthritis Foundation all agree: now is the perfect time to measure the success of your year-end partnerships and to package them as great case studies to help you raise more money in 2020…

Last month, I wrote that the key to corporate partnership success is audience-building because brands look for audiences to tell them what's popular, profitable and good in the world. In short, audiences are a magnet for companies.

For example, two weeks ago I covered Carson King's Venmo fundraiser for Iowa's Children's Hospital. After Carson raised $250,000, Venmo stepped in and offered to match donations. Then Busch Light offered to match donations AND put Carson's face on its beer cans. Why? Because Carson had built a passionate audience of supporters and funders that Venmo and Busch wanted to align with and tap into.

I've been looking for examples of nonprofits working on audience-building. With Halloween coming up, I found a good one thanks to Bat Conservation International.🦇…

This past week, I got a great question from a reader asking when and how to clean your email list. You know I'm a big believer in email and newsletters - and with good reason. Campaign Monitor just came out with a report that showed "across the board, donors prefer email. Nearly 42% said they prefer to hear from a nonprofit via email from the organization, and 20.5% said an email from the organization would inspire them to give again."

Email works, people. Now on to the question!

Q. I look forward to receiving your email each week! Any recommendation for email list cleaning services and when to remove the disengaged constituents that don't open the emails?

Is your program or partnership in need of a refresh, or a new, innovative idea to take your impact to the next level?

Whether you are a company or a nonprofit, we can all use an infusion of new strategic ideas to drive greater awareness and engagement for social impact efforts. With the launch of Cause Booster, Selfish Giving's and Rocket Social Impact’s new offering to create fresh action or revenue-driving concepts for clients on a tight budget or timeline, we’re sharing five ways to give your program a boost!

Does your program or partnership in need of a refresh, or a new, innovative idea to take your impact to the next level?

Whether you are a company or a nonprofit, we can all use an infusion of new strategic ideas to drive greater awareness and engagement for social impact efforts. With the launch of Cause Booster, Rocket Social Impact’s new offering to create fresh, action or revenue-driving concepts for clients on a tight budget or timeline, we’re sharing five ways to give your program a boost!

Thanks for your patience waiting for the results of the 2019 Selfish Giving / Accelerist Partnership Law Survey many of you took back in May.

Karen Wu of Perlman & Perlman and I received a lot of questions about corporate partnerships and the law. On the surface, this was great! But we did need to establish a process for answering everyone’s questions. That’s taken some time, but we think you’ll enjoy the results.

Over the next few months, Karen and I will be releasing a four-part series on the four key legal issues for which you requested guidance.

Today, we’re answering five questions on advertising disclosures…

Thanks for your patience waiting for the results of the Selfish Giving / Accelerist Partnership Law Survey many of you took back in May.

Karen Wu of Perlman & Perlman and I received a lot of questions about corporate partnerships and the law. On the surface, this was great! But we did need to establish a process for answering everyone’s questions. That’s taken some time, but we think you’ll enjoy the results.

Over the next few months, Karen and I will be releasing a four-part series on the four key legal issues for which you requested guidance.

Today, we’re answering your questions on advertising disclosures. The FAQ’s below were taken directly from the survey - although Karen and I modified some of the questions for clarity and for other questions that come up….

About the same time last week I was speaking at the New Strategies Program at Georgetown University about audience-centric fundraising, Mark Hrywna at The Nonprofit Times was preparing to release an article that highlights just how much nonprofits need to focus on audience-building and raising more money from individuals.

Here's the one sentence that blew me away 🤯...

Overall, 80 cents of every dollar of nonprofit revenue in the United States comes from government grants or contracts and fees for services.

Less than 10% comes from individuals and less than 1% of revenue comes from companies.🤭…