My New Year's Resolutions

It's late on Sunday night and I'm moving a little slowly.  I've been distracted by occasional glimpses (every 30 seconds) at the Jets -Bengals game all night (Jets won, 37-0) and I'm getting over a minor virus of some kind.

So "My New Year's Resolutions" is the best title I could come up with.  Timely, but admittedly not very imaginative.

Anyway, the resolutions (all work related) boil down to these five:

1) This first one is a resolution my whole department is going to share: we're going to get our acknowledgement letters out within two business days of receipt of payment.

Look, I realize that isn't a very lofty aspiration, but as Louis Brandeis apparently liked to say, quoting Goethe, "One is the master through small details."  (I just read that in The New Yorker.)  That's why I call my business Tactical Fundraising.

2) I'm going to learn more from my peers.  Since starting this blog I've been spending a lot more time reading the blogs and newsletters of fundraising colleagues and other nonprofit professionals around the country and the world.  A lot of what I read is obvious stuff (like the guy who wrote about sending all his thank you notes within two days -- oh wait, that was me), but much of it is thought provoking, and it's fun to participate in serious conversations with other development professionals.  To wit, I encourage you to take a look (if you haven't already) at the Nonprofit Blog Carnival list that Jeff Brooks put together.  (My favorite is called Fundraising by the numbers, which addresses the issue of emotionality vs. statistics in a very rational manner.)

3) I'm never going to let my main email inbox grow to more than 25 messages (well, at least it won't stay that way for more than 24 hours).

4) I'm going to implement at least five ideas I've never tried before.  Establish monthly giving, a new fundraising event, a new approach to online giving, etc.  I'll consider the effort a (partial) success even if some of these don't work out -- the goal is to be daring and proactive.  We fundraisers are too risk averse.

5) I'm going to become more sophisticated in the way I use metrics and structured reporting to manage my fundraising work.

There they are -- I'd love to know, dear reader, what your fundraising-related resolutions are for the coming year.  Leave me a comment and let me know.