3 tips to tone your fundraising muscles this summer

We’re coming up on sunny skies and 70 degree weather, so it might not feel like time to prepare your fundraising toolkit for the fall, but actually, there’s no better time. Before you know it, Jack Frost will be nipping at your nose, and you’ll be wishing you used thsoe long summer days to get your fundraising in shape. Here are a few tips to get you started:

1. Get to know your donors: Use the next few months to better understand the world through your donors eyes. Try surveys or interviews that give you some insight into what donors care about, why they give to you, or how else they might want to get involved. Since you’re planning on making asks to these donors in a few short months, you might as well go the extra mile and spend some time cultivating the relationship now. 

2. Test your templates: There’s no worse time to find out that your email doesn’t look great on a mobile device than in the middle of your year-end campaign. Groups like Litmus and Email on Acid will let you test your emails on multiple channels to make sure they’re picture-perfect. 

3. Tone your list building activities: 2015 was a year of list size growth, according to the recently published M+R Benchmarks Study, so spend some time this summer building your list with high-quality leads. Try something new—a more prominent email signup on your website, a webinar that collects participant email addresses, or Facebook’s Lead Generation ads and Call to Action buttons. Make sure you have a strategy in place for communicating with new leads—send them a welcome series with good content that’s as personalized as possible.

So which of these tips do you want to try out this summer?