About NFP Playbook

NFP Playbook publishes working guides on the digital side of fundraising: how charities and other for-purpose organisations find supporters online, convert them, keep them, and measure the whole thing honestly.

The site exists because a lot of the advice available to fundraisers is either published by vendors with a product to sell, or too general to act on. Our guides try to be specific enough to use in your next campaign, with real benchmarks, named examples from charities that have proven each approach, and templates you can adapt.

How the site is organised

Every guide lives in one of six sections, which map to how fundraising work is actually divided:

• Ideas & Campaigns: what to run and when, from challenge events and peer-to-peer to giving days and crowdfunding
• Asking for Donations: the craft of the ask, in person, in writing, online and in grant applications
• Donor Communications: appeal letters, email programs, subject lines and the thank-yous that decide retention
• Retention & Regular Giving: keeping the donors you have and building a regular giving programme
• Digital & Social: social media fundraising, Meta's giving tools and marketing planning
• Platforms & Tools: giving platforms, donation pages, ad grants and the fine print underneath

How we write

Guides are written from practitioner experience and the sector's published research (the Fundraising Effectiveness Project, M+R Benchmarks, Penelope Burk's donor research and similar sources are recurring references). Where we cite a number, it is either from a named public source or clearly flagged as a working benchmark from experience. Where the honest answer is "it depends", we say what it depends on rather than pretending otherwise.

Guides get updated when platforms change the facts underneath them. The published date on each piece reflects its last substantive revision.

Independence

NFP Playbook is not owned by, or affiliated with, any fundraising platform, agency or CRM vendor. Tools are named in guides when naming them is useful to the reader, not because of any commercial arrangement. If that ever changes for a specific piece of content, it will be disclosed on the page.