Campaign Update

As we come into the home stretch for the 2024 Annual Campaign, I wanted to take a moment to give an update on how we are doing.  
 
November was a great month for us and in the first half of the month, we ended up closing over $200k in pledges and gifts in less than two weeks! The goal is in sight and the exciting part is that with the generosity and help of our community, it looks like we will not only hit our goal, but we will also surpass it! Our board is hard at work reaching out to our donors, as are our lay leaders, and the entire team of JFed Nashville is coordinating to engage in financial resource development.  

Even though we changed our campaign year to match the calendar (Jan-Dec) a few years ago, we frequently find that members of our community didn’t get the memo. That means that December is our last chance to close out our 2024 Annual Campaign. No pressure or anything! The good news is that the majority of our donors make their gifts in the month of December, so we’ve got that going for us, which is nice. 

Another tool in our arsenal that we haven’t deployed until recently is  Corporate Gift Matching. Most of our donors don’t realize that their employers will gladly match their gifts to Jewish Federation. Organizations like Alliance Bernstein, HCA, Nissan, and many more offer this benefit to encourage the generosity of their employees. That means that your gift of $900 could become $1800 and make you a member of our Pomegranate Society. Or $2500 would double to $5000 and qualify you as a major donor!  For more details just visit our website at jewishnashville.org/matching-gifts. 
 
One thing I have discovered since I started here earlier this year is that over the past several years, while Jewish Federation of Greater Nashville has been doing some incredible work for the community, we just have not done a good job of reaching out to our donors.  Some of that comes from all of the chaos from the COVID era, and some of it is that for decades, JFed Nashville worked like a Swiss watch, there were amazing seasoned lay leaders that had been a part of the solicitation process, and at some point, we lost the thread and failed to engage them. When I have spoken to some donors who stopped giving to us in previous years, I am finding out that the reason they stopped wasn’t that they didn’t support Jewish Nashville; it’s simply that we didn’t reach out to them. Nobody asked. 
 
When we launch the 2025 campaign, we will be much more organized. We will return to the good ol’ days of using pledge cards, while at the same time leveraging all of the technology that we have at hand. We will also be using our incredible Communications team – they really are doing some incredible work. It’s also supremely important that we aren’t just reaching out to folks to ask for money; we need to continue our stewardship of our donors.  Our fundraising process has to match the excellence of our charitable work, and the great news is that we have a plan and are getting there fast. 
 
So, personally, I would like to thank our community for its amazing generosity, both financially and with time. I’ve lived here for 20 years now, both of my children were born here, and while I was already proud of this very special community, I will say that over the last year I have learned to love Jewish Nashville even more than I already did. I am constantly overwhelmed by the philanthropic capacity of our community and the passion of my co-workers here at Jewish Federation of Greater Nashville. We are all very blessed and with your help, we can continue to grow, thrive, and keep our home safe.