The Nest Egg in 2025

What to expect from your favourite non-profit publication

Jan 09, 2025

Behind the curtain…

Today we want to bring you behind the scenes of The Nest Egg and to let you know what to expect for the coming year.

Change is afoot!

But first, time travel…

Let’s go way back (to the heady days where the most recent global pandemic was a century ago and Obama was still in the White House). Back in 2019 we started to write emails to our rapidly growing subscriber list.

It was part of a plan to grow an audience and to add courses alongside consultancy work.

This is how email marketing works – businesses send regular emails, offering value and building a relationship, with the aim of selling helpful and relevant products.

We did it and it worked.

Over 150 of you have done our courses in trusts and major donor fundraising and over 500 of you have attended one of our workshops. We continue to attract new clients who get to know us first through reading The Nest Egg.

v.2.0

Last year, we changed up our business model.

We wondered if there was a way to;

make our paywalled content available to more people;
continue to provide lots of free stuff;
pay our bills?

So instead of using email marketing to sell courses, the emails themselves would become the product.

Our reasons for doing this (which still remain) are:

We wanted to make our training accessible - by making the best content available at a much lower price point)
We wanted to simplify our business - no more tech / design wizardry needed!
We wanted to create a badass online community of income generation legends!

One year on

The Nest Egg currently comes out on the first Tuesday of every month for free subscribers nd weekly for paying subscribers.

At the time of writing, we have 3,100 people who subscribe for free and 100 paying subscribers. The percentage of you that open our emails is high – around 45%.

Wowsers!

Being able to finally live the dream of being paid to write for a living is the most incredible feeling. As we stand around in the kitchen drinking coffee in the morning, discussing topics for future editions, we have to pinch ourselves at the sheer joy that this is our job (or at least part of our job).

Thank you so much - all of you! You are the ecosystem that keeps our little business thriving, and in times like these, we couldn’t be more grateful.

So, what’s next?

At the end of December, we retired our online training courses on trusts and major gifts.

Existing customers, you’ll still have access until June 2025.

We’ll then be free to update the course content (because SO much is changing and it all needs a rework / refresh) and share it with you here in the Nest Egg.

Topics are likely to include:

Target setting in an uncertain world
Strategic planning - what are the choices and which ones are best?
Building long term donor relationships

This will feature alongside:

Mini research projects (yes, Caroline will read another bunch of reports so you don’t have to)
Thought pieces (sounds wanky but how else to say it?) on the bigger topics facing non-profits and how we can move through it all whilst retaining some semblance of sanity
Our own range of merch and journals (only kidding – though wouldn’t this is incredible???)

A full list of our plans is available here.

Return on Investment benchmarking study

Klaxon - we’ll be re-running our benchmarking study into ROI for different types of fundraising.

This is happening in February – please, please put some time aside to gather your data and participate in the survey.

The more responses we get, the better it will be.

As always, the main report will be free and accessible to everyone.

But we’re thinking that with the support of those of you who are able to pay, we’ll be able to publish and share more in depth analysis, for example:

ROI analysis by charity size and sector
How ROI changes the longer you fundraise
Year on year comparisons – a longitudinal look at how ROI’s are changing
How ROI figures intersect with other data and what this means for the sector going forwards
Guidance for trustees and leaders on how to use this information
Updated information on trust fundraising success rates
Commentary on the morality and the limitations of these types of study

So are you with us?

If this is exciting to you and you want a piece of the action, then we invite you to become a paid subscriber of The Nest Egg today.

It costs £7 a month or £70 a year.

Here’s the button if you’re not already a paid subscriber:

And finally…

We believe in the democratisation of fundraising training and that fundraisers should have choices in how they receive information and from whom.

We love the idea of a newsletter (which is also not a newsletter) being considered as part of the learning and development mix for ambitious fundraisers, alongside courses, group programmes, conferences and coaching.

We believe that people deserve to be paid for their work and that fundraisers deserve to be invested in by the organisations that expect so much of them.

Through The Nest Egg, we want to be your companion in helping you to achieve your mission.

Our vision is for an epic content hub, providing top notch professional development resources for you, our community of exceptional charity sector people.

If you want to and haven’t already please upgrade your subscription today.

Thanks again for being part of our community. We’re so grateful to you all,

Tony and Caroline