Sarah Durham

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Sarah is an entrepreneur and creative consultant with a passion for helping nonprofits communicate more effectively so they can advance their missions. 

She founded Big Duck (www.bigduck.com) in 1994 to help nonprofits increase their visibility, raise money, and communicate more effectively. In 2019, she acquired Advomatic (www.advomatic.com), to help them online. She spends her days guiding these businesses and talking with nonprofit leaders about their communications.

The author of Brandraising: How Nonprofits Raise Visibility and Money Through Smart Communications (Jossey-Bass/Wiley, 2010), Sarah’s expertise has been borrowed by NPR, The Chronicle of Philanthropy, Guidestar, and others. She is a sought-after speaker on branding, fundraising, and other nonprofit communications topics. She was named a “top fundraiser under 40” by Fundraising Success magazine in 2006, and one of the most influential women in technology by Fast Company magazine in 2010. As an adjunct professor at NYU’s Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service, Sarah taught strategic communications to other aspiring nonprofit communicators for many years.

Posts by Sarah

AdvoTalk: Bridging the gap between content creation and technology

  Sarah Durham (00:03): Welcome, welcome and happy Friday everybody. I am Sarah Durham and as you can see I am joined by Marion Marquardt who is my esteemed guest today for this conversation. Before we dig in to our topic, just a little bit of housekeeping. First of all, we have a number of

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AdvoTalk: Content Planning and Management 101

  Sarah Durham (00:04): Hello everybody, this is Sarah Durham and I am delighted to be your host today for the session on Content Planning and Management 101. We still have a lot of people who are logging in. So before we dig into the substance of our discussion today, I want to just do

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AdvoTalk: Marketing place-based programs in an entirely digital world

Sarah Durham (00:00:03): Hey everybody. Thank you for joining us today. I am Sarah Durham. I am the CEO of Advomatic and we are talking today about marketing place-based programs in an entirely digital world. Before we get started, I want to introduce a couple of people to you quickly and tell you a little

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Can you continuously improve your website?

  Transcript Sarah Durham: Welcome back to the Smart Communications Podcast. I’m your host, Sarah Durham, and I’m here today with Rory Tucker. Welcome Rory. Rory Tucker: Hey Sarah. Thanks for having me. I’m pretty excited. Sarah Durham: I’m going to give you all a little bit of background about Rory. He is on the team at Advomatic. Advomatic.com is

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Should your nonprofit switch its CMS?

Your nonprofit’s content management system was probably set up to meet your organization’s needs whenever your website was last built or updated. But changing something as critical as your CMS is scary. Should you abandon the “devil you know?” What if your new CMS is just as limiting, but in ways you can’t yet anticipate?  

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Advotalk: Nonprofit Communications Engine

The Nonprofit Communications Engine, Sarah Durham’s new book, helps nonprofit communicators and leaders to leverage communications in order to advance their mission. In this conversation, Sarah Durham will define what “success” means for nonprofit communications regardless of mission or size, and unpack the six core elements necessary to achieve it.   This invitation-only conversation with

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Who Really Owns Your Nonprofit’s Website?

The internet used to feel like the wild west. Websites sprung up like homesteads, built by an enterprising range of people using all sorts of source code. If you worked in the nonprofit sector in the 1990s, the odds are good that your organization built its first site in a proprietary system using custom-built code

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