Category

Fundraising

Nov 23
0

Around the Holidays Consider Fundraising For the Members of Your Community

By | Fundraising, Nonprofit | No Comments

iStock_000011346681XSmallYour nonprofit is always considering their bottom-line, and how your organization can benefit from fundraising. However, when the holidays are around the corner does your nonprofit stop and consider community members who may not be able to afford a turkey and all the trimmings for Thanksgiving?  Or that nearby families they are grasping at straws in trying to figure out how they can provide for their family a wonderful Christmas. They don’t know how they can pay all of their bills let alone purchase presents for their family members.

Fundraising is not always about furthering your mission and your incoming revenue. Around the holidays consider fundraising for members of your community. To begin your fundraising project organize a meeting with all of your upper management. Discuss how your organization can come together and raise funds for the community. Ask them to discuss the fundraising project with their departments. Then plan a meeting in the next 7 days to begin your project.

While your organization is gathering ideas, consider doing the following projects:

  • Adopting a Family for Christmas- There are many individuals that adopt an entire family for Christmas. What makes this project unique is that you are able to provide a wonderful Christmas for the whole family not just the children. Typically it is the goal of the organization to provide gifts for the children and assist the family with their Christmas meal. If this sounds like a program your organization would be interested in, use a search engine and search for adopt a family for christmas. Include your city and state in your search to find a nearby organization.
  • Adopting a Family for Thanksgiving is always an option also, but Thanksgiving is a few days away and may no longer be an available project for 2013. However you can consider this a community service project for 2014.
  • Conducting a food drive for the holidays is also an alternative, but with this choice you are helping a nameless and faceless family. If you are considering making a greater impact, consider one of the options above.
  • Another alternative to helping those in need is to contact nursing home and independent living facilities. See if there are senior citizens in your community who your organization can sponsor. You can purchase gifts but perhaps you can make it a community service project that goes beyond helping an individual during the holidays. Maybe you can sponsor a senior year-round by making weekly visits, remembering their birthday, and other special occasions.

Once your organization discusses the community service project and decides on a fundraising project, the next step is getting the employees involved. Send an email to all employees describing your community service project. List the dates that your organization will be collecting funds. Put the project in your company newsletter to ensure that all employees are notified of the fundraising project and have time to donate to the project.

During any other time of year, it is logical for your organization to focus solely on collecting revenue and your mission, but during the holidays a fundraising campaign to benefit the community is a fresh change of pace, and rejuvenates your employees.

Nov 13
0

Fundraising small donor by small donor

By | Fundraising | No Comments

iStock_000006237376XSmallOne fundraiser related her story of how she got into the profession: I was working for a mid-size corporation and was asked to handle the annual United Way Campaign. I knew absolutely zero about fundraising. I first went to the Vice President for Human Resources and asked that the company double whatever I could raise. He readily answered in the affirmative. I then went to each department, talked about core United Way services that could one day help them or their neighbors or friends, and then I asked every person to contribute a dollar per paycheck. Only a dollar.

When nearly every employee signed up, the company’s match was much more significant than they had anticipated, but they followed through. The CEO was congratulated publicly, with press coverage, by the local United Way Executive Director. Everyone profited.

What are the fundraising lessons from this experience?

Don’t discount small donations; rather, encourage them, especially in a campaign for small donations from lots of donors. “Every dollar counts” has become a tired phrase, but it’s true nonetheless. Every dollar does count. One fundraiser recently heard that a performing arts school needed new tutus that were not in their budget. She asked her friends for $5 each and asked them to ask their friends for $5 each. (What is social media for, after all?) Soon there were new tutus.

People want to donate but those who only have the capacity for small donations often shy away from contributing because they don’t think their gift will make a real difference. Imagine how good they would feel if they were told, You are one of 20 people who helped purchase this tutu. Helping people see how their particular gift makes a difference will encourage them to donate. (This is true for donors at every level.)

Ask a donor with the capacity for a major gift to create a matching gift that will double or triple all donations of $100 or less in the next two months until their entire gift is matched. All of a sudden, a donor who is able to contribute $25 feels as if their contribution to that cause is much more significant. And the major gift donor also benefits – that gift helped bring in many other donors, several of whom may be new donors to that cause, which in itself is quite valuable.

Donors who have made small gifts may turn into volunteers. They may offer in-kind contributions. They may even give larger gifts if their life situations change. But donors who give a gift at any level, year after year, are key contributors to the long-term sustainability of your organization. Thank them, thank them, and thank them again, and everyone will profit.

If you or your Board need donor-tracking software to increase your ability to have effective campaigns of any size, please contact us to see how we can help.

Nov 09
0

Build a Successful Major Donor Fundraising Program

By | Fundraising | No Comments

iStock_000007489713XSmallCelebrate the New Year by resolving to build a successful major donor fundraising program. Focusing on your largest givers is the quickest way for any nonprofit to bring in more funds and create a stable revenue stream. The right fundraising software can help you at every stage in the process.

The Pareto Principle holds true for fundraising. The top 20% of your donors will provide about 80% of your total income. An integrated donor management system allows you to pull together data from multiple sources in order to identify and serve these valuable constituents. You will be able to analyze giving patterns in terms of amount and frequency, and whether people are interested in general support or specific programs like scholarships or a new building. You may even find potential donors in unexpected places such as your volunteers or event attendees. Once you identify them, you can also use your system to track contact history and develop reliable data for designing renewal and upgrading strategies.

Detailed reports give you a clearer picture of your potential and performance. You’ll see if your major donor base is growing or declining. You’ll also be able to map out a gift pyramid showing you how many donors you need at each giving level to meet your objectives.

Of course, major donor fundraising is time and labor intensive. Technology allows you to target your resources for where they will have the most impact. It helps you to be more responsive to your donor’s individuals needs and communicate with them regularly and effectively. Most of all you’ll become a good steward of the contributions you receive. You’ll avoid missed opportunities by connecting with people who are dedicated to your cause and using the appropriate cultivation and solicitation strategies.

Contact us to learn more about effective nonprofit software solutions. We can help you build the financial and administrative infrastructure you need to enable you to advance your mission.

Nov 07
0

Get Your Donor Management in Place before the End-of-Year Rush

By | Fundraising | No Comments

Happy New Year 2014 replace 2013 concept on the sea beachMost people think of the week between Christmas and New Year’s as a great week to take vacation. Families fill planes, trains and automobiles to get together across the country, snowbound New Englanders head for the Caribbean, groups of friends shop the after-Christmas sales, and in general most people aren’t thinking about work.

But if you work in the nonprofit industry, you know that someone has to be in the office during that critical week between Christmas and New Year’s, because that’s when lots of donors make last-minute donation decisions. If there’s no one in the office to handle the nonprofit’s side of the donation transaction (especially with regard to a donation of stocks, or property), the nonprofit might lose out. Then there are all the checks arriving by mail during the week as well; someone has to process those donations and get the checks to the bank.

Regardless of who is designated to handle these end-of-year donations, your entire team can benefit from a robust donor management system when it comes to efficiently processing the end-of-year rush. Capably getting the hard copy checks to the bank is pretty straightforward—but if you don’t have a donor management system in place, your team might be playing “catch up” in January in order to get annual donor letters out the door in time.

You also never know if someone is going to walk in the door and announce that they want to donate a parcel of property down the street, or call to arrange a gift of some of the stocks they inherited from grandma 6 months ago. Without a powerful software system that is tailored to the particular needs of nonprofits, these donations can be pretty difficult to handle appropriately in a short period of time.

If your accounting and fundraising teams are not completely in sync, you might find yourself mandating work days at the end of December—when you could be letting a software program do the bulk of the work. Yes, someone will need to mind the office during the last week in December, but if you have appropriate donor management software in place, when staff returns to work in January, they will be able to easily pick up their piece of the process and seamlessly generate thank you notes, financial reports and management updates with ease. So prepare now for the end-of-year giving rush, and implement an updated donor management program today.