Archive for February, 2009

Annual Giving: Overhaul Your Fundraising Program

What would it take to double your annual fundraising results? Our team can apply best practices to all areas of your annual fund, including direct mail, thank-you processes, events, data base management, corporate sponsorships, grants, and on-line fundraising.  And, we bring board members into the fundraising process to make them full partners in your fund development program. You emerge with a more powerful fundraising program and active buy-in from your board that will raise much more money.

Major Gifts: Going for the Gold

Don’t leave money on the table every year because you don’t have a Major Gifts program. Every organization should, at all times, have 10-20 prospects they are cultivating for a major gift. Our team can help you identify your foremost prospects, and craft cultivation strategies to bring them closer to your organization. Best of all, we can engage your board members as ambassadors to nurture long-term relationships with your prospects.

How do we harness our board members’ passion for the cause and channel it into productive fundraising activities?

Here are practical, easy ways your board members can open the door, connect their friends to your organization, expand your organization’s social networks, and help you find new friends and donors—without having to solicit.

1. Make Friends for the Cause

We need to capitalize on our board members’ personal social networks to further our organization’s urgent work solving community problems. So the job is clear: we have to ask our board members to introduce our organization to everybody they know.

Your board members need to be roaring advocates for your organization; they need to talk about it wherever they go. They should be all over their friends, telling them why it matters and urging them to get involved.

Actually, you want your board members to start an epidemic—of ideas. Ideas are like viruses—they spread from person to person.

Your board members can launch an epidemic of good news about your cause that will spread through your community. I teach board members how to be sneezers—conveying excitement about our cause everywhere.

This is the essence of viral marketing. Word of mouth can do marvelous things for a nonprofit cause. It creates great community buzz.

When everybody in the community is talking about your project, fundraising then becomes a natural outgrowth of all the energy and enthusiasm generated for your cause. This kind of visibility and background PR is absolutely essential for good fundraising.

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