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Fundraising Questions

Good questions are the foundation of any fundraising plan. The same could be said of any other initiative your nonprofit might undertake. So, this is a post about questions that you can apply to fundraising challenges. The questions also work for other challenges, like program design and marketing.

To get started we need a challenge to ask questions about. Here is one fundraising challenge that’s confronted many nonprofits:

“In what ways can we use our Web site to raise more money?”
Many questioning techniques could be applied to that challenge. For now, let’s just focus on something simple – “why”?
Why do you want to use your Web site to raise more money? Because we have lots of traffic.

Why do you want to use that traffic to raise money? Our most pressing need is increased funding from some source and the Web site seems like the logical place to look for more money.

I think you get the idea. Try asking “why” and recording your answers. Do it again and again until you get an answer that suggests another challenge or another approach to your effort to raise more money.

You should plan to ask “why” five times, but a good answer could come before that.
You can use the same technique to explore challenges in areas like social marketing, strategic planning, program design and activism strategy.

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