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How to Get Fundraising Ideas, Part 1

Fundraising too often falls back on conventional ideas. You can send out a fundraising letter, or put a donation button on your Web site, or have a bake sale. A relatively ambitious organization might solicit donations for a silent auction or even start selling something.

Brainstorming could yield some interesting new fundraising ideas. Brainstorming may be unstructured – (“Let’s look for some new ideas.”) or a formalized search for new ways to raise money. This post is about one of those formalized brainstorming techniques.

In Thinkertoys, Michael Michalko writes about something called an Idea Grid. You can consult Thinkertoys for a detailed explanation but I hope that my brief introduction here gives you enough to work with.

So, the first step in creating an Idea Grid is to create, well, you create a grid with four quadrants labeled High Involvement, Low Involvement, Think, and Feel. High Involvement represents expensive products like cars and boats. Low Involvement represents cheap goods like razors and pencils. The Think quadrant is for products sold with lots of information, like cars and computers. The Feel quadrant represents products that appealed to a consumer’s desires, such as cosmetics.

Here’s what an Idea Grid looks like, subject to the limits of text editors:

Think Feel
High Involvement
Low Involvement

In a commercial context this grid would be filled with product names. Expensive products that come with high emotional involvement would be in the upper right quadrant.

All products fit in one of the four quadrants. All fundraising appeals fit into one of those four quadrants as well. Sometimes we use numbers or logic to convince potential donors. Other times we focus on eliciting an emotional response. Sometimes we want a big gift and sometimes we chase many small gifts.
The grid above should be relatively easy to fill out with different sorts of fundraising techniques. You can see where all of your fundraising efforts fit in this grid.

But could you find any new fundraising ideas there. Look for any quadrant that’s empty. For example, you may realize that no effort is being made to logically convince big donors that supporting your organization makes sense. A logical appeal to major donors is a possible new fundraising approach.
Next time I’ll look at another structured way to generate fundraising ideas.
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