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Questions That Raise More Money

I read somewhere that taking the time to ask good questions will vastly improve the results you get from any activity – fundraising, education, and advocacy to name a few that are relevant to the nonprofit world. This post is about a particular way of asking questions, and a particular set of questions.

Before I get to the heart of the matter, I want to say a few words about Micheal Michalko’s popular Thinkertoys: A Handbook of Business Creativity for the 90s. The subtitle describes the subject. All of the idea generating tools Michalko mentions would work in a nonprofit setting. I’ll attempt to illustrate this fact with one of the techniques.

Michalko describes a questioning technique called SCAMPER. I don’t have the space here to really explain how SCAMPER works. First, of all, what does that acronym stand for?

S = Substitute?
C = Combine?
A = Adapt?
M = Modify or Magnify?
P = Put to other uses?
E = Eliminate or Minimize?
R = Reverse or rearrange?

Thinkertoys breaks down each letter in the acronym explaining how to use that part of the acronym to ask new questions, and presenting a list of new questions to answer. Most of the questions are so general that they can be used with any non-profit challenge.

Before you can actually use SCAMPER, you will need to work on defining your challenge. How does that work? Just take the general subject and break it down into steps, or activities, or processes. The terminology here is not important. Just break down that challenge into parts and try SCAMPER on each part to see if any good new ideas emerge.

A fundraising example will illustrate how to use SCAMPER. We want to raise more money this year but the usual techniques of asking local businesses and mailing fundraising letters don’t seem workable. Maybe SCAMPER can lead us to some new ideas.

First, we need to break our challenging of raising more money into parts. I quickly came up with a partial list of parts:

1. Select an objective
2. Develop a strategy
3. Get a mailing list, or other list
4. Monitor results

You might add parts but I think this list is a good starting point if you want to use SCAMPER on the challenge of raising more money.

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