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A Technique for Generating Fundraising Ideas

I’ll return to the subject of strategic planning for nonprofits later. For now, I want to introduce another technique for generating ideas, for fundraising, planning, program design, advocacy, and other things.
The Filament Technique was created by Edward De Bono, guru of creative thinking, and described in Serious Creativity. The technique is pretty easy to understand so I will just jump into demonstrating it with a nonprofit example.

We start by defining a creative focus. In this case I want to focus to securing donations. You could also focus on fundraising generally or on another aspect of fundraising. The process is exactly the same.

Having decided on the creative focus of “securing donations” I next need to list some of the normal requirements of securing donations. Here is my list:

Potential donors
Compelling case for donations
Printed materials
Objectives

Note that those requirements are kept pretty broad. That was done on purpose. The list above is meant to be an illustration and could certainly be expanded if I really tried.

The next step is to list possible ways of meeting each requirement:

Potential donors – rented mailing list, email list, members, newsletter subscribers
Compelling case – case studies, statistics, describe possibilities, paint a picture, anecdotes
Printed materials – brochures, letters, reports, cards, pamphlets, premiums
Objectives – money goal, deadline, program, equipment needs, advertising needs

That list is also meant to be an illustration. You could probably add many more elements if you tried.

The final step involves studying each of the four requirements, or “filaments,” to see if any promising ideas suggest themselves. Taking one element from each filament does suggest a possibility. Taking “newsletter subscribers,” “case studies,” “reports,” and “program” suggests that there could be a newsletter (perhaps emailed) that solicits small donations through PayPal in order to expand the program that the newsletter reports on.

The same process could work to generate ideas in areas like advocacy, program design, program improvement, and social marketing.
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