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How to Get Fundraising Ideas 2

This post is about yet another way to generate fundraising ideas. New ways to attract donors, get contributions, get bigger contributions, and secure donations of goods and services are always in demand. Or at least this is my thesis here!

One way to get ideas is to think of the elements of a challenge and how those elements could be combined in novel ways. If you look at the many elements of fundraising and how those elements could be combined then you might get a great new idea. Exactly the same philosophy could be applied to any area of nonprofit management.

What parameters are there in fundraising? This should be a review, so I’ll list some parameters below, the list variations on each parameter. Think of this list as a summary of what you need to have and what you need to do.

Audience – voters, previous donors, your mailing list, business owners, Web site visitors.
Purpose – legacy gift, monthly gift, donated goods, donated services, one-time gifts.
Objective – operating funds, program start-up, program support, project funding.
Approach – live Web event, Web project, live (for real!) event, print mailing, email, radio.

Now, have a quick look at each short list and see what you can see. You will find the common strategy of writing a letter to your mailing list to ask for a one-time gift to help cover project costs. Other standard fundraising strategies should reveal themselves rather quickly.

Study those parameters and their variations again. Maybe you want to approach business owners for monthly gifts to cover a specific program using a live (for real!) event. That seed of an idea only took two minutes to find and record. Maybe you could use a Web project to get Web visitors to think about making a legacy gift to support the organization’s most popular program.

Knowing your particular needs and your organization’s social environment should help you see other possibilities.

You could also take a few minutes to copy that table. Later, as new elements occur to you those can be added. With not much effort, you can get a powerful fundraising idea tool.

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