Skip to main content

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.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Web Strategy That Works

I was reading a Chronicle of Philanthropy article about online strategies that work in a bad economy. The article presented four different strategies and a nonprofit that used it successfully. This post is about the strategy of using specialized Web sites. Put up a site just for a certain crisis, event, issue, project or program. The Chronicle details how Partners in Health did this for Haiti earthquake relief. Any issue, whether a crisis or not, whether global or local is a potential candidate for replicating the Partners in Health approach. Events of global and local significance are fine subjects for a site. You are probably already familiar with World AIDS Day or World Water Day. Those global events and many others are the subject of special Web sites and advertising campaigns both online and in print. Local events from the mundane, like the beginning of a new school year, to the momentous. A crisis is another good reason to put up a specialized Web site. The epic flooding in...
Post a Comment
Read more

Brainstorming for Fundraising Success

Looking for opportunities to raise more money or just to use your fundraising resources more efficiently? This post is another of a series on brainstorming and fundraising. You need three things to think creatively about fundraising. Openness to new ways of thinking is a requirement. Attitude matters in creative thinking, so you need to be positive and nonjudgmental. You also need to be familiar with one or more brainstorming tools. In recent posts I’ve described some brainstorming tools created by Edward De Bono and described in various books of his. In those posts I referred to using random ideas or objects to spark new ideas. In this post I will rely on a fantasy question, a provocation in De Bono’s terms, as a starting point. Consider this fantasy question: What if every donor supported 1000 charities? That question can potentially spark new ideas, if examined in the right way. De Bono writes about several ways of creating movement from a provocation like that question. I’ll qui...
Post a Comment
Read more

Fundraising Ideas

Raising money is a perennial challenge for nonprofits. The Great Recession has made things tougher for some and nearly impossible for others. Your nonprofit may be working hard to deal with fundraising challenges. Traditional thinking about fundraising might lead to thinking like this - “We need to raise $600,000 more money third year. What do we need to do to make this happen?” A discussion of grant writers, fundraising consultants and mailing lists follows. There is nothing wrong with this approach. At least some of that discussion needs to happen. But, new thinking might also be needed. Lateral thinking may help you get better results. Lateral thinking is (from Wikipedia) “solving problems through an indirect and creative approach.” The point of lateral thinking is to move “sideways” to new ideas and different ways of thinking. The point of this little essay is to point out another way of approaching the subject of fundraising. Lateral thinking itself suggests a broader approach to ...
Post a Comment
Read more