grundyhome.com

Fundraising always sounded like a cushy job to me. I had this notion that it consists calling some wealthy donor up, wining and dining him, and collecting a huge check.

Of course, that’s not how it works. It’s not about doing business over drinks or dinner. It’s about building a relationship and telling a story. I am going to spend a lot of time over the next few months considering exactly what this means. I’ll be sure to write about it.

That’s right, we haven’t been fundraising. I cringe when I read articles about how to keep fundraising during a recession because we weren’t even doing this when the economy was strong! We used to get our funding from one major agency, but that has dried up and left us wondering how we’ll replace that source.

So my job is to take us from zero to… well, somewhere. And that’s where I’m starting.

Define the somewhere

Fundraising is goal-oriented. You determine your needs based on your goal. You create a strategy to reach your goal. You measure your success against your goal. If you don’t have a goal for your fundraising, you won’t be able to focus your efforts enough to stand out.

I haven’t been doing this long, but I’ve learned one thing - donors prefer to give for a cause. Heating your office and paying your staff isn’t a cause. Creating a new program, saving more people from starvation, or building a new hospital - these are causes. And people can get behind a cause. Your job, at the outset and on a continued basis, is to align your fundraising goal with the cause.

One of the first tasks for my committee is to identify our funding needs and priorities. These will come from the programs, the leadership, the board, etc. They should be guided by the strategic plan (which we also don’t have, but are working on). This is the basis for setting our goals.

Find a starting point

At the very least, we’ve done some small fundraising efforts. We’ve held fundraising events that raised anywhere from a few hundred to a few thousand dollars. We’ve applied for a few grants. We have a database that hasn’t been seriously maintained and that nobody really knows how to use. It’s not much, but it’s something.

Point A to Point B

So we have the starting point and a goal (not that I’m not calling it the ending point). How you get from start to goal is the big discussion. That’s called your strategy. And without a strategy, you’re traveling without a map.

I believe that fundraising and marketing are really about the same things: telling a story and building a relationship.

Having worked in a marketing world for my relatively short career, I volunteered to chair our new marketing committee at our Camp Fire council. This makes sense, as I’m far more experienced in this arena than anyone else in our organization. I brought in some volunteers with a variety of experiences, including writers, advertising, PR, and small business owners. We’re starting at ground zero. It’s going to be fun. More on this in another article.

In a much less logical move, I have also been appointed/volunteered to serve as chair of our fundraising committee. I have absolutely no experience with fundraising. Other than a nascent interest in the subject and an overwhelming desire to dive into a new subject and overextend myself again, there’s no reason I should be the one to take this committee on. Oh, and the fact that there’s nobody else to do it.

So what makes me think I can do this? Because I believe that fundraising and marketing are really about the same things: telling a story and building a relationship. Donors and customers don’t care about you, they care about the product. As a non-profit, your product is the benefit you create for them.

Some (hopefully) familiar marketing concepts

1. Retention: It’s easier to keep a donor/customer than it is to gain a new one
2. Relation: Tell a story that relates to your donor/customer
3. Information: Keep your donor/customer informed about (and this is important!) what you are doing for them
4. Inspiration: Inspire your donor/customer to act - not by begging them, but by making it easier to say yes than it would be to say no

From this starting point, it starts to seem a bit more reasonable that a programmer/project manager/marketer/entrepreneur might try his hand at fundraising. Doesn’t it?