Nolo’s Fundraising Tips for Busy Nonprofits

If your nonprofit is like most, you've defined your "major donors" based on a certain average dollar amount that they give annually and keep in touch with them accordingly. But when was the last time you examined that cutoff line?

As Richard Male points out in a recent article made available by the Grassroots Fundraising Journal, entitled "How to Prepare Your Nonprofit for an Economic Recession," now's a good time to lower the dollar threshold and widen your pool of major donors. That gives you more people to whom you reach out, make personal connections with, and ultimately come to rely on to keep your nonprofit viable.

No matter what the economy, his suggestion also carries important implications about not getting into a fundraising rut. Looking at whether your relationships with donors (both major and minor ones) reflect current economic realities and allow you to maximize the degree to which they feel connected to your organization is always a good thing.

That's the suggestion made by coaches interviewed in this article by Julie Deardoff of the Chicago Tribune. Problems include runners who push themselves harder than they should, feeling they owe it to the charity, and others who decide they're going to make it to the finish line even if they have to stay until well after dark, when the help stations and others have packed up and gone.

Deardoff's article also notes a number of the wonderful things about athletic events built around fundraising, including the extra charge participants get by working together with others toward a cause.

But there's a warning flag in this article for any charity that puts on marathons or similar events -- you don't want to be the one that's a little lax on safety standards, leading to a major injury or safety problem that makes the contributors to this article look prophetic.

I'm just back from a vacation on the East Coast, which included some long, lovely drives through the small towns of upstate New York. The weather was balmy, the people were friendly. Nevertheless, I believe I alienated an entire small-town fire department -- and all due to their assumption that I knew about their fundraising cause.

There we were, my husband driving his father's car (with New York plates, so that no one knew we were hapless tourists), watching Memorial Day flags flutter from porches and barbecue smoke rise from backyards, when we saw a sign saying "Boot Drive Ahead." I asked my husband, "What's a Boot Drive?" He grew up in Buffalo, so he had more chance of knowing than I. Neither of us had a clue -- it sounded like some traffic penalty, like when they put a big metal thingy around your tire for not knowing that Oakland street-sweepers don't observe a certain federal holiday.

Rows of people lined the town's main street, including some firefighters in uniform, whose backs happened to be turned to us as we made our way along. Then a policeman very sternly motioned for us to stop. We did, but didn't roll down our windows. He gave us a dirty look and let us zoom off (somewhat eagerly, confused by the whole experience).

Only then did the other shoe (or boot) drop. In the rearview mirror, I saw a fireman holding a boot out toward a car. He was collecting money, presumably to support the local fire department. Oops. We did offer some green to the next town's boot-wielding fireman. But c'mon folks, a little more signage would have helped. There's nothing tacky about saying something like, "Support Your Local Fire Department!" Moral of the story: Vagueness in fundraising leads to lost chances to interact with potential donors.

I just came across a fundraising letter that -- with apologies to the sender, who shall remain unnamed -- seems like a good lesson in how NOT to write a first paragraph.

It goes like this: "During recent months, our world has been experiencing swift and constant change. The challenges of our current times are, however, underscored by a feeling of hope for the future. While the weight of the global financial crisis presses upon us, the generosity of our supporters encourages us to continue our efforts..."

Are you excited by reading this? Did you learn anything new? Were any questions or mysteries raised that the rest of the letter will solve (other than the mystery of what effort or cause the writer will eventually ask your support for)?

To me, this opening sounds generic, like a speech that any political figure might give. It's not at all conversational, and therefore impersonal. What's more, it doesn't give any clues about the relationship between sender and recipient, why exactly the sender is writing, or why we should keep reading.

A good fundraising letter starts with a strong personal message, and preferably a hook that draws people in. You're dealing with nanoseconds here -- that's all the time you have before most readers say, "Just another fundraising letter," and aim yours at the recycling bin. For examples of catchy, interesting fundraising letters and more details on how to write one, see the lengthy discussion in Chapter 4 of my book, Effective Fundraising for Nonprofits.

Making the most of your nonprofit's web presence is no longer just a cool option, it's your best bet economically, when every stamp costs more money than your budget allows.

For ideas on expanding your online opportunities, check out news of this recent announcement from YouTube, which allows nonprofits, for free, to overlay ads onto videos they post. (Don't have a video? This is a perfect project for a volunteer or intern.)

Or, look at what other nonprofits are doing on Twitter. 

But don't forget the basics: A website that tells people who you are and what you do, with clear explanation of why you're a reliable and worthy place to send their money. For more information on this topic, see my article, "Using Your Nonprofit's Website to Help Fundraise," and this recent survey report about where nonprofit websites fall short.

Every nonprofit knows that telling its donors or funders, "We'll go under without some money!" is no recipe for fundraising success. As dire as the need for services to the clients or cause may be, the inevitable underlying message is, "We're kind of a mess, perhaps not the model of efficiency you'd want working on this cause or chewing through your money."

Yet many nonprofits, forgetting this lesson and driven by some very real desperation, regularly pull out the "Help, this is it!" message anyway.

Well, if ever there were a reason to tone down the desperation, it's expressed in the recent article in The New York Times by Stephanie Strom, called "As Detroit Struggles, Foundations Shift Mission." It quotes a University of Michigan professor, Larry Gant, who articulates what local Detroit charitable foundations are carrying out in practice: "Insolvent organizations need to be dissolved, weak ones need to be merged and acquired, and only the strongest should receive the stimulus they need to become more financially sound."

Gulp. By way of example, the article discusses one organization on the way to insolvency that a foundation guided into a merger with another organization. It was probably one of the lucky ones -- others are no doubt receiving outright "no's" to funding. If it were my organization, I'd want to take a hard look at my position before approaching a foundation, and if some radical change like a merger is the only realistic hope, have my plan in hand before seeking new money. Let them see that you've got your turnaround plan in place -- a light at the end of the tunnel.

So, the Girl Scouts have gotten themselves into a flap about whether they should be forbidding use of the Internet as a way of selling cookies. It seems that door-to-door is okay; and marketing your cookies on the Internet is okay; but once a girl (in this case, a particular girl named Wild) starts actually letting customers order online, that's either unfair to other girls or a safety risk. Not exactly a bright dividing line.

You'll find the whole story, called "The Cookie Crumbles," written up by Kurt Soller in Newsweek. He raises the important points that Internet sales are not necessarily safer than knocking on strangers' doors, and that a little entrepreneurship should probably be rewarded rather than slapped down, especially in a world where kids will need to know how to use the Internet (at least until the Next Big Thing comes along).

Another point that didn't get raised in the article, which may also underlie the unease with Internet sales, is that the girl in question had her parents' help in setting up the website, and not all Girl Scouts have that opportunity. That's a little troubling, but hardly new. I remember being irked as a kid when other parents took the cookies to work and sold them, while my dad worked at home and had no office to peddle sweets at. Here's hoping the Girl Scouts find a way to make this a "teaching moment" about Internet usage for all concerned, rather than get into an impossible enforcement effort.

And while we're on the topic, when is a major nonprofit going to come up with healthier snacks to sell?

The recession has affected everyone, rich and poor alike. While the rich still have money to fall back on, I imagine (believe me, I only imagine) that it can be as hard to see 25% cut off a million dollar portfolio as a $10,000 one. In the first case, you've just said goodbye to $250,000, while in the second case, you've lost a "mere" $2,500.

How the rich are responding was the subject of an interesting USA TODAY article by John Waggoner on February 2, 2009, called "Even the wealthy feel tapped out." The title pretty much conveys it all, and the article focuses on the various luxury businesses (cars, condos, champagne) affected by the downturn.

But there's a bright spot in here for nonprofits, I think. The article says that even though the wealthy can still afford, say, fancy cars, they may be less likely to buy them, or anything else that looks ostentatious, in a down economy. To do so might look "declasse."

That's a great opportunity for nonprofits to give those with money a better way to spend their cash. Gala dinner, anyone? Or how about an eco-tour sponsored by your organization?       

I attended a nonprofit organization's party for donors recently at which they did one thing very right and one thing very wrong.

Let's start with the right: After dinner, when everyone was in a good mood and not yet looking at their watch to check whether it was time to apologize to the babysitter, the E.D. got up, reminded everyone of the organization's great work, and made a pitch for immediate donations. Better yet, she invited a major donor to the stage to talk about her own motivations for giving. The donor seemed truly thrilled to both be recognized and to have a chance to talk about a cause that she has made her own. Volunteers passed out envelopes for donations, accompanied by a little thank-you gift.

Now for the problematic part: At the end of the evening, no one knew where to put their donation envelopes. They stood up, looked around, looked confused, and ended up handing their envelope to any staff member they could find.

That's not only a disservice to donors, but could irritate them enough to say, "Forget it, I'll keep my envelope." It would be so simple -- and not at all pushy -- to just plant someone at each door with a big jar in hand! Next year, I hope...

I'm still in the mode of reading and summarizing scholarly articles so you won't have to. This next one is from the summer 2008 issue of Nonprofit Management & Leadership (vol. 18 no. 4). (Yes, I'm a little behind.)

This time around, it's an excellent article titled "A Nonprofit Manager's Guide to Online Volunteering," by Beatrice Bezmalinovic Dhebar and Benjamin Stokes. The authors evaluated more than 300 organizations' use of online volunteering services, talking to both staff members and the volunteers themselves.

Their conclusions are simultaneously more and less heartening than I would have expected.

On the positive side, a few groups have been able to use this seemingly random method of reaching out to people to get some serious help, particularly with technological, operational, or fundraising matters. Some have even built entire programs around online volunteers. The online services can create natural matches between nonprofit organizations that are either remote, small, or new, and volunteers who are busy during normal working hours, live far from opportunities for volunteering, or are physically disabled -- but want to help. Not too surprisingly, most volunteers chose assignments with limited time commitments, in most cases only one to five hours of work a week.

On the non-so-great side, most organizations find that a lot more volunteers say they want to help than actually follow through. Even those who complete an assignment rarely come back and do a second one.

But it quickly emerges that the problem can't simply be chalked up to flaky volunteers. Like any staff member, volunteers need training, management, and feedback. The article provides some concrete suggestions for giving this, including suggestions like:

• ask volunteers about their qualifications before assigning them anything (they actually tend to like being taken seriously this way!)
• send a "Thanks, but we've filled that volunteer slot" email to applicants whose services you don't intend to use
• start with short test assignments
• be clear about the scope of work and your expectations
• keep in touch at least once a week (or more) about how things are going, and
• tell the volunteers (effusively and often) when you're happy with their work and that it's making an important difference to your organization.

As with so many other human relationships, communication seems to be the key. The overriding lesson I took from this article was: While the Internet can be an amazing way to link nonprofit organizations and volunteers, it can also create a barrier between you. Nonprofit managers will get the most from online volunteers if they keep nurturing the human side of this relationship.

Oh and, for a bonus, here are links to the list of volunteer matching websites set forth in the article:

• http://www.idealist.org/volunteer/index.html
• http://www.mentornet.net/
• http://www.onlinevolunteering.org/en/index.html
• http://www.serviceleader.org/new/virtual/
• http://www.volunteermatch.org/