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Annual, Individual Fundraising for Small, Smart Nonprofits.

Caution: Don’t let potential donors slip through the cracks!

Cone Blue Wall
Somewhere, floating around your office, you probably have lists of names like these:

  • Participants in your spring 5K fundraiser.
  • People who attended your gala as a guest of a board member.
  • Family members of clients/ students/ patients.
  • People who’ve contacted you for help, education, or information.
  • Short-term volunteer project participants.

The names on these lists are your potential donors – people who have connected with your organization in some way, but have not yet supported you financially – your best candidates for an influx of new supporters.

How hard are you working to entice, invite, and persuade them to support your mission?

This is one of those fundraising tasks that is easily ignored or derailed.

We forgot to ask volunteers to sign-in at that church drop-in workday. We never get around to entering the list of names our board member handed us at the last meeting.  We got so busy with our upcoming fundraising gala, we never got around to sending that follow-up letter from our educational workshop.

There is a huge untapped potential in this segment of your donor database. Bumping this group up on your priority list is an easy way to bring in more money – a great return in investment of your time.

Here’s how to get started. [Read more…]

Should you ask volunteers to give money on top of their gifts of time?

mountaintopteamIn Part 3 of our series on targeting key donor segments we discuss if and how to approach key volunteers for financial support.

Sandy, a development manager for a mid-size, regional animal shelter wrote in with this dilemma:

“I suggested to our VP of Development that as a part of our fall campaign we write a special appeal to our numerous active volunteers who haven’t yet made a financial gift. He promptly shut the idea down since he felt we’d be devaluing their gifts of time. I strongly disagree and am wondering if other organizations have had success asking their volunteers for financial support.”

Many nonprofits are reluctant to ask for money from their program volunteers for this very reason. Organizations don’t want to appear greedy or offend their volunteer corps.

But your volunteers are your biggest advocates. More than anyone, they understand your work and the importance of your mission. They also understand that your organization depends on financial support to continue to operate. [Read more…]

Help! I don’t have enough donors for an annual campaign!

Over the last year, I’ve heard from people at several organizations who know they need to develop an annual, individual giving program, but feel they don’t have enough donors to get started.

Some of these organizations are relatively new.  Although they’ve had start-up grants that allowed them to get up-and-running, they understand that they need long-term support from individual donors to sustain them for the long haul.

On the other end of the spectrum are organizations that have been around for quite some time.  They have some individual donors they’ve acquired here and there, but because they haven’t had a program in place to keep them connected, their donor pool has grown stale instead of stronger.

What should you do if you find yourself in a similar situation?  Where do you start?  [Read more…]

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Smart Annual Giving helps small nonprofits harness the power of a well-planned, well-resourced annual giving program.

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