7 Online Fundraising Ideas For Year-End Procrastinators

It’s that time of year again — when you kick yourself for not starting to plan your organization’s year-end fund raising appeal earlier. But there is still time to whip together a guerrilla campaign using email and online donation tools, even if you’ve never done it before. 
If you have a list of supporters’ email addresses [...]

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Teaching Board Members to Raise Money

According to an article in the Jan. 14th issue of The Chronicle of Philanthropy, nonprofit experts often complain that they can’t get members of their boards to effectively raise money.
But the problem is usually more about the nonprofit organization’s leadership than it is about the motivations of its volunteer board members, writes the anonymous author [...]

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Greatest lives among us

Greatness lives among us. Nick Anderson, a teenage from Conway, Mass. approached Oxfam about going to Darfur after co-founding a successful national high school challenge to raise awareness and funds for Darfur by using the social networking site, Facebook.  
As the co-founder of a highly successful fundraising initiative, Nick helped to raise more [...]

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Why donors stop giving

The Indiana University Center on Philanthropy recently revealed the tops reasons why lapsed donors quit donating.
What is particularly important is to notice that 50 percent of these reasons are within your control. Therefore, manage these potential pitfalls. It’s much easier to keep a donor, than to find a new one:

Feeling [...]

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Foundation Center

The Foundation Center is one the nation’s best resources for grant seekers. It’s a great place to start your search for potential funders, because the Center has profiles on some 80,000 grant makers, detailing their areas of interest, grant history, and other pertinent information.
Grant seekers can visit one of the libraries (located in Washington, New [...]

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New website offers access to Federal data

A new online database makes it easy for a nonprofit organization to get information about federal spending and local statistics that might influence their work.
The National Priorities Project Database provides data from 1983 to the present in the categories of basic demographic information, education, health, housing, hunger, income and provider, labor and military, which can [...]

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Develop a winning case statement

A good case statement must be one that grabs a prospective donor’s attention, and then offers a solid reason for investing in a program.
According to Jerold Panas in his book Born to Raise: What Makes a Great Fundraiser; What Makes a Fundraiser Great, a case statement must have eight essential elements. Panas cautions that these [...]

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Fundraising pitfalls

Mistakes in fundraising can be very costly – particularly for smaller organizations pressed by tight budgets and ever-increasing needs. Here are 12 pitfalls to avoid.

Being reluctant to ask for donations. If you are not asking for gifts, you are probably receiving far less than your potential.
Failing to do your homework. Many charitable organizations fail [...]

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Guidelines for evaluating fundraising costs

Fundraising is a process that has many components, and investments must be made to complete the process. Individual components of the fundraising process should be evaluated as part of a total development program, and boards of directors of nonprofit organizations should determine a reasonable rate of return on investment for their own organization based on [...]

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Five steps to a grassroots fundraising plan

Develop an income and expense budget.
Determine the total amount of money to be raised.
Set income goals for government, foundations, corporations, and individuals.
Decide how many donors you need to meet your goals and select the best strategies.
Develop action steps, put the plan onto a timeline, and implement.

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