If you're like most nonprofits, your team is gearing up for the year-end fundraising push! With economic uncertainty, we know many donors will be a little more conservative with their year end gifts, but thankfully, there is a long list of alternatives to cash giving that your donors may not even know about.

If you’re like most fundraisers, you quickly realize that events are a LOT of time and work. When you look at time spent and event expenses, a majority of events don’t yield enough revenue to make much of an impact at all.

I want to let you in on a little secret – minimizing the number of fundraiser events you host will not only free up precious time for you to do other tasks, but it will actually enable you to build a robust fundraising program that yields the financial results needed to make a much bigger impact.

If you ask Oxford...

Philanthropy is the desire to promote the welfare of others, expressed especially by the generous donation of money to good cases

So...just the desire to help others? And does it HAVE to be to good causes? What if the donor gives only for personal recognition and prestige? Does that make what they are doing not philanthropy? Hard to say.

Remember that they are likely already giving - Giving to charitable causes feels good. Very good. In fact, so good that a majority of Americans do it every year regardless of income level. Six out of ten (or 60%) of American households participate in some sort of charitable giving annually, and giving continues to increase every year despite the pandemic. So don’t think in terms of “Will you give?” but rather “Will you give to my charity over the other charities in town?”.

In the nonprofit world, a Feasibility Study is a detailed analysis for a proposed project or fundraising campaign to determine how much can be raised in donations, what initiatives a donor base would support, and who to solicit for gifts to support the project.

With the 2020 pandemic, healthcare was top of mind for every community across the country, and in-kind donations were at an all time high, topping $170,000,000 nationally, but even though charitable giving has grown over the last few years (even through the pandemic) healthcare philanthropy has seen much smaller jump in cash donations, when compared to the 10 other top charity subsectors.

When hiring a fundraising firm, you’re doing just that, hiring additional fundraising FTE’s to help you bring philanthropic revenue through the door. If you wouldn’t hire each person that will be working with your team actually onto your team, don’t hire them as your fundraising firm.

With not enough time to do everything, or at least not enough time to do everything well, we can take lessons from our top earning nonprofit clients, along with national data to show where fundraising staff should be spending their time every October.

Chances are if you’re a small shop, you’re an overworked and potentially understaffed shop, or you’re a shop looking to expand your philanthropic outreach to prospects, the answer is…YES.

If you are new to cryptocurrency or fundraising (or both!) and need to go from little to no knowledge to being fully up to speed in 2022 on how they intersect, this is the free guide for you! We’ll explain everything you need to know in terms people can actually understand.

You should customize each presentation based on each prospect’s values and what you have learned is important to them. Never do cookie cutter presentations or your prospect will never feel like their desires are understood.

Set a fundraising goal – Be specific with what you are trying to accomplish. Focus on the dollars needed and set specific, measurable goals so that you can inspire action and track financial growth and results.

If a donor has to dig through your site to figure out what it is your charity does for the community or even the world, they are instantly hesitant to support you financially. If first impressions are everything, yours must be clear in the first 3 seconds of viewing the site.

Do you have the bandwidth to figure out all of the who, what, when, where, why and how you need for a successful campaign? Or, would it be better to have someone with experience help you with the roadmap for success…

Marketing your cause to the masses can often feel like shouting into the void, but marketing your cause to your constituency and those who already know what you do is extremely purposeful.

“Respect for the CFRE credential is highly prized in my city, also, there are more jobs in fundraising than people to fill them. Nonprofits are compensating competitively due to this.”

The first thing to keep in mind is, that in 9 of out 10 cases, raising money was not mentioned when the board was recruited. They agreed to serve on their own time with no pay to help their community, and when your predecessor had the conversation, philanthropy was not part of it.

For nonprofits, the key is not to try to shift from cash giving to crypto giving, but to simply add accepting crypto to the fundraiser tool belt. Donors looking to give away tens of thousands of dollars this year…

Discovering and evaluating prospective donors, and their interests, relationships, inclination to give, and philanthropic capacity to support an organization’s fundraising efforts.

Inevitably someone is tasked with being a first-time “fundraiser”, and with no experience or idea where to start, searches on Google some variation of “Fundraising Ideas” only to find pages and pages of blogs/articles that say “Easy fundraising ideas!” “Cheap fundraising ideas” “The 70 best fundraising ideas for nonprofits!”