By Birger Stamperdahl and Kalsang Y. Tashi, Give2Asia
The start of a new year for many is a time for making plans, setting goals and declaring resolutions. For those of us in the nonprofit world, it also is a time to assess the success of the past year and our efforts to move the needle on the social issues we care about. Perhaps this year more than most, our success and ability to meet future goals depends on effective fundraising.
With that in mind, we’ve taken a step back to consider some of the successful fundraising efforts that have been employed by the hundreds of organizations in Give2Asia’s network. These efforts range from simply putting up a donation button on a website to carrying out large gala events. Different strategies make sense depending on the organization, their resources, and their base of support.
Several groups this past fall were quite successful raising money. In fact, Q4 2008 was the busiest Q4 of any year we’ve had since our founding in 2001 – despite the economy. This success was based partly on the ability of our network to fundraise within their own communities, and we want to share a couple of examples of what groups did in 2008 to raise money. These are not examples of multi-million dollar fundraising efforts. However, they do stand out as good efforts and examples for how to make U.S. fundraising successful.
Both have these basic similarities:
- They appeal to a very specific, predefined audience
- Before the campaign, they leverage people within their target audience to lead the fundraising and build interest
- The fundraising itself helps to create ongoing ties within the donors’ community so that giving also has an immediate reward, in these examples there was either an event or a matching gift
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