Do you have so much to do for your capital campaign, with so little time? Think about including your most zealous volunteers in your fundraising program, according to Michael J. David-Wilson, executive director for the Middlesex County College Foundation in Edison, N.J. Why not use your best supporters to cultivate other organization members?

David-Wilson presented his ideas in a session at the 46th annual Association of Fundraising Professionals (AFP) international fundraising conference in New Orleans. Here’s how to turn your volunteers into development participants:

• Volunteer participation. Volunteers can be a great addition to your fundraising team. Just make sure if they are asking others for gifts, they make one of their own.

• Major gift donations. Try to tackle big gifts early. Use your own board’s participation as examples of campaign giving.

• Volunteer training. Ensure that your volunteer solicitors are properly trained before they ask for gifts. Team your professional fundraisers with volunteers for some role-playing in donation asks.

• Give information. Compile important donor information for your fundraising team. Set up a gift amount to ask for and what that gift amount would do for the campaign.

• Set up success. Everyone needs a boost of confidence. Arrange some telephone solicitations for your volunteers with donors most likely to give. That will put your volunteers on the right foot for in-person asks.

• Provide backup. Volunteers don’t normally ask donors for gifts – so they may lose their confidence at the meeting. Couple volunteers with a professional development staff member who can move in if the volunteer gets too nervous.

• Celebrate successes. Make volunteer solicitors excited about their hard work. Think about building some friendly competition among volunteers by tracking donor visits or the amount raised.

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Very typical is the agency that has received a large grant to run their programs for one year. Then, in the tenth month of the grant period, comes the realization that they have no idea how they will fund the next year’s programs. With less than two months of money left in the bank they go into emergency fundraising mode.

Their first impulse is to start applying for another large grant. But at most foundations, the process – from letter of inquiry to proposal to acceptance – typically takes at least three months, and often six to eight months.

Their next idea is to turn to their individual donors with a panicked letter that essentially says, “Send us money now or we might go out of business.” That, of course, is the least effective fundraising letter you can write. Donors want to invest in your successes, not bail out your failures.

So, how do they avoid these situations? The answer is to plan. Through the planning process, you will achieve the following:

• Limit crisis fundraising: This, as the example above illustrates, is our primary reason for creating a fund development plan, but there are others as well…

• Diversity builds in flexibility: Changes in other sectors of the economy can have a major impact on nonprofit funding. A cut in the state budget can be passed down as fewer contracts for local service organizations. The dot-com bust of a few years back cut foundation endowments, reducing the funds they had available to grant. Agencies that had become comfortable relying on one or two sources of funding found themselves struggling to survive these changes. Those with plans and diversified funding bases had the flexibility to adapt and survive.

• Planning for diversity brings in more opportunities: Through the planning process you come to identify funding opportunities you never knew existed. Further, when you stop having to scramble to pay next month’s bills, you will be able to devote more time to developing new sources of income for your agency.

• Setting priorities, strategies, and goals: New opportunities present themselves all the time, if you are open to receiving them. But which opportunities should you pursue? When you have a clear mission and a plan, the answer becomes clear. By following the plan, you know where your efforts are most needed at any given time, and you can turn down distractions that don’t further your defined goals.

• Increasing board involvement: I always hear nonprofit staff complaining about either their un-involved board members or board members who meddle too much without knowing what they’re doing, and yet they don’t create opportunities for the board to be constructively involved. Asking your board to be a part of the development planning process will both motivate them and educate them at the same time.

• Integrating fund development with other program activities & plans: If you’re lucky enough to have staff who work on fund development full-time, you’re also risking a disconnect between program people and fundraisers. The result is an annual event that’s held the same week as the busiest part of the program staff’s season. Written plans that are shared by all staff help to avoid such conflicts and encourage a working team environment.

• Most productive use of team’s time: The bottom line is that by being organized, and having clarity as to what is expected of every team member, all your activities will be more efficient.

So what’s holding you back? Put your team together and start planning for success today!

About the Author

Ken Goldstein is a grant writer and consultant working and living in Silicon Valley. Since 1989 he has been an executive director, a board member, volunteer, and consultant to nonprofits. His education includes a BA in Politics from UC Santa Cruz and a Master of Public Policy and Administration from CSU Sacramento. Goldstein Consulting can be found at goldsteinconsulting.com. Ken is also the author of “Introduction to Fund Development Planning” – Please see fundraisingplanbook.com for more information.

(c) 2006 by Ken Goldstein, all rights reserved.

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• publicity
• public education
• fundraising
• volunteer recruitment
• service delivery
• advocacy
• research
• communication

Let us look at brief examples of each of these uses in turn.

Publicity

Good sites gain attention. Attention or awareness is exactly what all non-profits need… it accelerates fund-raising efforts, and enhances all the following essential needs:

Public Education

There’s a fine line between grabbing the public’s attention and educating the public about an important social problem or cause.Whatever the mission statement of your non-profit organization is, it needs to be presented with clarity to the various “publics” that all non-profits must influence if they are to be successful. All organizations have several different “publics” which they must influence in a positive way in order to achieve their organizational goals.

Some of these “publics” are:

• centers of influence
• community organizations
• government officials and departments
• other non-profits
• volunteers
• donors
• etc. etc.

A properly constructed and strategized website can reach all of these “publics” cost effectively and with immediate ‘calls-to-action’.

Fundraising

Large sums of money are now changing hands over the Internet. One early barrier to online fund raising was the perceived insecurity surrounding online financial transactions. With dramatic improvements in online secure data transmission, this is no longer an issue. Now there are multiple ways for donors to make direct donations without worrying. Several companies offer secure methods for performing online financial transactions. PayPal and Amazon now provide free mechanisms for the proper transmission of credit card donations to non-profits… eliminating the need for the non-profit to own and manage their own credit card merchant account… and saving the organization on transaction fees.

Another advantage of online credit card donations is that they are usually for larger amounts… and given more often during the year.

The biggest single benefit of a well crafted non-profit web site is the fact that you are now opening up the entire online world… almost a billion users (and growing) worldwide… to your organizations needs and goals. It is not unusual for organizations to recieve substantial donations from complete strangers living in foreign countries. These folks will have found you on the world-wide-web, feel an affinity to your goals… and donate money using your online form and their credit card.  Building a donor database allows the organization to “go back to the well” seeking additional donations for specific projects, needs, or general support.

Volunteer Recruitment

Volunteer recruitment and management is a well developed and proven use of the Internet. The Internet allows for a new and powerful way for people to support nonprofits by becoming virtual volunteers. Virtual volunteers have more control over their time and the ease of working from home because they take advantage of the convenience of online communication. All the factors that motivated volunteers face-to-face still operate forcefully over the Internet. A spirit of community and personal relationships thrive abundantly in cyberspace. Of course, many nonprofits have effectively used their web presence for recruiting volunteers that show up on their premises. Recognizing volunteers… a vital component of developing a strong volunteer is made simple and easy through a web site.

Service Delivery

Our economy is increasingly based on the timely exchange of information, All successful non-profits must deliver the right information to the right person, at the right time.

A web site is a powerful way to deliver services for those organizations in the business of providing people with information. Since this includes almost all non-profits, the need and benefits of a website accessable 24-hours a day, seven days a week, become obvious.

Advocacy

To mobilize people around an issue, an organization must get the word out quickly and provide people with convenient tools for responding. Because it’s so easy to update a web site and have the vital details available instantaneously, the web is a perfect way to encourage people to act on issues that greatly concern them. Timely action alerts can be sent via email to various organization maintained data bases …instantly. It’s easy to respond to a call for action when one can email one’s legislative representatives or link to other volunteer bulletin boards on the Internet. Cross linking with other like-minded organizations provides a “synergy of action” that would be impossible with a well crafted web presence.

Research

Research may take many forms. An organization may wish to keep up with legal, political, scientific or other mission related developments. Alternatively, it may wish to learn about grant getting opportunities.

Two excellent starting points for almost any kind of searching are Google and Yahoo. Probably the best directory devoted entirely to nonprofit organizations on the web is the Action Without Border’s web site. This includes a page of foundations and links offering grant opportunities. Cross linking with these organizations provides a wonderful networking opportunity and usually leads to additional opportunities for all the linked organizations.

Communication

It would be hard to overemphasize the advantages, cost savings, or numerous virtues of email. Email offers the best of the phone and the mail. It is as fast and as reliable as the phone, while compensating for the frailties of human memory by preserving a written record, as does the mail. Further, email allows for asynchronous communication, meaning that one can read one’s email on one’s own time, rather than having to play telephone tag. Of course, it also encourages clarity of expression by remaining a form of *written* communication.

Web sites facilitate email correspondence when they make publicly available the email addresses of organization staff. Sites can offer options which make sending a message as convenient as filling out a form. They can also invoke an email mailer on many browsers when the visitor to a site clicks on the right button.

If you are worried about getting too much email, more than you have time to answer, consider discarding any mail delivered by the US Postal Service and using the time you save to answer the few email messages you are lucky enough to receive. They will likely be more valuable, more interesting and you will be able to respond to them more quickly with better results than most of your incoming “snail mail”.

In summation… the strong benefits enjoyed by all non-profit organizations, from the development of a custom website, are many and varied. A strong web presence provides a solid economic basis for additional revenues (donations), cost savings, and enhanced services to members, volunteers, and the public at large. Since most non-profits are understaffed… the dramatic labor savings and management efficiencies gained with a comprehensive web site can mean the difference between success or failure… growth or survival!

About the Author

Thom Reece is the CEO of On-Line Marketing Group, a direct response marketing agency with headquarters in Hawaii. He is the creator of the Online Marketing Resource Center & the major portal for the network marketing industry- MaxxMLM.com . Thom can be reached by email at: thom@e-comprofits.com.

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