All Articles

Listed below are all the articles published on Raise-Funds.com. Some are short, some long, and a few are long enough to have been divided into chapters. This is a large list. To aid your exploration, the articles have been categorized by content in an index at the top left of this page. Raise-Funds contains more than 100 articles and an equally large number of worksheets, forms, and other downloadable resources.

Do Not Ignore Nonprofit Basics

I recently saw a LinkedIn posting searching for a marketing director for a nonprofit with national and international ambitions headquartered in my geographic area. I usually check out such job postings as possible indicators of the direction nonprofits may be moving...

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We Call It Development
But What Is It Really

When setting up a new development shop or restructuring an existing  one, the last thing you should be worrying about is—well—development! The modern development department succeeds not because an organization has had an epiphany about the need to raise money, but...

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Building a Small-Gifts Campaign Landing Page

Website pages are an important part of any fundraising campaign. When the fundraising effort is made online only, the online campaign landing page (OCLP) can be the difference maker. It can speed or impede the giving process. As things stand now all online fundraising...

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Single Women Fundraising Sweet Spot

Nonprofits should reach out and develop a base of support among single women, and a social-media strategy should be an important part of that effort. The evidence for both the importance of unmarried women as donors and social media as a key way to interact with them...

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How Large Should A Development Staff Be?

The core of the question, in any of those settings, is a search for an "ideal" or industry standard. Such an animal doesn't exist. There are just too many variables for an across-the-board approach to organizing a development office, especially in terms of how many...

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Use of Social Networking Sites on the Rise

If you are managing a nonprofit or some aspect of a nonprofit’s fundraising and have not yet found yourself faced with the question of what to do about online social network participation, you will be—and more likely sooner rather than later. Year after...

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Can One Non-Profit Donate Money To Another?

I was asked if one 501(c)(3) non-profit can give money to another 501(c)(3) charity. With the usual, and necessary, caveat of, “I am not attorney, nor am I giving legal advice,” I responded that, Yes, when the transaction advances the donor non-profit's charitable...

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Micro Gifts & Impulse Giving Online

How the Smallest of Gifts Combined with the Impulse to Give Can Yield Real Results Nobel-Peace-Prize-winner Muhammad Yunnus founder of the Grameen Bank Micro-giving is most often thought of as the charitable donation of small increments of money from individual donors...

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Membership Campaigns: The “How-To”

You want to introduce a membership campaign, preferably as part of the Annual Fund Campaign. Your objective is an expanded and reliable base of donors who renew their support year after year. Good thinking. Give yourself a pat on the back: An effective membership...

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Finance vs. Development?

Mixing Oil and Water and Making it Work in a Non-Profit Organization The receiving and the handling of donations made to non-profit organizations are simple to do, but very often poorly done. When that happens, a vital block is taken out of the foundation we strive to...

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Pro Bono Services for Your Organization

Pro Bono: "Especially for the Public Good" (Merriam-Webster) The dictionary definition of pro bono fits well with non-profit organizations, which themselves are also for "the public good," according to the IRS description of how they must be created and operated. And...

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Development Director Job Interview Questionnaire

Introduction The interview form presented below is designed to elicit as much pertinent information as possible and as desired or required in the most advanced of interviews. However, for the vast majority of non-profit organizations, it is meant to be a guide to the...

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Debt-Elimination Fund-Raising Campaigns

How can your organization raise the money it needs to pay off: Money borrowed from a lending institution? Unpaid invoices from vendors, suppliers, and contractors for the purchase of a capital asset? Money allocated from other of the organization’s resources/assets?...

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Solicitation of Vendors

A non-profit organization's intention to solicit its vendors for cash contributions in support of its general operating campaign or a capital building or renovation project has a number of unique twists and turns which must be considered in detail before asking for...

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Donor Surveys

What Do You Know About Your Donors and What Do They Know About Your Organization? If we're going to ask people for money, it sure helps if they think highly of both our organization and its mission. Do they see our mission as vital and valid? Are we perceived as being...

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A Campaign Deferred Is a Campaign Defeated

Disasters and crises can occur anywhere, at any time. Hopefully they won't have the impact of mega-disasters such as the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks or of 2005's hurricane Katrina. However, even disasters of considerably less magnitude can impede the...

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What’s a Good Director of Development Worth?

Non-profits with resources sufficient to engage professionals in key staff positions seem to find it relatively easy to determine salaries for heads of marketing, finance, and human resources, among others. Development directors however are another story. Why is that?...

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Develop Your Fund-Raising Plan
with Consensus

Introduction Are you working on a fund-raising plan—or planning to? When seeking to construct a plan for a fund-raising campaign, the persons charged by their non-profit organizations with that responsibility often ask for a plan "boilerplate," or a "template,"...

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In the Beginning

All fund-raising campaigns must begin with a realization that the organization needs money, usually voiced to the person charged with fund-raising as, "We need to raise $________." The amount varies, but once accepted it becomes the Goal. Whether the effort is to be...

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Major Gifts Campaign Checklist

A successful Major Gifts fund-raising campaign is not magic. It is a straightforward, concise process of executing well-defined components arranged in a step-by-step progression. I know this to be so because I have seen it done over and over again—starting at A and...

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Nonprofit Fund-Raising Demystified

When it comes to fund-raising, there are truths and myths. The truths illuminate the path to success. The myths speak with the dark voice of "conventional wisdom" of what can't be done and won't work. Throughout my career I have had to overcome three myths of...

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In Search of the Elusive Major Giver

What a Major Giver is How to find them What you need to have in place before conducting a Major Gifts Campaign Your organization needs money. Big money. The kind of money you can't raise by going out and asking for donations of $10, $20, $100, or perhaps even $1,000....

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Positioning Grant Writers For Success

Unrealistic Expectations, Pay Practices That Grantors Often See As Tainting The Funding Process, And Poor Planning And Follow Through, Can Doom The Best To Failure Some of the most heated discussion in the nonprofit world centers on grant writing. Why? Because so much...

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Fund-Raising with a Net: the Internet

The excitement surrounding Internet fund-raising and its hoped-for windfall of support for non-profits reminds me of when direct mail and telefunding were new to the fund-raising scene. However, Internet fund-raising is causing an even greater stir in the non-profit...

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Annual Campaigns: Once a Year Every Year

An annual campaign is best described as a campaign conducted each and every year for the purpose of raising money to assist in paying a non-profit organization's regular, ongoing expenses. The money it raises is most commonly used to offset an operational deficit, but...

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Know Your Organization

You start the process of becoming a fund-raiser for an organization when you first become involved with the organization. That's when you begin to acquire knowledge about an organization, and acquisition of knowledge is the first step in preparing to raise money. To...

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Capital Campaigns: Building for Now

A capital campaign raises money that will be spent to acquire or improve a physical asset. The most common use of a capital campaign is for the purchase, construction, or renovation of a building (commonly referred to as "bricks and mortar"). However, an organization...

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Setting an Endowment Campaign Goal

How do we begin to set a goal? You first set a "target" goal, based on what you must accept as very loose factors; those being the changing rates of interest (meaning changing amounts of future income), the sliding scale of actual endowment funds at work as the...

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How to Recruit Your Volunteer Fund-Raising Team

Volunteers are the lifeblood of a development operation, and trustees are the most important volunteers of all. The trustees approve an organization's budget and they must accept personal responsibility for raising called-for contributed income. They are expected to...

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Campaign Solicitation Kits

"For Want Of A Kit A Campaign Was Lost?" A little neglect may breed mischief: "For want of a nail, the shoe was lost; for want of a shoe, the horse was lost; for want of a horse, the rider was lost; for want of a rider, the battle was lost." B. Franklin: Poor...

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Tapping the Philanthropic Well

Principal Fund-Raising Myth It's common knowledge that corporations and foundations give most of the money to non-profit organizations Principal Fund-Raising Truth You go where money you think you can get is to be found in the greatest quantities and most of the time...

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Beginning a Career in Non-Profit Fund-Raising

"How Do I Get Started In Fund-Raising?" This question has been posed to me countless times in my nearly thirty-year career as a development professional. And, it is a query I now observe scores of times via the various internet non-profit-related News Groups. If this...

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Nine basic truths of fund-raising

The nine basic truths of fund-raising listed below are taken from the introduction to my book It's a Great Day to Fund-Raise, and they are the foundation of my successful career as a development officer for and consultant to nonprofit organizations. Organizations are...

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