Endowment Campaigns
Every nonprofit wants an endowment—the bigger the better. Endowment earns income that does not need to be raised each year. For a nonprofit, endowment is the equivalent of teaching a person how to fish.
Why then do so few nonprofit organizations have endowments capable of producing income of significant size in relationship to their annual budgets? Because hard pressed nonprofits find it hard to justify raising $10,000 today and then setting it aside to earn at best a few hundred dollars for this year’s needs.
In reality endowment campaigns are just as important as any other fundraising effort an organization can undertake. They bring in the support that can provide the stability needed to allow a nonprofit to concentrate on mission rather than survival.
Articles about Endowment & Endowment Campaigns
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....
How Much Endowment Is “Right” for Our Organizaton
Is there a "standard" or "industry" percentage ratio of our endowment funds—funds working to provide annual income—which can relate that corpus/principal amount to key financial statements such as the annual expense budget, operating deficit, annual fund campaign...
Making Your Endowment Funds Work for Your Organization
Whether you already have some form or endowment or are about to embark on your first endowment campaign (see the article Endowment Funds Go on Forever But an Endowment Campaign Should Not ) you need to be ready, willing, and able to steward your endowment funds and...
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...
Endowment Funds Go on Forever But an Endowment Campaign Should Not
There comes a time in an endowment campaign when the initial urgency of the need inherent in the campaign's case for support begins to fade. The excitement of the kickoff, anticipation of success as the personal solicitations begin, the first promising results—can go...
The Name Is the Game: Memberships and Named Gift Opportunities
In the nonprofit world, when it comes to "memberships," we seem to be of two minds. On the one hand are memberships that convey benefits in exchange for a fee, and on the other, those that recognize donors for gifts made. Fee-Based Memberships In fee-based...