Fundraising
Should Your Organization Sell Products & Services to Raise Money?
I am made increasingly aware of the conflict non-profit organizations experience when faced with choosing between: Raising the money they need using a traditional philanthropic process. Making a profit from selling and endorsing commercial products and services. The...
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...
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...
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...
Sponsorships and Underwriting Campaigns: Would You Please Fund Our…?
Sponsorships and underwriting are different labels for basically the same thing: funding donated for the support of a project, program, event, initiative, activity, or even a salary. In general, foundations are identified as underwriters and corporations as sponsors....
Fitting Annual, Endowment, Capital, Sponsorship & Underwriting Campaigns into Your Organization’s Plans and then Making Them “Sing”
Remember those great old movies with Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland? The ones in which the "kids" had a money-raising dilemma that perplexed and perplexed them. All of a sudden Mickey would light up with youthful exuberance and optimism. He'd turn to Judy, and say, "I...
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...