Rachel works under me as the Vision 100 Network Event Manager. She did some searching for new fundraising resources to help her think and plan for building our support base and stumbled across a great little book:
Ask Without Fear: A Simple Guide to Connecting Donors with What Matters Most. It's a great help to those working in ministry or any not for profit or organisation that needs to raise support. And it's a very quick read. Check it out.
Lots of the stuff he covered I'd learned before, but a couple of new things early on were helpful:
“It's important to strategize your campaign goal. One of the most powerful research tools is creating a 'gift table'. Gift tables help save your from 'to-raise-$100,000-we-just-need-to-get-$100-from-1000-people' thinking. Decades of fundraising research show that money doesn't come that way.”
He gives a couple of tips to be conscious of in planning a giving goals:
- You should aim for your first donation to be 10% of the total goal – so if you were raising $100 000, you'd need a $10 000 donation
- The top 50 gifts need to add up to 50% of the total goal.
- You will need to ask 4 people for every 1 donation. So if you need 10 people to give $1 000 then you will need to ask 40 people.
And then he links to an awesome online 'gift calculator' that maps this out for our target amount. Enjoy!
