You know your mission. Your raison d’etre. The core of what you do. (At least I hope you do). But hiding in plain sight are a bunch of shining, inspiring, hopeful visions. Not just the practical day-to-day work, but your hopes for what you’ll achieve if your wildest dreams come to fruition. Big donors, and…
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If a monthly giving program is not one of your key strategic annual fundraising strategies, this is the year you should add it to your development work plan.
Why?
It’s your secret to being sustainable, short-and long-term. Because recurring donors give more and stay more loyal over time.
These donors can become a reliable source of predictable annual revenue that minimizes stress and uncertainty.
This is something you should seriously consider, don’t you think?
And it’s really not rocket science. It’s something you can and should do. And I’m about to give you a step-by-step process to help you maximize your annual contribution revenues.
Should you have any doubt that this will yield impressive results, take a look at
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Philanthropy should not just be about big checks.
Last week I shared some reasons not to eschew small gift fundraising. Today I’m following up with some tips for building and mobilizing your community to find, sustain and grow these gifts.
This is important, because a donor’s first gift is seldom their largest. It’s a starting point.
The majority of your gifts will be small, but the majority of your income will come from a small group of major donors.
You have to grow this cadre of loyal, passionate philanthropists by building relationships with supporters over time.
The lion’s share of major gifts come from previously small gift donors.
A client I’m working with told me 50% of their major donors began with very small gifts. How about tracking this for your organization? Sure, some major donors come in at the top. But I’ll bet you a majority start by dipping their toe in the water. How can you get folks more fully immersed?
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Did I ever tell you about the fortuitous happenstance that taught me about the power of small gift fundraising? A few years ago I went to research something online. Not surprisingly, I ended up viewing the first entry Google gave me – which was on Wikipedia.
As luck would have it, and to my delight, I ran into an awesome fundraising campaign. [This is an occupational hazard with fundraisers. We actually like and admire things like pledge breaks when they’re done well!]
Here’s what I found superimposed at the top of the screen:
DEAR WIKIPEDIA READERS: To protect our independence, we’ll never run ads. We take no government funds. We survive on donations averaging about $15. Now is the time we ask. If everyone reading this right now gave $3, our fundraiser would be done within an hour. We’re a small non-profit with costs of a top 5 website: servers, staff and programs. If Wikipedia is useful to you, take one minute to keep it online and ad-free another year. Please help us forget fundraising and get back to Wikipedia. Thank you.
I was then given the option to make a one-time gift of $3, $5, $30 or $50, or a monthly gift of $10, $20, $100 or other.
The Wikipedia campaign serves as a great reminder. Even though many nonprofits survive by the grace of 3% of their donors providing 97% of their contributed income (or something closer to the 80/20 rule) there are indeed nonprofits that are exceptions to this rule
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