The Extreme Fundraising Blog

Here’s an interesting philanthropy experiment: what happens when you give 100 people $100 dollars?

Some of them revolutionize their worlds. Check out the Chronicle of Philanthropy article here.

Cher Hersrud of the The Resource Center in Fargo, ND posted these ideas to the CharityChannel CharityTalk list. (Posted with her permission.)

A couple of examples of the non-event from North Dakota:

• a theatre sold tickets for a Dark Night - people tayed home, the theatre was closed - little time/money invested, pretty good return.
• a church held a non-rummage sale; inviting members to contribut $25, instead of the time and effort to donate “stuff.”  Very positively received.
• a phantom run was scheduled - and not held.  T-shirts were sold for the non-vent, which raised funds.  It can become an annual non-event with different shirts each year.

This is one of my favorite type of events - limited investment of funds and
volunteers.  Some, cannot easily become an annual event.

Another great tidbit in Jeffrey Fox’s “How to Become a Rainmaker”:

The Rainmaker always turns a customer objection into a mutual–customer/Rainmaker–objective.

Let’s say a donor says, “Gee, I’d love to make a $25,000 gift to the campaign but both my kids are in college right now.” A rainmaking fundraiser would restate that as, “So our objective is to schedule pledge payments that are smaller for you while your kids are in college, correct?”

Powerful, isn’t it? The tone is no longer adversarial, it’s now positive. Plus, the fundraiser can find out more information about the donor and how to best serve her. And, perhaps most importantly, you’re getting the donors agreement. Fox says “Rainmakers believe that objections are the way customers mask pleas for help and information.”

As I said in 5 Reasons to Love Objections (http://fundraisingcoach.com/blog/2006/05/16/5-reasons-to-like-objections/), objections show interest. So seek out objections. And see how they can become mutual objectives.

Amy Kincaid at Fundraising Breakthroughs just posted on a creative fundraising strategy.

At least they’re thinking out of the box! Would this work for you?

As much as you may try, ultimately, you may never know what really motivates a donor to give to you.

Check out what motivated this donor to give $6 million to the Los Angeles Opera at Jeff Brook’s Donor Power Blog.

It’s certainly not about the money. A trip from LAX to Berlin, booked tonight to leave tomorrow, will cost between $5500 and $1500!

Last time, we looked at a concept in the book How To Become A Rainmaker by Jefferey Fox.

In that book, he say’s the “Killer Sales Question #1″ is

Do you have your appointment calendar handy?

What a great question. According to Fox, this results in an appointment more than 90% of the time!

If you’re like me, you’re the only person in your nonprofit solely dedicated to fundraising. Even thought I love fundraising, I keep getting bogged down by the aspects of my job that I’m not good at, the things that don’t come naturally: event management, receipting, pledge reminders, the never ending details of direct mail, etc.

These activities are necessary but they don’t bring in money to the hospital. Asking does. Especially face-to-face.

Most of my development carrier has involved a national constituency. I’d fly to a place, easily set up appointments, and make the calls. But here, 98% of our donors live in the area. Setting up appointments with local folks is an entirely different beast.

When you’re flying in, you’re a novelty. People make room in their schedule. When they see you each week at Rotary, you’re a great guy, lot’s of fun, but not a novelty. It’s easy to let the discipline of face-to-face visits slide.

This summer I realized that, even though I know who my 100 top prospects are, I’m not seeing them. So I’ve set a goal of at least 2 face-to-face donor meetings a week. I have a standing Wednesday morning appointment with myself to book the visits for the following week. And I’ve asked a colleague to call me to see if I’ve done the visits and if I’ve set up next week’s.

And I’ll be asking this wonderful question:

Do you have your appointment calendar handy?

The lovely folks at Blackbaud have asked me to do two seminars.

If you’re coming to Conference for Nonprofits in South Carolina this October 22-25, you can find me doing “Creating Donor Evangelists” on Monday and “Asking For Money: Taking the Fear out of Face-to-Face Solicitations” on Wednesday!

Be sure to let me know if you’re coming. My email is marc@fundraisingcoach.com.