Lately I’ve been getting lots of questions about how individuals can fundraise for walkathon events and many other -athons: bike-a-thons, bowl-a-thons, etc.

So I wrote down some of the basic advice I was giving. When I finished, it was a 5-page article!!

Rather than post that long an entry here, I’ve put it in the Articles section. The link is:
How to Fundraise for Your Next Walkathon.

(c) Marc A. Pitman, FundraisingCoach.com

Learn how you can set up a brand new fundraising program, or re-tool your existing fundraising, to raise serious money for your cause. Purchase this full-day fundraising seminar you can download right to your desk and start learning today!

Other Possibly Related posts:

1. How to Fundraise for Your Next Walkathon
2. Fundraising warning: Don’t limit your fishing to the smallest pond
3. Fundraising Secret #44: Up your giving this year

I’m surprised by how many nonprofit professionals see “marketing” as a bad word, a practice that is somehow beneath them. If that’s your attitude, a new book called Guerrilla Marketing for Nonprofits will help you move beyond that and become excellent at communicating your message.

This book is packed with useful ideas, detailed strategies, and helpful tips from experienced professionals. The authors discuss crafting your message, defining your “product,” using traditional media, using new media like blogging…they even cover how to effectively use social media tools like Twitter and Facebook.

I’m thrilled that the authors also include great fundraising strategies in their coverage of marketing.

Guerrilla Marketing for Nonprofits clearly outlines ways to market your nonprofit and conduct effective fundraising initiatives. Best of all, you’ll be able to to easily implement them with relatively little cost.

Here are the chapters in the book:

1. What Nonprofits Need is Better Marketing
2. Getting to Know Nonprofit Guerrilla Marketing
3. The Guerrilla Marketer’s Personality
4. How to Turn Your Mission Statement into a Marketing Tool
5. Guerrillas Focus on People
6. Guerrillas Understand Their Marketplace
7. Mini-, Maxi-, and E-Media Weapons
8. Info-, Human-, and Non-Media Weapons
9. Attributes and Attitudes of Your Organization
10. Guerrilla Publicity
11. Guerrilla Marketing on the Web
12. Guerrilla Social Media
13. Niche Marketing Guerrilla Style
14. Meeting Needs While Changing Minds
15. Expressing Your Organization’s Unique Identity
16. Cultivating Winning Relationships for Your Nonprofit
17. Seven Golden Rules for Fundraising Success
18. Seven Platinum Rules for Recruiting Volunteers
19. Guerrilla Marketing Behavior Change
20. Launching and Maintaining Your Marketing Attack

The parts of the last chapter are indicative of the whole book:

• Write a Marketing Plan in Just Seven Sentences
• The 17 Secrets to Maintaining Your Marketing Attack
• How to Spy on Yourself and Improve Your Marketing

And that’s just one of the chapters! The subtitle of this book is “250 tactics to promote, recruit, motivate, and raise more money”. And I believe them.

Read it yourself or buy a copy to give to your favorite cause.

I know it’s a book I’ll keep returning to!

(c) Marc A. Pitman, FundraisingCoach.com

Learn how you can set up a brand new fundraising program, or re-tool your existing fundraising, to raise serious money for your cause. Purchase this full-day fundraising seminar you can download right to your desk and start learning today!

Other Possibly Related posts:

1. 3 reasons social media is worth the effort for local nonprofits
2. Development and Social Media in a nutshell
3. Can Chase Learn from it’s Community Giving #fail?

As I mentioned in an earlier post, Ask Without Fear! was listed on Amazon.com two years ago.

Last week I asked for suggestions about songs that dealt with Research. Some of the answers were:

• “The Gambler” Kenny Rogers
• “Private Eyes are Watching you” Hall & Oates
• “If I had a milliion dollars” BNL
• “She Blinded Me with Science” Thomas Dolby
• “I always feel like somebody’s watching me” Rockwell
• The theme from “Jaws”
• “Money” Pink Floyd

So now lets’s work on the rest of the steps.

What songs would you suggest for:

• Step #2: Engage,
• Step #3: Ask, (including handling objections) and
• Step #4: Love

I’m thinking “R-E-S-P-E-C-T” would fit for “engage” and “Love Train” for “Love.” What about you?

Let’s have fun with this!

As with the first post, feel free to give suggestions by commenting on this blog post, tweeting me suggestions, blip-ing me suggestions, Facebooking suggestions, or email me suggestions to marc@fundraisingcoach.com!

(c) Marc A. Pitman, FundraisingCoach.com

Learn how you can set up a brand new fundraising program, or re-tool your existing fundraising, to raise serious money for your cause. Purchase this full-day fundraising seminar you can download right to your desk and start learning today!

Other Possibly Related posts:

1. “Ask Without Fear!” soundtrack contest: Research
2. How Funders are Changing the Game: Movie Mondays
3. Ask Without Fear! Special “Holiday Miracle” Bundle

Like so many others in the past few days, I read a great blog post on what twitter lists can say about your personal brand by Jay Baer.

He points out that Twitter lists give a unique insight in to what people think of you. As he says, these words they use help tell you “what you are, not what you wish you were.”

His friend created http://twitterlists.convinceandconvert.com to help reduce your lists to the words people use to describe you.

To make it more fun, he recommends you cut and past those words into Wordle.net. You may remember that exactly a year ago, I used Wordle to show if our appeals were donor-centered fundraising appeals or schpeal-centered. So it was fun to go back to Wordle to check this out.

A word of caution. If you use the converter, be sure to only cut and paste the words from the Twitter lists. When I did a “select all” it grabbed text from the web page. This made the word “remove” feature prominently in some of my early pictures. Not exactly flattering.

Why not carve some time out this week to read Jay’s great post. And then play around.

Two of the Wordles I made are here. Feel free to post links to your Wordles in the comments section!

Here’s my favorite:

(c) Marc A. Pitman, FundraisingCoach.com

Learn how you can set up a brand new fundraising program, or re-tool your existing fundraising, to raise serious money for your cause. Purchase this full-day fundraising seminar you can download right to your desk and start learning today!

Other Possibly Related posts:

1. Printed Donor Lists: To do or not to do?
2. Using Twitter and Facebook in your year-end fundraising letter strategy

This past week, I’ve been privileged to be on a couple panels introducing nonprofit organizations to social media tools like Twitter, Facebook, and Linked in. While I love these tools, I was quick to express that:

• They don’t replace all the good fundraising practices we’ve learned over the decades.
• “Social” media is just that, social. These facilitate and require dialogue, not merely broadcasting announcements.
• These tools take time: both to get familiar with and to keep going.

It’s been an intriguing experience. The attendees seem to get really excited about the potential of these tools. But I could see the shine fading as they remembered all the work already piling up on their desks.

I could easily see local nonprofits easily these tools off. After all, what good is it for our local homeless shelter if it garnered fans from Australia? How will they help me serve the people in my community?

Here are three reasons it might still be worth your while, even if your mission and donor base are very localized:

1. People have a tendency to equate large social media numbers with credibility.

   Though incredibly inaccurate, most people still think bigger is better. So building up a large base of Twitter followers or Facebook fans may make your nonprofit may seem even more credible in the eyes of your local donors.

2. We live in a highly mobile society.

   Here in Maine, we sometimes seem obsessed with the number of people moving away, especially young people. But often, people that move away, hold their old community near to their heart. And, in the case of Maine, people that move out of state probably have more disposable income to donate to causes they favor. Social media tools can help you cultivate new donors without expanding your travel budget.

3. Most importantly: people in your community are already on these tools!

   So what if people in Timbuktu are joining your fan page? Your board members are already on Facebook. And the lady you’ve been trying to get interested in your cause, the one that owns the business on the corner of Wabash & Lake is on Twitter. Why wouldn’t you seek people out where they already are?

Twitter, Facebook, Qik, and all the other websites with funky names aren’t the “silver bullet” to fix all your fundraising woes. But they are great tools helping us do what we’re supposed to be doing any way: building relationships!

If you’re haven’t chosen a tool, why not pick one today? If you choose Facebook or Twitter or LinkedIn, let me know. I’m at:
http://twitter.com/marcapitman
http://facebook.com/marcapitman
http://linkedin.com/in/marcapitman

And the FB fan pages are at
http://www.facebook.com/AskWithoutFear
http://www.facebook.com/FundraisingCoach.com

(c) Marc A. Pitman, FundraisingCoach.com

Learn how you can set up a brand new fundraising program, or re-tool your existing fundraising, to raise serious money for your cause. Purchase this full-day fundraising seminar you can download right to your desk and start learning today!

Other Possibly Related posts:

1. Development and Social Media in a nutshell
2. Getting Started with Social Media
3. Book Review: Guerrilla Market for Nonprofits

All week, I’ve been sharing the answers I’ve been giving to questions I’ve been getting on how to effectively use Twitter. The first two were on what I use to tweet and how to find interesting people to follow.

Today is the final installment: What are hashtags? (And why should I care?)

What are “hashtags”?

“Hashtags” are labels created with the # symbol. For example, #redsox or #pysch. You see, hashtags were developed by early Twitter users to simply organize related tweets.

Hashtags draw attention to a tweeted conversation. Conferences and seminars use them to both help organize tweets that happen during the event and to market their event to people who aren’t even there. For example, Blackbaud uses #bbcon for all their conferences.

This is invaluable. Apps like HootSuite’s search on a hashtag or word and make a continuously updated column of tweets. You can learn alot from these conferences without ever leaving your desk.

That’s why I love Tweetgrid. This is a wonderful, simple, clean website you can use to follow multiple hashtags at the same time. If you choose a 1×2 grid, you can follow learn from the #bbcon and the #redsox game at the same time!

Some of the more common hashtags are #followfriday and #charitytuesday. But there are many more.

In truth, hashtags aren’t really needed anymore. Twitter Search and other tools make it really easy to find words and topics without needing the #. Now when I search, I search on the term and the hashtag, like “#redsox OR Red Sox.”

Listen in on conversations in real-time

And this is one of the most powerful uses of Twitter. It allows you to listen in on what other people are saying about things important to you. Check out the official Skittles website. The “chatter” button goes directly to the page that shows all the Tweets about Skittles.

Nonprofits and businesses can use this to find out what people are really saying about them, their products, or the problems their products solve. They can see the real frustrations and the real joys. One very creative Comcast employee, Frank Eliason, seized on this and created @comcastcares. Now a team of people, this Twitter account monitors comments about Comcast and tries to help sort out problems as quickly as possible.

How could your organization use this? Today?

There, you have the answers to all three Twitter questions I’ve been getting most recently. I hope they prove helpful for you!

(c) Marc A. Pitman, FundraisingCoach.com

Learn how you can set up a brand new fundraising program, or re-tool your existing fundraising, to raise serious money for your cause. Purchase this full-day fundraising seminar you can download right to your desk and start learning today!

Other Possibly Related posts:

1. Twitter lists and branding according to Jay Baer and Wordle
2. Using Twitter and Facebook in your year-end fundraising letter strategy
3. I’m so grateful this TweetsGiving

One of the biggest jobs in we in development have is being “keepers of the lore.”

So often our organizations are so focused on the present–being the best they can at their mission–and the future–strategizing where they’re going and how they’ll get there–that they forget the past–the very people and events that brought they to where they currently are.

As fundraisers, that’s our job. We get to:

• remind the people in our organization of our unique history, and
• let our donors and the others outside our organization know that we remember, and are grateful for, those that went before us.

In other words, it’s our job to be the storytellers of our organization, almost like the bards of old.

Organizations don’t have a personality. People connect to organizations by the individuals that work for them.

Just think back to your own experience in high school or college. Do your memories consist of brick buildings with ivy growing on them? Or are you forever remembering the wonderful times you recited your school’s mission statement? Of course not! Your memories center on your favorite teachers and your circle of friends.

It’s the same with our organizations. People don’t relate to our mission statement, they relate to the people fleshing that mission out.

This is one of the amazing privileges of being a fundraiser! We get to engage people that have long history with our organization. We get to find them and learn of their involvement and their interests. Hear their stories.

They have wonderful stories!

And then we get to tell these stories over and over again to the people currently working with our organizations, both employees and donors. By this, we’re “keepers of the lore.”

These stories remind us and those we work with that our work is part of something far larger than ourselves. It’s amazing to watch people swell with pride as they are reminded of this. The stories of success cheer us with their celebration. The stories of hardships remind us that our organizations have successfully weathered hardship before.

This listening and retelling adds stability to our organizations. It creates an atmosphere of hope. It may not completely recession-proof your fundraising, but it’s far easier to raise money in an atmosphere of hope, than in one of scarcity!

And stability and hope are sorely needed in unstable times like those we’ve seen over the last few weeks. And will likely see for many months to come.

So embrace your role as a “keeper of the lore“! Go out and harvest stories. And share that harvest with the people that care about your organization!

(c) Marc A. Pitman, FundraisingCoach.com

Learn how you can set up a brand new fundraising program, or re-tool your existing fundraising, to raise serious money for your cause. Purchase this full-day fundraising seminar you can download right to your desk and start learning today!

Other Possibly Related posts:

1. Fundraising Secret #44: Up your giving this year

The Don’t Tell the Donor Blog had a chilling link to a New York Times article.

Here’s a quote from the article:

About 30 nonprofit agencies that held several accounts at Freedom, each with less than $100,000, lost money because the F.D.I.C. considers the multiple accounts of a single depositor as a single account. The Fort Greene Senior Citizens Council, for example, had 24 separate accounts totaling $316,000. The F.D.I.C. reimbursed $100,000, leaving the council with a deficit of $216,000. [emphasis added]

This isn’t meant to panic you. And I’m not a financial advisor, nor have I played one on TV.

But if you were told that your nonprofit would be FDIC insured with multiple accounts at the same bank, you may do well to check with your own financial advisors.

(c) Marc A. Pitman, FundraisingCoach.com

Learn how you can set up a brand new fundraising program, or re-tool your existing fundraising, to raise serious money for your cause. Purchase this full-day fundraising seminar you can download right to your desk and start learning today!

No related posts.

Most of my nonprofit executive coaching clients are surprised that so much of my “Ask Without Fear!” fundraising training is based on listening. I guess most of us fall into the trap of thinking that all we need to do is memorize a great schpeal, give it, and wait for the money to roll in.

It doesn’t work that way. (Which is good. It ensures we all have jobs!)

Chris Brogan just wrote a great post on listening using technology. Think of it as the Web 2.0 version of the Fred and George Weasly’s extendable ears.

Check it out at ChrisBrogan.com.

(c) Marc A. Pitman, FundraisingCoach.com

Learn how you can set up a brand new fundraising program, or re-tool your existing fundraising, to raise serious money for your cause. Purchase this full-day fundraising seminar you can download right to your desk and start learning today!

No related posts.

With Ground Hog Day right around the corner here in the US, I thought we’d learn Fundraising Secret #11 from the perspective of the classic movie Ground Hog Day:

Fundraising Secret #11: Don’t be a Ned

Does this sound like your fundraising efforts?

Ned: Phil? Phil Connors? Phil Connors, I thought that was you!

Phil: Hi, thanks for watching. [Starts to walk away]

Ned: Hey now, don’t you tell me you don’t remember me ’cause I sure as heckfire remember you.

Phil: Not a chance.

Ned: Ned… Ryerson. “Needlenose Ned”? “Ned the Head”? C’mon, buddy. Case Western High. I did the whistling belly-button trick at the high school talent show? Bing. Ned Ryerson, got the shingles real bad senior year, almost didn’t graduate? Bing, again. Ned Ryerson, I dated your sister Mary Pat a couple of times until you told me not to anymore? Well?

Phil: Ned Ryerson?

Ned: BING!

Phil: Bing.

Ned: Do you have life insurance, Phil? Because if you do, you could always use a little more, I mean, who couldn’t? But let me tell something – I got’s a feeling [whistles] you ain’t got any. Am I right or am I right or am I right? Right, right right.

I crack up every time I see this scene!

Phil is so completely self-absorbed and utterly uninterested in Ned, let alone what Ned’s selling. And Ned’s so completely absorbed with selling insurance, he’s not reading Phil’s very clear signs of indifference.

Please, don’t be a Ned.

Our donors have had it “up to here” with marketing and sales and promises from people that don’t care about them.

Learn to care.

Our donors, like us, are real people with real concerns about real lives. And your nonprofit isn’t at the center of their real lives. Nor should it be.

It’s our job to help get our organization on their radar screen. But rather than going after anyone that can fog a mirror, it’s more helpful for your fundraising efforts to figure out what type of person already gives to you.

• Men or women?
• WWII generation? Silent Generation? Boomer? Xer? Millenial?
• What draws them to your mission?
• How are they first introduced to your organization?

I’d venture to guess it’s not by accosting them on the street in the middle of a cold February day. (Or on the phone. Or in the mail.)

So as you start this new year, commit to taking the time to do the hard research to get to know your current donors. And commit to engaging with donors and donor prospects to get to know them, and to let them get to know you, before you ask.

And whatever you do, please, don’t be a Ned!

(c) Marc A. Pitman, FundraisingCoach.com

Learn how you can set up a brand new fundraising program, or re-tool your existing fundraising, to raise serious money for your cause. Purchase this full-day fundraising seminar you can download right to your desk and start learning today!

Other Possibly Related posts:

1. Fundraising Secret #44: Up your giving this year