FAQs about fundraising

How can our work create engagement, attract relationships, grow the number of people that support us. I also have been reluctant to give specifics since everyone’s situation is different. There is not a recipe that works for all. So, here is an attempt to share 10 ideas that may be helpful at jogging creativity and entrepreneurial bravery for you.

• Pray for people you do not know but would like to know. Pray for your community (local, regional, global)
• ⁠Create a monthly meeting to pray. Invite the community (in-person, online, etc.)
• Create an action team. “Hey, will you join our action team. Members meet 4x a year, hear what’s happening, they pray for us, encourage us. Not a committee, not a board, an action team. Add 5 people. Grow to 10. Grow to 50. Meet in person once a year
• Let’s say you help trafficked women in Uganda and you know a lot about international human trafficking. I don’t know very much about Ugandan culture or human trafficking. You know a lot. You may be an authority in many ways. How can you teach this to us? 2 minute videos, podcast, book, seminar event online to attend.
• Make a list of 50 people you would like to support you. (But how can I list 50 people that I do not know?) well you have to start. Pray, inquire and search. But become interested about discovering people you do not know but would like to, and then seek ways to have lunch, coffee, or any other type of interaction you can. Not to ask them for money right away, but to hear their story and learn what they are passionate about, doing to serve the kingdom, struggling with etc.
• Experiment with fun community events (not a big banquet featuring your org). What about a barbecue outside on a nice evening to meet new people. Pleasant food and everyone introduced themselves. Or a series of small coffee and desserts with people. Main idea, is where some gather we can create the focus on people getting to know each other not to focus on the organisation and the need for resources. Take 5 minutes to share a little about the work but it is not the focus.
• Create a spectacle type of event that creates content for social media and an invitation to join: 1. A week where the staff prayer walks 5 km a day. “We are walking as a staff and asking you to join for teens meeting Jesus in South Africa, etc.” 2. We are climbing Kilimanjaro, local mountain. 3. A 5k event. 4. Infinite possibilities – experiment, focus on events being fun and creating awareness and content
• Conduct a community or regional survey. Call everyone, knock on doors and ask questions, put the answers together and share the results. Let’s say you are running a ministry that creates youth meetings for teens where they learn about Jesus and grow spiritually. We have 5-10 questions in the survey. We asked 100 supporters and here is what they said. We asked 100 people in the neighborhoods where we work (and by they way, they may not have known who we are or what we are doing) and here is what they said. You may learn how to improve some things, meet more people, and hear what people value and want. The answers also generate a lot of content to share on social media and in newsletters.
• Create a way volunteers can activate your fundraising. Compassion is a good example. They developed Compassion Sunday. Any lightly directed volunteer around the world can accept the challenge to have Compassion Sunday at their church. The volunteer receives a packet of instructions and materials from compassion. The volunteer then coordinates with their church to get five minutes in their churches agenda on any Sunday then, for that Sunday, that’s been designated a video is played, and it is announced that the goal is to find three people in the congregation that would support three kids that would be a win for the church and for three kids, it’s a simple idea. Probably takes a lot of coordination to make it happen but you can see how it scales, compassions fundraising and that anybody around the world on any Sunday can be an advocate for raising money for compassion. Maybe there’s a way that your organisation can activate volunteers in a similar, but different kind of way?

10. Figure out how the stories of your current donors, in an authentic and not awkward way, can be a story you share for others to follow. Let’s say you have a donor who is a true champion of your organisation and is willing to talk about why they love your organisation. That’s much more powerful in some ways than you convincing people that what you’re doing is great.

How did the supporters I do have come to support us? Identifying what we individually are doing and what the mission as a whole is doing that generates new relationships is a helpful exercise because it may lead to things that can bring replicated? It might also identify the fact that the truth is I really do not have new donors, we are not doing anything that has interested people to get involved in a fresh way in several years.

What are creative ways we can experiment to create more engagement, interest, friendship and encouragement?

Do donors have anything else to do other than give? Am I creating ways that people can get truly involved?

In non profits we are often experts at understanding the problem and solutions for a serious need. Maybe becoming that expert and reporting it gives a voice to new people. Our fundraising often devolves into just asking people to give. How can we amp up inspiring and educating. Encouraging other people that care about what we do to make it a part of their own missions.

Identify people you would like to meet and pursue them. As you say, in person is hard to beat. I always use a top 10 list every month. One thing on my top 10 every month is answering these questions, who would I like to meet and how can I get in touch with them to see if they will have a cup of coffee with me? The focus of always trying to meet new people is helpful for me. When it happens (and it sometimes fails) and I actually figure out how to get together, I usually just ask to hear their story, what things are they excited about and what things are they doing to serve Jesus. Over time this kind of works. Sometimes, by just knowing many people, they talk and it serves as a referral or a stamp of approval among community peers. It can create momentum and people come looking for you at times as opposed to it just being chasing.

I have asked this so many times and in my experience working with several mission sending organisations, I find that missionaries (or anyone raising personal support for the work they do) tend to have a couple of things that hold them back.

1. Fundraising is a distraction from the real ministry.

2. The job isn’t fund-raising.

In the places where I have been able to have a role in preparing, training, and encouraging these wonderful workers, I have always leaned hard towards changing these mindsets, creating ongoing training and sharing stories of their peers doing things very well.

1. Donor work is ministry.

2. It is the job.

What is the community your are representing and how do you pull that community together. Missionaries do not often get let go for bad performance like you would at a company but the lack of a supporting community is kind of like getting fired. It is the essential (social) entrepreneurial skill. What if your fellow missionaries relished and thrived in the work they do with their supporters. The ones that love it and see it as ministry usually do thrive.

This is a nice resource. An online giving calculator or a giving pyramid. I use this a lot to visualise how many people I probably need to approach in order to meet funding goals. Many times though, I will put my goal in the calculator and it will show me that my goal is higher than my current relationships will probably support. Which, means it’s time to get to work figuring out how to meet more people or how to encourage my organisation to do things that draw more people’s interest to getting engaged with us.

https://giftrangecalculator.com/