How to you become an effective fundraiser?

[Step]

I might be entering a contest soon that involves fundraising for a charity, what are some things i can do to be effective? Please be specific

[robert m]

Have a look at some charity sites and see what they are doing - range from stuff you do yourself (baking cakes) to challenges (climb everest) - depends what might suit your fund raising activity and the time/money you can invest

[meliotrope]

Here are some things you can do.

What works best, better than anything else, is asking someone you know, for money, face to face. It has about a 50% chance of success. This is straight out of Kim Klein's fundraising book, Reliable Fundraising in Unreliable Times. Kim Klein is the founder of The Grassroots Fundraising Journal, in San Francisco.

If you can ask 20 adults you know, for money, face to face, $100 each, probably 1 out of 2 people will say yes. So that's $1,000.

Another way to fundraise is to ask someone you know for money, on the phone. That has about a 25% chance of success. that means you need to reach out to 4x as many people as you need to say yes. If you call 40 people, maybe 10 of them will say yes.

If you'd rather email or write a letter, that has a much, much lower rate of success. It's just not going to be possible for you to be effective if you only do that.

You can also start taking $10 per week and putting it in a jar and don't touch it.

Another idea is to go around to people's houses and ask them if they need yard work done, hedges trimmed, leaves raked, that sort of thing, Next week go around and ask if they need their cars washed. Next week go around and ask if they need their dogs walked.

Then I've got a list of 52 ways to fundraise. Maybe one of them will spark an idea for you.
http://www.wildwomanfundraising.com/52-w...-fundraise

And I've got tons of free articles about fundraising here: http://wildwomanfundraising.com

And I've written a book about fundraising as well, here: http://wildwomanfundraising.com/store.

Was this helpful?

Mazarine Treyz
Author of The Wild Woman's Guide to Fundraising

[ClickStart]

Let the power of the internet and your social media networks work for you.

Consider an online crowdfunding project on a site like ClickStartMe. There are several sites where, for a percentage of what you raise, you can use the power of crowdfunding to your advantage. You put your cause online, tell people on the site what you are trying to raise money for, then promote the fundraiser by sharing a link to the online crowdfunding fundraiser to all of your social media contacts. People go to the site, give $5 or $10 (or more!) through their credit cards in a secured transaction, and you get the money you need!

Crowdfunding is generally described as getting a lot of small donations from a large number of people. Using the power of social networks, it is easy to get a great fundraiser going through a crowdfunding site and raise money quickly without having to do car washes and bake sales and the other time consuming old fashioned ways of raising money.