Three Tips to Help Simplify Your Fundraising

If yours is like many other nonprofit organizations, there’s a good chance you don’t have the resources you’d like. Perhaps your budget is a little lower than you’d hoped and your support staff is non-existent, but yet you are tasked with creating a successful fundraising campaign.

Don’t worry! These three tips will help you simplify your startup fundraising.

1. Don’t Reinvent the Wheel: Use Readily Available Resources

Often the biggest challenge with a startup fundraising campaign is knowing where to start. This is where the planning comes in. Our suggestion to simplify your efforts is to use tools that are already available online. Look for “how-to” planning articles that walk you through step by step what you need to know: such as this how to plan a walk-a-thon guide. You can learn a lot of helpful tips such as: how to utilize your network for prospecting, how to solicit sponsorships for your fundraising event, or how to effectively market your event using social media. Scan the internet for fundraising templates. You can likely find a number of fundraising checklists, timelines, and even sample budgets to help you plan. See Fundraising Tips for more helpful planning hints.

2. Increase Efficiency with Fundraising Software

Today there are many fundraising software options available to help you be more efficient while planning and managing your fundraising campaign. Here are a few ways software can simplify the entire process:

• Develop an easy-to-create fundraising website: you’ll need a fundraising website to register participants and collect donations. Well, don’t hire a web developer to create one from scratch. You should easily be able to create your own custom fundraising website using a template. Just be sure the template allows for customization as you’ll want to make sure your fundraising website mirrors the branding of your organization. You should be able to choose design and color palette, upload images and logos, and more.
• Fundraising software should help administrators be more efficient in their management efforts. You can track progress of the campaign at any time by looking at registered participants, total donations, sponsorships and sales. You can also easily update information about the event, add sponsor details, upload a new video, sell fundraising merchandise, and much more all from one system.

3. Use Digital Marketing to Promote Your Campaign

Digital marketing has made marketers lives a lot simpler by creating new opportunities to develop awareness and drive traffic to your fundraising website. Take advantage of the digital marketing tools available to you. Send email blasts to your constituents. Be sure to include a live-link to easily direct people to your site, and include sharing widgets so people can easily spread the word to their social networks. Use fundraising widgets to post announcements about your fundraiser anywhere you have an online presence. And, of course the all important social media. Post announcements about your fundraising campaign on all channels. Use compelling images and stories. You’ll want to post things that people really want to share to help you gain access to new markets via viral sharing.