Fundraising the SMART Way:
Predictable, Consistent Income Growth for Your Charity + Website
Strategic planning and tactical fundraising can maximise income and minimise costs.
Fundraising is the lifeblood of the nonprofit, and, successful or otherwise, determines the organisation’s ability to provide for the group it serves. Every organisation attempts to lower overhead while increasing donations, but this often proves to be impossible within existing frameworks. Effective fundraising – increasing donations while engaging more donors and lowering costs – requires a sound strategy that turns major roadblocks into minor hurdles that are easily overcome. It’s not about trying harder, it’s about working smarter.
Fundraising the SMART Way provides the groundwork for a complete revamp of organisational fundraising systems. Author Ellen Bristol applies twenty years of corporate sales experience and eighteen years in fund development consultation to the problem of inefficient fundraising. Bristol turns her extensive sales expertise toward the perspective of “selling” an organization to potential donors, increasing the donor pool, and lowering the cost of fundraising.
Bristol presents two critical components:
- The Ideal-Funder Profile: a benchmark for each category of funder (donor, grant maker, corporate giver) that lists factual, quantitative characteristics of your ideal funder; qualitative or values-based characteristics; and the danger signs that suggest that some donors, assuming you were to win them over, may cost more than they are worth. A complex benchmark of this nature provides clear guidelines about which donors justify the most investment of time and effort, and which do not. In the SMART Way™ model, we call such profiles Scorecards.
- The Donor Moves: milestones that locate the gift/grant opportunity in the pipeline based on the donor’s giving process, rather than your team’s getting process. Virtually all gifts and grants evolve through a short, predictable, unvarying series of milestones that provide effective performance indicators, both leading and trailing.
The book details the questions every nonprofit should be asking to maximise the effectiveness of fundraising efforts, and encourages systematic strategy development by zeroing in on key factors such as:
- Organizational goals, strengths, and weaknesses
- Donor actions and motivations
- Workload management and results QA
- Opportunity evaluation and organisational action
The book outlines clear, concrete, actionable steps that can be immediately implemented to escalate income growth. Effective fundraising is sustainable, consistent, and on-target. It must exceed current need and expand to fill future need. Fundraising the SMART Way represents a true breakthrough in that it lays a foundation for true systemic overhaul, and can be the catalyst for the growth of any nonprofit.
Published in The AFP/Wiley Fund Development Series.
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