About the Course: 200 Fundraising Ideas to Help Your Non-Profit Raise More Money than Ever Before

Introduction

Welcome to 200 Fundraising Ideas to Help Your Non-Profit Raise More Money than Ever Before. I am so glad you will be joining me for this course as we take a look at new and innovative ideas to help your organization raise the money it needs to thrive.

Before we begin, I want to remind you that if you have any questions about what you are learning, or if you need to review a specific idea to see if it will work at your organization, you may email me at any time at [email protected] I would be happy to answer your questions and help you think through the ideas we present.

Also, remember that each course module will be present 20 ideas on a specific theme or tactic. Some of these ideas will work for your non-profit, and others won’t.

That’s ok!

Like a baseball player develops an eye for seeing what pitches will be strikes and which will be balls, going through all of these ideas can help you build your “eye” for fundraising ideas.

The important thing is that your non-profit continues to think outside the box and continues to try new ideas to grow your fundraising.

No non-profit can implement 200 new fundraising ideas in a year. Your goal should be to find one or two ideas from each module that might work well for your organization and excite you. Then you go and test each idea to see if it works.

Testing is essential for non-profit fundraising.

Whenever I work with a non-profit, I try to ensure that the organization is testing and quantifying its fundraising tactics. I encourage fundraisers to take a critical look at the return on investment they receive from each of their fundraising strategies, including how much time, money, and stress they are spending on each dollar raised.

Are you testing at your non-profit?

When non-profits start testing, they are often shocked to find that some tactics they thought were bringing in lots of money aren’t, at least not compared to the hours spent on those tactics. Likewise, you probably have a couple of fundraising strategies raising a ton of money compared to the hour or two per month you spend on them. You will never know until you test.

So, go ahead and look through the ideas we present each week… see which look promising. Then implement one or two of them at your organization, and test the results. If the idea works, great – you can invest more time and energy into it (and perhaps cut another tactic that isn’t working so well). On the other hand, if the idea doesn’t work, there’s no shame in cutting your losses and scrapping the idea – and then moving on to test something else.