Where Fundraising Starts – a Story

Once there was a Fairy Princess, who longed for her Prince Charming. She pined away every day, wondering where she was going to find her dream prince. She spent a lot of time thinking about all the wonderful things they would do together. But where would she find him?

Suddenly one day, the Fairy Princess was startled by a frog that jumped up on her windowsill. “Ribbit! Ribbit!” said the frog. Translated, that means “Hi, I’m your Prince, but you have to rub me and touch the warts on my back first.”

At first, the Fairy Princess was put off, angry and upset that anything so ugly as a frog would jump up on her windowsill and make that awful croaking noise. But the longer he sat there, the more she got used to him, and finally, she put out her hand and touched him right on the back, and rubbed her finger over his warts. In a flash the frog turned into a charming Prince!

Fast forward to two months after the storybook wedding and the honeymoon. The Fairy Princess got to thinking that a lot of her friends were in the same predicament she had been in. They, too, were wondering where their Prince Charming was going to come from. Now she knew something they didn’t. So the Fairy Princess put together an informational charity, started an email newsletter and went out into the world gathering email addresses and funds to support her “Find-a-Prince” charity.

She was a busy little princess! She spoke at public gatherings. She advocated finding and rubbing frogs in public. She lobbied Congress and the State Senate to pass laws promoting human-frog dialogue. She went door-to-door asking neighbors to contribute to the Find-A-Prince charity. She told her story to teary-eyed audiences in churches and on college campuses.

And then the Fairy Princess really got down to business. She worked up a strategic plan that showed Find-A-Prince charity saving huge numbers of frogs for fairy princesses all over the realm; she projected both the cost and the effect of her charitable activity way out to years 10 thru 15. She projected annual budgets many years into the future to show her friends and neighbors that “Find-A-Prince” was not just a shot in the dark or a flash in the pan.

She also gathered statistics that showed that the number of happy-ever-afterwards Fairy Princesses was increasing dramatically thanks to the donations from all the contributors. She told them they could all be proud of this success and the happily-ever-afterward lifestyles they brought to all those Fairy Princesses.

Most important of all – she made a “significant donation” to the Find-A-Prince charity each and every year. Because, after all, she wanted to set a good example for all the other people of her town and all those other fairy princesses who were her friends. She wanted to make sure that there was enough money coming in so all her objectives for the Find-A-Prince charity could be achieved.

Finally, the Fairy Princess became a Board Member of the Find-a-Prince charity. She gathered about her wise people who were leaders in the community and who shared her enthusiasm for turning frogs into Princes. Together they would make her charity work and accomplish great things. She did all the things she needed to do to ensure that this would happen. She did not, however, become the executive director! She left that to a frog-conversion specialist!