Starting a Charity? Fund Development Planning, cont'd

The fundraising process has seven distinct steps, as follows:
1. Define the project
2. Write the case for support
3. Develop or identify prospect poools
4. Deliver the case for support to prospects
5. Enlist and train volunteers for cultivation and solicitation
6. Deploy staff and volunteers in cultivation and solicitation
7. Recognize and thank your donors

So having begun our Fund Development Planning process with the organization's strategic plan and case for support, we now turn to the selection of a specific project (or projects) that can focus the donor’s attention and giving.

We know from a wide variety of research data available that donors give more consistently, more frequently and with greater internal satisfaction when they can focus on a specific project.

One of the reasons for this is that focusing the donor's attention on a specific project enables a donor to see and feel good about alleviating specific need in specific areas of the community’s life. Identifying the good that one does is more easily accomplished with specific focus on a project. In the end, that brings with it more personal satisfaction to the donors and often larger gifts to the charity.

A second reason for having a project on which to focus is that it is easier for donors to identify with the specific persons in the community whose need is being alleviated by the charitable organization. And when donors identify with visible program recipients they have the sense of more fulfilling personal relationships with those who are helped. All of this promotes better and more lucrative giving to the nonprofit organization.

For example, take the homeless. Many people in our communities don't know who the homeless really are. A charity dealing with the homeless can focus, for example, on the project of temporary shelter they provide homeless families; it can show a picture of a homeless family that looks just like the average commmunity dweller. In some areas the average age of homeless persons is 9 years old, because so many families are experiencing homelessness. Including such a project in an organization's annual fund drive gives the charity time to spotlight, lift up, give the important details of who the homeless are, and why they benefit from temporary shelter. This not only heightens the prospective donor's sense of community need, but informs the donor's understanding of exactly who the homeless are; it helps the prospective donor understand that homeless people are not very different at all from themselves.

Therefore, Our start-up charity will benefit from identifying certain specific aspects of their service programs or program locations as the basis for its fundraising, whether this be seeking grants from foundations and corporations, or asking individuals to contribute to what is essentially an “Annual Fund” campaign for operating funds. Those operating funds will be identified with, and represented and symbolized by the individual program initiative being lifted up.

Tomorrow, more on this theme: the part played by oxytocin in giving.