Starting a Charity? Fund Development Planning -- Engaging Volunteers in Fundraising

As we said before, there is much in fundraising that seems counter-intuitive. One of the first thoughts that may be on the minds of individual members of the Board of Directors is how the staff will raise the money necessary to keep the organization financially stable. In fact, this is not far off the mark, in that in many nonprofit organizations the fundraising activity is carried out largely, sometimes even solely, by the organization’s staff.

However, we must ask two questions:
1. What is the appropriate fundraising involvement for every member of the organization’s structure that will lead to the kind of optimized fundraising that will provide maximum revenue of the organization over time?

2. Who among the organization’s invested volunteers and staff are likely to be most effective in producing the revenue needed by the organization?

Our answer to the first question is that every member of our new charity family, whether staff or volunteer, has a role to play in fundraising. Not all can do the same kinds tasks or carry the same level of responsibility. But everyone associated with the our new charity organization will be involved in some aspect of fundraising in accordance with their capabilities, learning and motivation. The reason for this is that our existence, and therefore our ability to serve the community, is heavily dependent on our fundraising capability to keep our organization financially stable and allow us to serve the community. This is the expression by all of us that fundraising is critical to our success as a public trust.

Our answer to the second question is twofold:
The first answer is that volunteers who have already made their financial gifts tend to be much more effective than even a program person, an executive director or a director of development, especially with their peers. Generally, volunteers are seen by the public (and their peers) as having more motivation and less self-interest involved in their cultivation and solicitation efforts.

The second answer is that typically fundraising staff and the organization’s executive director have limited time that they can spend on their fundraising tasks; thus their ultimate effectiveness will be limited. Volunteers open up considerably the organization’s ability to reach out to larger pools of donors with increasing diversity over the years. Thus volunteers significantly enhance and magnify the organization’s ability to raise contributed funds from the public. Without volunteer involvement the organization’s fundraising capability can be severely truncated after a certain point, because staff can only do so much in a day’s time.

Therefore, our new charity will endeavor to involve volunteers at all levels of fundraising activity. To do this, we will commit ourselves to the following seven components in our management of all our volunteers

• Identifying likely volunteers from within the community
  
• Recruiting the most appropriate volunteers from those identified
  
• Bringing these volunteers continually closer to the organization’s work
  
• Training our volunteers in fundraising methods and techniques and in the work of cultivation and solicitation of contributions
  
• Deploying our volunteers with reference to our cultivation and solicitation strategies for individuals, corporations, sponsors and foundations, so that each volunteer has a continuing group of persons or institutions they are responsible for cultivating and asking for gifts.
  
• Evaluating the work all our volunteers do on an annual basis, and providing both evaluation mechanisms and further training to assist those who need these supports.
  
• Debriefing, thanks and recognition for all volunteers, both annually (for continuing volunteers) and at the end of their respective terms of service.