Basics of Non Profit Fundraising in 12 minutes!

going to do today is a a little sort of Art and geometry project from grade school called the geometry of fundraising and I'm going to try to actually fit uh all of fundraising campaigns and strategies into 15 minutes kind of like um maybe like that two-minute Shakespeare if you've ever heard of that uh and the concepts that we're going to go over I think will be useful whether uh they're new to you or uh you've been through many different different fundraising classes and that sort of stuff it'

s a good way to encapsulate sort sort of from Big to little the way fundraising Works um I'd like everybody to if they have their piece of paper just draw at the top three basic shapes we're going to draw a triangle a circle and a rectangle these are our basic geometric shapes that we're going to use to to pretty much understand how uh a campaign and and when I say campaign I don't just mean like a big effort to raise millions of dollars for a building but you can use the same Concepts uh if you

're thinking about just how much you need to raise over a single year for an annual fund or for your operating but first the triangle uh we're also going to draw two other triangles one uh right side up and one on its head and the one here on the left is donors and the one on the right is dollars and I'm just going to do a little more drawing here I'm going to put a line here on this one and a line down here on this one and this is put the number 20% and here we're going to put 80% okay now this

is a a very standard mathematical equation that probably most of you know which says that 20% of our donors give us 80% of our money and when we say donors I'm talking about individuals corporations foundations we'll put government money and earned income sort of outside of that that picture so what does this relationship mean it means that if we want to make our budget every year or reach the goal for our campaign we need to make sure we know who these 20% % of the people are and by people I a

gain I mean corporations foundations and individuals and we better make sure that we have strong relationships with those folks and this is really true if you go back to your office and you take a look at how much money you raised last year and who gave it I I'm very sure that in almost every organization whether you're $50,000 nonprofit or $50 million nonprofit you're going to find that there's this this relationship happens all the time so the other interesting thing about this is that um down

here is where typically you know for years and years it would be where uh people did uh Direct Mail campaigns tons all that kind of stuff is money and those uh those relationships and those activities those are really important uh you can't really run a nonprofit effectively most of the time without them but if you focus your effort down here you're never going to get what you need to run your operation which is this 80% of the money so a lot of times uh for instance I'll meet with a potential

client and they're going to say okay well we need to raise x amount of money we're going to send out a letter to everybody we know and we're going to ask them to give you know $1,000 the interesting thing uh and $1,000 may be a lot uh for for some of your organization just an example interesting thing is that that's never going to get you to hear and when you send out that letter and you get the money back it's going to come in in the distribution of some people are going to give $2,000 some peo

ple are going to give $50,000 $50 it's going to come in in this kind of distribution so you need to do things to again figure out who these people are uh one other interesting thing uh before we move on to the next geometric shapes is today a lot of this work is in uh online giving social media that sort of thing and that's it's very exciting it's very cool you got to do it I advis people to do it but you're making a mistake if you think that's going to get you here and in fact it um social medi

a and online giving took a really big jump forward with Obama's 2008 campaign where there was a lot of attention on you know this was a Grassroots effort and it was a very amazing thing that he and his staff were able to do however shortly after the 2008 campaign a report came out analyzing his giving turns out that the majority of gifts were either people giving multiple times through the internet so that their total giving was above you know $25 or $200 and um or or people giving significantly

more and in fact the reported numbers show that Obama actually received 80% more money from large donors those giving $1,000 or more total than from small donors it's not very widely known Circle those of you who are drawing please draw two circles circle on the left it's called your network circle on the right is us giving get to the second one in in a few minutes so uh also in the network you want to draw some uh concentric circles those aren't very concentric but you get the idea uh these ar

e actually points that uh some of the previous speakers referred to but you need to figure out like like right here in the beginning I mean in in the center that's your staff that's your board those are your closest friends okay so in order to raise money effectively first of all you have to have a center of your circle you have to have a a sort of nucleus of your network there and over time you have to figure out how use this group of people to effectively connect to the people who are somewhat

further out in your network this this whole thing right here this is kind of like the the key to to a lot of successful fundraising it's something you know we don't have time to go into how that really works in in detail but it's really if you can figure out how to do that effectively you you've done a big part of the the job so you need to to know who who these people are to figure out that 20% there uh and then you know sometimes you have people who are if this is your circle you got people h

ere on the periphery who are uh kind of in the Outfield uh sometimes there are people who are out of bounds and your job is really you know who can I use in my network to to reach these individuals and frankly sometimes I'll I'll sit down with nonprofit leaders and they'll say well I want to get to Bill Gates and for some reason I you know he's still like he's kind of like a mythical figter even though he's got a foundation now everybody somehow wants to get money from Bill Gates and you know li

ke a personal check um and occasionally and this is kind of funny I mean occasionally somebody will say yeah I actually know his so and so who knows then it's okay but otherwise he's really for most of you he's in outer space so nice okay so us giving uh this was uh referred to by uh Hildy Also let's put a little um line there so we've got a pi and this here is 75% of the pie this uh represents the individual giving in the United States this doesn't change very much year to year in terms of perc

entages okay so 75% thereabouts of the money that is donated to charity in the United States each year comes from Individual donors the other 25% or so comes from uh foundations corporations and uh requests which actually if you include the requests it makes individual giving significantly more so the total amount that is given each year is roughly uh $300 billion plus or minus so that's a lot of money that comes from individuals my point here is that many many nonprofits focus on government mon

ey corporate money Foundation money earned income really really important great money if you can get it if you're not figuring out how to maximize your individual donations as Hill said starting us off this morning and figuring out what your network is you're missing out on a lot of potential money you can get and you're going to probably have a hard time maximizing this 20% of the people who can give you 8% of now um looks like I have a few minutes left I'm sure everybody's wondering what's the

rectangle rectangle um I didn't put it on here two reasons one I don't have enough room but the other is that on the back of this geometry page which you can pick up on your way out if you don't have one there are two gift tables that are a sample and um a lot of you are probably already also familiar with gift tables that's our rectangle a gift table is a very very elegant way to put the metrics of how you do fundraising into a simple rectangular chart and what it does is it shows us both um t

he people that the number of gifts that you need and then the number of prospects that you need to get those gifts at various dollar levels to reach your goal and then I I put two samples here one is a $500,000 campaign and the other is a $5 million campaign and again that could be um an annual fundraising effort or it could be a multi-year effort and what happens is if you take some time to study this chart you can put some specificity around this you know if I need say 25 people to reach this

uh 80% of my dollar goal do I have those 25 people already in my network do do I know who I can go to or am I going to have to spend 2 months a year figuring out how to use this network to reach those people very elegant tool we use it a lot uh in the fundraising uh Campaign World and also just helping nonprofits strategize on the F so I think that's that's pretty much what I wanted to cover to go over I I just uh wanted to show you uh I brought my business card which I'm sure is very hard to se

e from the back there so I I blew it up a little bit but but not very much and this also kind of refers to Bill Gates if you can see and and if not uh these are on the table out there and it also on this side it has my contact info if you'd like to contact me this is an infinity symbol and these are little dollar bills shooting out of it so the the uh my logo is infinite money in green of course I I'm optimistic and it relates to Bill Gates because he said once I have infinite money meaning that

I have more money than I could ever personally spend so may all of our nonprofits aspire to that