Nonprofit Fundraising Quotes

Fundraising is an extreme sport!

Rapunzel rode to the city and rented a room in a building that had real stairs. She later established the non-profit Foundation for the Free Proliferation of Music and cut off her hair for a fund-raising auction. She sang for free in coffee houses and art galleries for the rest of her days, always refusing to exploit for money other people's desire to hear her sing.

Don’t let comparison kill your creativity.

Nurturing a donation is unlocking a donor’s desire to express their joy for caring for others.

Emotions play the biggest part of moving a donor to give, but statistics and impact reinforce the decision to give to reduce donor’s remorse.

Major donors want you to be effective and efficient — but most of all, they want to know you understand and value their partnership.

Thanking your donor should be an opportunity to brag about the donor instead of your organization.

If you hate asking for a donation, you don’t understand your donor. You’re stealing their joy.

Donors don’t give to your organization, they give to make the world a better place.

Your donor is the hero. This doesn’t take away from the great work your staff is doing.

People aren’t giving you money to fund programs. They’re donating to see results.

Leadership isn’t just about deciding what to do, it’s also about knowing what not to do.

Fundraising isn’t about the money, that’s just one outcome. Fundraising is about people.

For years, the family funded legal challenges to various campaign-finance laws. Ground zero in this fight was the James Madison Center for Free Speech, of which Betsy DeVos became a founding board member in 1997. The nonprofit organization’s sole goal was to end all legal restrictions on money in politics. Its honorary chairman was Senator Mitch McConnell, a savvy and prodigious fund-raiser. Conservatives

Table 1-1 Sources of Private Contributions: 2011 Source of Income Amount of Total Giving in Billions Percentage of Total Giving Individuals $217.79 73% Foundations $41.67 14% Bequests $24.41 8% Corporations $14.55 5% Total $298.42 100% Source: Giving USA: The Annual Report on Philanthropy for the Year 2011 (2012). Chicago: Giving USA Foundation. Fundraising for fun and profit

I spend a great deal of time working for kids in Uganda and India and chasing bad guys who hurt them. I started a nonprofit a number of years ago and now Sweet Maria and I think about my day job as a great way to fund the things we’re doing. Now when I put on a suit and tie or jump on a plane to go take a deposition, we call it “fund-raising.” It still makes me grin every time to say it this way. It’s like a really successful bake sale to get rid of bad guys.

I didn’t realize Farrah Fawcett had died of anal cancer. There were references to her ailment as cancer “below the colon.” It was like my mother, when I was a kid, calling the vagina “your bottom in front.” Up through 2010, anal cancer had no nonprofit society, no one to organize fund-raisers and outreach, no colored awareness ribbon. (Even appendix cancer has a ribbon.)* Like cervical cancer, anal cancer is caused by the human papillomavirus; people get it via sex with an infected person, and that seems like something they ought to know when making decisions about using a condom.

the James Madison Center for Free Speech, of which Betsy DeVos became a founding board member in 1997. The nonprofit organization’s sole goal was to end all legal restrictions on money in politics. Its honorary chairman was Senator Mitch McConnell, a savvy and prodigious fund-raiser.

Once you find your 20 percent, you have to facilitate an exchange—their money for some value, or perceived value, in the charity. How is this value determined? What can your nonprofit provide to the charitably-minded person? There are four of them, and the high-level value is the easiest: help the supporter feel good. It’s the main reason people give.

The next value that a nonprofit can provide is autobiographical heroism, helping donors see themselves as the hero in their own life story.

People are fickle. One day they love your charity. The next day they don’t. On other days they’re somewhere in between. They’re busy. They get distracted. Their emotions run hot and cold. With so many for-profits and other nonprofit suitors competing for your supporters’ share of wallet, your supporters will always be wondering in the back of their minds, “What have you done for me lately?” If your answer is simply, “Give us money again!,” you might have a problem.

Nonprofit organizations exist to help people help others — through giving money, time, effort, or material goods.

If you put these five things together - you can't use money to attract talent, you can't advertise, you can't take risks, you can't invest in long-term results, and you don't have a stock market - then we have just put the humanitarian sector at the most extreme disadvantage to the for-profit sector on every level, and then we call the whole system charity, as if there is something incredibly sweet about it.

Philanthropy Advantage provides the best nonprofit business consulting in Kansas city, USA. As a leading Microsoft Dynamic CRM consultant in the Kansas city, we are specialized in providing high end MS CRM solutions for Nonprofit and foundations.

I wanted to help rescue this species from endangerment by learning about the elephants’ intricate social structure, increasing worldwide attention to this species through my research and scientific advancements in knowledge. However, when the scientific papers that I had spent years writing finally came out, there was little reaction. I felt proud of my scientific accomplishments but was sad that I wasn’t doing more for the species that I cared about so much. The following year after I graduated, a new paper by one of my colleagues in Gabon found that between 2002-2011, the duration of my Ph.D. plus a few years, over 60% of the entire forest elephant population declined due to poaching[5]. The poaching was almost exclusively driven by the consumption of their tusks as sources for carving statues, jewelry, and other decorative objects. The true conservation issue had nothing to do with studying the elephants themselves. What was the point of studying a species if it might not exist in a few decades?  If I really wanted to help forest elephants, I should have been studying the people, the consumers who were purchasing ivory to determine if there were ways to change attitudes towards ivory and purchasing behavior. Yes, having rangers on the ground to protect parks and elephants is important, but if there is no decrease in demand, it will constantly be an uphill battle. All of the solutions to the conservation problems of forest elephants are social, political, and economic first.  If you are interested in pursuing wildlife biology as a career for conservation purposes (like I was) or because you love animals (also me), you might be better suited in another career if research is not your thing but can still work for a conservation organization. Nonprofits need lawyers, financial planners, fundraising experts, and marketing executives to name a few. When I perused the job boards of nonprofit organizations, I was surprised by how few research positions there were. There were far more in fundraising, marketing, and development. Even if you don’t work directly for conservation, honestly, you can still make a difference and help conservation efforts in other ways outside of your career. A lot of conservation is really about investing in programs and habitat, so species stay protected. For example, if you can purchase and/or donate money to organizations that buy large areas of land, this land can be set aside for wildlife conservation. The biggest threat to wildlife is habitat loss and simply buying more land, keeping it undeveloped, and/or restoring it for species to live on, is one of the major means to solve the biodiversity crisis.

the core reason that someone will give money or donate to a nonprofit is because they want to feel significant and that their life has meaning.

Populist fundraisers argue that fundraising is evolving from big donors to big networks, and they believe that marketing to the top of the pyramid hurts their nonprofit’s future. They want to deliver the same communications to everyone, because they believe the small piece of their donor base that’s made up of older, richer supporters is a high-risk and high-reward constituency. This notion sounds good in theory, but it just isn’t true.

One of the most fundamental strategic concepts is focusing marketing efforts and resources on the 20 percent of your donors who have the capacity and ability to make large or legacy gifts. Master this, and you will endow your nonprofit’s mission with the greatest degree of efficiency at the lowest cost—period.

Pressure to conform: Nonprofit leaders feel pressure to conform to funders’ unrealistic expectations by spending as little as possible on overhead, and by reporting lower-than-actual overhead rates.

Sales leaders know that everything I’m describing in this book applies to them, too. The private sector is way ahead of nonprofits in this regard, which makes sense. Their profit model financially motivates them—their CEOs, managers, and salespeople—to crack the code on what truly works and what doesn’t. If they don’t, their investors seek change. In the 21st century, your investors (your donors) will, too.

Fundraisers no longer have to interrupt people at the wrong times with irrelevant communications. Nonprofits that listen effectively to donor verbatims and digital body language can be relevant and provide value to their supporters. When they do, it’s not an interruption at all. It’s engagement, and it’s welcomed.

Not satisfied with the status quo, fundraising leaders are change makers – they see ahead to what the organization could accomplish to fulfill its mission and set a path toward attaining it. They are influencers in the best sense of the word as they draw upon their communication skills to share their vision for the future.

We even recommend a status-associated title for the nonprofit brands we work with. People will be much more likely to donate if they know they are an “Anchor Donor” and even more likely if they get special privileges like updates from the founder or access to other anchor donors at fund-raisers.

By making money the object, rather than relationships, nonprofits fall into a trap—the same trap Jim Collins alluded to when he stated that money is an input of a nonprofit but not an output.1 The outputs, according to Collins, are life-changing outcomes that touch both giver and receiver.

There are some seismic cultural shifts that are underway online, and they are adding new vital layers to our digital landscape.

Brochures didn’t disappear when websites arrived. Text messaging did not destroy telefundraising. As tactics, tools and platforms pile up on top of one another, we tech-savvy digital fundraisers have to hone and maintain our ability to wade through these weeds of ever-increasing uncertainty and complexity. We need to be able to embrace it. Plan for it. Leverage it. Tolerance for ambiguity is a sign of maturity in our lives, which includes our fundraising careers, because the digital ecosystem we operate within is constantly evolving. It has a food chain, complete with predators and prey. It has seasonal shifts. It gives and supports life, but it also generates and disposes of waste.

You don’t have to master every new tool right away, but an understanding of what it does, who it’s for, and how it works goes a long way in helping you understand how it might fit alongside what is already working for you. Going all-in on the latest social media platform won’t be a wise use of time, effort or money for the majority of charities.

In our digital age, there are more trends by the day, and each fad comes and goes so quickly that it feels like the world has moved on by the time you catch up. Chasing fads is exhausting, unproductive, and, perhaps most damaging of all, it’s a distraction from the fundamentals that attract far less attention but wield far more power and influence.

I believe it [a year end appeal] is often so successful because it is one of the few—if not only—times that many charities deliver a clear and “hard” ask for a gift, along with a deadline. Specific, urgent, and time-bound. These are qualities that we shouldn’t hide in storage ten months a year like pumpkin spice and Michael Bublé.

Roxanne Stern is an experienced educator who has a long, successful history of working in the education management industry. With skills in non-profit organizations, event management, and fundraising, Roxanne Stern is a true asset to any education environment. She has many years of experience as a Senior Projects Advisor.

The narrative that BIPOC are inferior and helpless without white intervention is present in white supremacist consciousness whether a person with white privilege flies to Africa or stays in their home country. White saviorism at home can show up as teachers with white privilege wanting to rescue their students who are children of color. It can show up as individuals and businesses hosting fund-raisers and nonprofit projects to rescue BIPOC struggling against issues of lack of access and discrimination. And it can even show up as parents with white privilege wanting to adopt children of color (though this is obviously not always the case, it is something to be aware of). In more subtle ways, white saviorism is the person with white privilege speaking over or for BIPOC in the belief that they know better how to say what needs to be said.

When you spend your days in fund-raising, you raise money. But when you invest your life in growing God-honoring stewards, He raises up extravagantly generous givers.