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Many communities are setting up school fundraisers to augment budget shortfalls and finance various school programs, including marginalized schemes and those deemed impossible. Some institutions pursue fundraising to support the construction of new facilities or the renovation of current ones. Fundraisers also aim to support the varsity or academic competition with other schools. Despite the many noble goals behind fundraising, they remain secondary to the main purpose of schools: education remains an integrated effort involving learning students, supporting parents and teachers.

1. Ensuring the Success of a Fundraiser

Goals, financial targets and schedules must be clearly set when planning a fundraising program. A start and close date must be established, with copies of the timetable printed and distributed to all participants. Extending the fundraising beyond two weeks should be discouraged, as it could eventually be counter-productive. An adequate number of volunteers must also be available to manage the fundraiser.

- Organizers should make the community aware of the fundraiser

- Participants can be requested to name friends, family and relatives who are likely to support the activity

- Organizers must also be very clear with the target audience

- Campaign should be tailored to catch the attention of the nearby population

- Put up posters, community postings, and print parent-teacher letters to promote the activity

- Kick off your fundraiser with an event or rally

- Offer a prize to the top performer to encourage competition and spur higher profits (if your fundraiser involves selling)

2. Learn From The Pros

Schools should also learn from the experience of veteran fundraisers and tap them accordingly. Such help would enable institutions to take immediate action to correct any error that may emerge in the course of the campaign. At the end of the fundraising, officials leading the effort should collect all monetary gains, related order forms and tabulate the results. Order forms and any related documents must also be kept for possible tax questions.

School officials must impose fundraising restrictions. The absence of regulation would exhaust resources and volunteers and minimize potential gains from fundraisers. Ideally, the principal must impose strict guidelines before approving any activity – as an example, limiting fundraising to one per semester will better promote enthusiasm and reduce the likelihood of burnout.

3. Be Aware Of Your Competition

As a professional grant writer and consultant, I am often amazed at how few nonprofit organizations actually have a fund development plan beyond a vague idea of applying for a few grants and sending out an annual appeal letter.

Recognizing that lack of planning, I am not amazed at how often these same organizations have rounds of emergency budget cuts when they realize that they have no assured streams of income.

Very typical is the agency that has received a large grant to run their programs for one year. Then, in the tenth month of the grant period, comes the realization that they have no idea how they will fund the next year’s programs. With less than two months of money left in the bank they go into emergency fundraising mode.

Their first impulse is to start applying for another large grant. But at most foundations, the process – from letter of inquiry to proposal to acceptance – typically takes at least three months, and often six to eight months.

Their next idea is to turn to their individual donors with a panicked letter that essentially says, “Send us money now or we might go out of business.” That, of course, is the least effective fundraising letter you can write. Donors want to invest in your successes, not bail out your failures.

So, how do they avoid these situations? The answer is to plan.

Through the planning process, you will achieve the following:

* Limit crisis fundraising: This, as the example above illustrates, is our primary reason for creating a fund development plan, but there are others as well…

* Diversity builds in flexibility: Changes in other sectors of the economy can have a major impact on nonprofit funding. A cut in the state budget can be passed down as fewer contracts for local service organizations. The dot-com bust of a few years back cut foundation endowments, reducing the funds they had available to grant. Agencies that had become comfortable relying on one or two sources of funding found themselves struggling to survive these changes. Those with plans and diversified funding bases had the flexibility to adapt and survive.

* Planning for diversity brings in more opportunities: Through the planning process you come to identify funding opportunities you never knew existed. Further, when you stop having to scramble to pay next month’s bills, you will be able to devote more time to developing new sources of income for your agency.

Last time I checked, there were 25,000 response lists and 50,000 compiled lists currently on the market. Among all of these lists, you’ll find hundreds that work for fundraising appeals. Actually, you likely won’t find them. Locating the best names for your mailing is complicated and best left to an experienced list broker.

A list broker is a specialist who researches and recommends lists for you, and manages all the paperwork and other details of renting the list.

An experienced list broker:

• helps you find new lists
• identifies profitable segments on unlikely lists
• helps you create a matrix for testing your mailing against other lists
• negotiates the best prices for you with the list owner
• recommends other media (such as email) to consider testing
• makes sure the list gets to your lettershop on time
• helps you evaluate your response rates, gift income and other results
• manages invoicing for lists you rent

A Typical List Rental Transaction

1. You phone a list broker that specializes in the non-profit sector
2. You describe your organization’s mission, including what you do and who you help
3. You describe your ideal donor (such as “female, 55 years old, married, owns home, $150,000 household income, cares about animal welfare, lives in the United States and responds to direct mail fundraising appeals from animal rights organizations”)
4. You email the list broker a PDF sample of the direct mail package that you are going to mail to the list, and the list broker forwards it to the list owner
5. The list owner reviews and approves your package
6. You tell the list broker the following
1. the selects you want, if any*
2. how many names you want to order
3. when you will mail your piece
4. when you need to receive the names
5. where you want the names to be sent (your lettershop, usually)

* A select is a process that the list broker conducts on your behalf to choose only some names from the entire list. You might ask the broker to select names from a particular zip code, for example, and only rent you those
names.

Mailing list brokers know the industry. The firms they work for have researched and tested thousands of lists. So working with a qualified mailing list broker is vital.

I once had a friend who used to bid me farewell by exclaiming, “Up ‘yer kilt!” Where Jock is today and how many pals he still has I cannot tell. But his original and startling phrase reminds me of a vital truth in direct mail fundraising: How you thank your donors and how your donors hear you thank them can be two different things.

Strangely enough, in the process of thanking donors, some fundraisers actually offend them. Here are some of the classic mistakes to avoid in your gift acknowledgement letters, notes and cards.

Mistake #1: “Dear Friend”
I think I can affirm without fear of contradiction that the only people who address you as “friend” are the people who are not your friends. If they knew you well, they’d address you by name. If you thank a donor with a letter that begins “Dear Friend,” you are likely to thank them and tick them off at the same time.

Mistake #2: “We are in receipt of your gift”
Your thank-you letters need to be sincere. But the quickest way to kill sincerity on paper is to speak in formal tones and generalities: “We are in receipt of your donation.” “We are grateful for the support recently received from donors like you.”

When you give a friend a present, you expect the friend to thank you for that gift in particular. “Thank you, darling, for this beautiful ring.” “Thank you, Dad, for my new bike.” Avoid impersonal generalities by naming the gift you are thankful for.

Mistake #3: Asking for another gift
You don’t intend to sound greedy or ungrateful when you request another gift in your thank-you letter, but that’s how the majority of donors perceive you. They think you’re being rude. That’s why I counsel my clients to request only one thing in their donation thank-you letters–that the donor accept their deepest, sincerest thanks..

Mistake #4: Too late
How long does a donor have to wait for a thank-you before assuming you are not grateful? Two weeks? One month? Three months? In direct mail fundraising, there’s no such thing as thanking a donor too quickly. Every day of delay is a day for your donor to thing your organization is disorganized or ungrateful. Since neither of these two things is the case, aim to mail your donation thank-you letters, cards and notes within 24 hours of receiving a gift.