People Give To People

Last Thursday and Friday I was in Ohio on a speaking tour for the ePhilanthropy Foundation. I am one of about 40 people who are certified ePhilanthropy Master Trainers (ePMT) and travel around conducting seminars on best practices in utilizing the Internet for building revenue and cultivating relationships with donors and potential donors.

First let me say how interesting it was to be in Ohio right before the election — whew nothing but political ads everywhere — and my flight back to Chicago was delayed because Bush was coming in to the Columbus airport.

Now to the point I wanted to get to today in this blog entry.

I was on the tour with Sheeraz Haji, CEO of GetActive software, and Philip King, CEO of Artez Interactive. I found it quite interesting that all of our presentations reinforced some of the same points:

1.) All the old rules of fundraising still apply online — you need to consider the cycle of cultivation, stewardship, and solicitation.

2.) When you are looking at your online impact – look at more than just the dollar amount of credit card donations that came in. Look at how you may be improving results in your offline campaigns, may be involving new volunteers or donors, may be educating prospects which will lead to increased offline giving etc…

3.) People give to people – Make your e-communications personal and targeted and consider putting your online tools into the hands of your best donors, board members etc…

GetActive, Artez Interactive and several other online fundraising tools allow you to create personalized pages for your donors and volunteers that they can then e-mail to friends and colleagues to ask for support and explain why they believe in the cause. You may have received an e-mail like this for a special event. For example someone is walking in a fundraising walk and they send you an e-mail that has a link to their personal donation page which has a photo of them training for walk, an explanation of why they are walking, and a link to a donation form that is tracked back to them. Organizations using this for events are raising a lot more money than they used to.

But the point I wanted to make today is to really encourage you to think about how you can use this same concept for fundraising outside of events and how you can tie it back to your offline fundraising. You could have the members of your major donor club create a personalized page and send an e-mail telling colleagues why they help the organization and encouraging people to either pledge online or please respond to the year-end annual gift appeal. Sometimes board members or volunteers don’t have a lot of money to donate themselves but they can raise money from friends and colleagues — especially if you make it really easy for them.

Well all for now. Let me know what’s working online for you. Use the comment section here or simply shoot me an e-mail.

When the ePhilanthropy Foundation e-tour comes to your town, I encourage you to attend. You can get all the info from their website:

http://www.ephilanthropy.org