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4 Fundraising Tips To Sample
4 Fundraising Tips To Sample

Thanks to COVID-19 you can forget about that buffet at the local casino. There won’t be any sampling adventures from 19 hot and cold choices. 

Fundraising is an adventure, however,  where a little bit of everything helps. In her book Fundraising Buffet, Sandy Rees offers 101 tips on fundraising that she has garnered as a fundraising coach, and she offers several real-world experiences to flesh out her advice.

Some of her tips:

  • Include a reply envelope in a thank-you letter. At a food bank where Rees worked, she found that these envelopes generated about $20,000 a year. She also found that people who consistently used them were good candidates for a monthly giving club.
  • In a thank-you letter, include an offer to tour the facility or site. A donor and spouse who usually gave around $10,000 a year were so impressed with a tour that they wrote a check for $10,000 on the spot.
  • For grant proposals, get your supporting documents organized. When Rees sets up a development office, she gets stacking trays to hold supporting documents. She made several copies of each document and put them in a tray.
  • For fundraising identify each donor with a unique number. One organization where she worked had three donors with the surname of Smith and the same first name. Rees put the correct record number on each reply card and looked up the donors by record number when doing gift entry.