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How can nonprofits support local communities?

January 24, 2023 by Dennis Fischman Leave a Comment

A guest post by Harry Lopez

If you run a nonprofit organisation, consider your local community to be the heart of your cause. The people surrounding your doorstep are those who will bring the biggest positive impact to the recognition and success of your organisation.

Nonprofits are an integral part of society. They are the voice of the people they serve, heal, protect, shelter, educate, support, rescue and nurture. Often it is nonprofits who offer life-saving aid and life-changing support and opportunities for disadvantaged people. They are the voice of the heartbroken, the struggling and those in need.

So how exactly can nonprofits support local communities?

Community of many hands

You are a part of your community

Be an active part of the community

To support your local community, you must first be an active part of it. So get involved in the social club, run a stall at the summer fair, donate new art equipment to the local schools, and help to serve tea and coffee at the village hall.

Loyalty is extremely important when it comes to keeping your followers repeatedly donating and supporting your nonprofit. Making a positive impact in your community will not only help you to continue spreading kindness, but it will also improve your brand recognition and help to increase the visibility of your cause.

After all, the more people you can reach, the more donations you can receive, and the bigger impact you can have for your community and the lives of those who are loyal to your organisation.

Be the voice of change

Often, it is nonprofits who pave the road to change. From wildlife conservation, environmental protection, ending child marriage to promoting equality and social justice, it is because of their positive impact on their communities and people world-wide that these organisations are remembered and admired.

Whatever your cause is, brainstorm ways you can directly help the people around you in line with your brand values. Be there for important events that matter to your people, and become their voice and advocate. By doing so you will inevitably start conversations and begin to build relationships with the people around you.

In time you will gain their trust and respect, and help to strengthen the overall fabric of your community.

Give back to your warriors

You need people who are passionate about your cause to make your organisation successful. Whilst you may aspire to eventually have a worldwide following, the best place to start is with the people on your doorstep. You may be surprised just how many of your neighbours resonate with your cause. Most people are empathetic and so long as you act with integrity and goodwill, they will be glad to help if they can.

Make sure you give back to your warriors, those who are loyal to your cause and shout about it from the rooftops. Show them how much you appreciate them by supporting them with acts of kindness. There are many ways you can give back to your community, from simply publishing an appreciation post on your social media pages, to gifting a loyal donor their weekly food shop.

Be there for your people

Be your community’s hero, the people they turn to when they need a helping hand. Giving back shows that you care and are willing to spend money raised to help further the lives of everyone in your local community.

Work on gaining the trust and respect of the people around you by recognising a need and finding a creative solution. This can be as small as organising a group of volunteers to go litter picking, or as dramatic as collecting donations of clothing, home supplies and food for a local family who have suffered a house fire.

If one of your local supporters has lost a loved one, make it your business to know about it and send them a card and some flowers. These acts of kindness build your integrity as a brand and grow the trust and loyalty of your donors.

Become a community hub

If you are looking to boost your brand’s impact and get to know the people of your community better, why not host a monthly or weekly meeting? You may be able to hire the village hall or community centre for a couple of hours to invite everyone to come and have a cup of coffee and chat about what they feel is important to their community. Discussion can be open ended, or planned if there is a specific campaign you are planning and would like opinions on.

You may find some people come to enjoy the relationships they build at your meetings, and soon you will have created a mini society of loyal followers for your cause.


Harry Lopez is a financial advisor who specialises in giving unbiased advice to nonprofit start-ups. Harry works closely with many entrepreneurs to ensure their businesses are environmentally friendly and will positively impact the lives of everyone they reach.

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Fundraising Tuesday: A Letter to Nonprofits

April 21, 2020 by Dennis Fischman Leave a Comment

Dennis Fischman photoDear readers,

I want to speak to you from my heart.

I went into nonprofit consulting because you do great work. Each day, every day, you give your time, your creativity, and your compassion toward making out world a better place.

During the Covid-19 pandemic, your work is especially needed. And yet, I worry that after this pandemic, many nonprofits will be severely injured. Some may even have to close.

Why?

Because our sector was not prepared.

I am not talking about preparation for the disease. It’s not the lack of face masks or surgical gloves–or even the learning curve involved in trying to do all our work online–that’s going to do many nonprofits in.

No.

Many nonprofits were not prepared for the current crisis because they haven't stockpiled loyal donors. Click To Tweet

We are seeing right now, if we didn’t before, that we cannot rely on the federal government to get us through the crisis. But we could not rely on them before the pandemic, either.

The same is true for state governments. Some nonprofits are better off than others because our governors and legislators have more foresight than those in other states. All states have to balance their budgets, however, and with their economies flatlined, they don’t have money to spare.

Foundations? I agree with Vu Le of the Nonprofit AF blog: foundations could be helping out more right now by turning all the grants they’ve given for this year into unrestricted money, so you could spend it where the need is greatest.

Mostly, however, they are not doing that. And next year, they will have less investment income. Unless they dip into their endowments, we will see less money from foundations, too.

The only ones that nonprofits can rely on are our loyal donors. And we have too few of them.

You can read the statistics as well as I can. From year to year, the percentage of first-time donors who give again to our nonprofits is getting smaller and smaller.

The most consistent donors are people in the Baby Boom generation who have given over and over again for years. There were always going to be fewer of us Boomers as time went on. Covid-19 is taking some of us (and our parents, and a few of our children) before their time.

It’s vital to nonprofits to create loyal donors–and keep the ones you have. The organizations that have made good friends of their donors over a period of years are the ones that are going to survive the pandemic. Others will be casualties.

So why are we ignoring our loyal donors?

We acknowledge their gifts online immediately, but we sound like robots instead of human beings.

We send thank-you letters by mail, but we sound self-important instead of grateful.

Most important: in our communications between asks, and in our asks, we sound like we are talking to a crowd. We give no indication that we know who this donor is, and what he, she, or they care about. (Including their pronouns, and even their names!)

If we had spent the past few years:

  • Collecting the right contact information for each donor
  • Surveying them about their interests
  • Segmenting our mail and email lists
  • Sending messages to each segment based on what they want to hear about
  • Telling stories about why their support is needed
  • Making the donor the hero of the story, and
  • Helping them feel that donating to you is how they do the good things they want to do in the world, and that they couldn’t do it without you (not the other way around)

…then we would not fear the pandemic or the recession that will follow. We would have donors we could trust.

I want to suggest that it’s not too late.

There are a lot of things we can’t do while social distancing. We’ve cancelled Spring galas and fundraising events already, and a lot of those road races and golf tournaments are just not happening this year.

Please, give yourself some credit. You are doing the best you can under difficult circumstances. It’s time to sit back, take a breath, and look at what you can actually do.

What if you put the time you would have spent planning events into creating loyal donors?

Maybe you never had the time to go through your database before and separate it into people who support your nonprofit because of this reason or that reason. Now is the perfect time to get started.

Maybe you don’t know enough about the donors to segment the list as you’d like. Give donors a call and ask, first, “How are you doing? Can we help?” and second, “What made you support this nonprofit in the first place, and why do you keep on supporting it?” Write it down!

Then, hold them close. Communicate more than you ever have before.

And that way, when we come out the other side of this global disease, your nonprofit will have better, closer, more loyal friends than you ever had before.

Please feel free to steal ideas from Fundraising Tuesdays on this blog to help you move ahead. And please let me know how else I can serve your nonprofit.

Best wishes,

Dennis

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TY Thursday: Torn Between Two Donor Lovers?

July 26, 2018 by Dennis Fischman Leave a Comment

two lovers

Which one deserves your #donorlove?

If you’re going to go out of your way to thank a donor fabulously, creatively, as many times and as many ways as you can, which donor should get your love?

Do you single out the person who gives you the most money, or the person who gives most loyally over the years?

Let me tell you two stories to help you decide.

The Sudden Passion

The receptionist at the anti-poverty agency where I worked brought me the day’s mail. I opened a handful of reply envelopes from our most recent fundraising appeal. Then I gasped. A woman who had never given us a penny before had sent in a check for $1,000!

For our little nonprofit, $1,000 was a fortune. It was ten times the amount of the average donor’s gift. And it was the first time that Jean had donated. We had great hopes for the future.

As far as I know, we did all the right things to let Jean feel the #donorlove. We

  • Sent her a thank-you letter with a personal note from the Executive Director, the same day we received her donation
  • Followed it up with a voicemail
  • Listed her in our newsletter and annual report
  • Invited her to special events

Yet we never heard from Jean again. I still don’t know why. Perhaps she meant to give to an organization in town with a similar name, and she was too embarrassed to tell us she’d made a mistake? Or perhaps we’d touched her heart just that one time, and the morning after, she realized she loved some other organization better?

I’m not sorry we had our brief moment of passion with Jean. But I’m glad we didn’t run away with her, thinking it was true love, and forget about the donors waiting at home.

The Love of a Lifetime

John was a client of our agency. He couldn’t give much at a time–certainly not $1,000! But he had volunteered or served on the Board for twenty-five years.

Whenever we sent an appeal letter, he gave what he could. And when we had our twenty-fifth anniversary gala, John went around town (walking with a cane) and solicited gifts from local businesses. Back at his subsidized elderly housing, he went door to door and asked his neighbors to donate.

Over a lifetime, John raised $1,000 many times over.

Because John was shy, we couldn’t applaud him in public the way we would have liked. We sent him thank-yous and listed his donations, but we never toasted him or sent him gifts.

At Board meetings, however, we thanked him and held him up as an example. And our agency went above and beyond to make sure he  (and later, his daughter) would keep his housing and benefits, even when he was hospitalized for months at a time. That was another way of saying thanks.

If You Have to Choose Your True Love, Here’s How

Ideally, of course, you’d thank every donor fervently and frequently. Aim to do that! If you have to choose, however, pick your most loyal donors at every level.

Don’t just thank your major donors. If your newsletters are full of pictures of people who pay for whole buildings or programs, then your average donor will think, “This organization doesn’t need people like me.”

Show the love to the donors who, over time, show the most true love to you. Click To Tweet

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