Top Five Fundraising Strategies

It is well known that organizations require money in order to run properly. Managing events is a great way to raise money for your organization, as is collecting membership dues. This next installment will explore different fundraising techniques and the best ways to fundraise for your organization.

#1: Determine How Much Money You Need to Raise

This may seem obvious, but it is important to have a detailed and precise idea of how much money you need and what you need it for. Are you making repairs on your building? Do you simply need more money to cover your expenses? Have you experienced growth in your organization and need more money to accommodate the expansion? Are you running a charity event? Whatever the reason, it is important to determine why you need the money, what it is going to be used for, and if it is truly necessary to run your organization more smoothly.

#2: Look to the Past

Have you had a successful fundraiser in the past? Were there some events that worked better than others? Be sure to take a look at your past events and determine what worked well and what did not go quite right. For example, you may have had a competition in the past that was very well attended and you were able to raise a lot of money from it. However, there may have been another event that was less successful because it was not well attended. Was this because of the time and date of the event? Was the weather bad that day? Was the event poorly organized? Taking a look at these questions should help you figure out how to plan for your next fundraising event. In addition, you can also ask your competition participants to take part in a survey about their event experiences. This can easily be done in Compete-At's Event Manager using the notification tool. There are a number of online tools to create surveys for free. Here is one: www.polldaddy.com

#3: Decide how Donors Benefit from Giving to you

No matter how you are fundraising for your organization, it is important to be able to inform your donors what they are getting in return for giving you money. If they are paying a registration fee for a competition, be able to explain that your organization needs to cover the costs of the event as well as operation of the association in general. If you are having a fundraising campaign explain the benefits they will receive from donating their money. Additionally you want to be sure to include plenty of information on the "About" page for the event. You can easily turn this page as an admin of Event Manager.

#4: Gratitude and Incentives for Donors

It is important to remember that it is easy to get caught up in the event planning and fundraising campaign and forget that fundraising does not end when you have reached the amount of money that you were aiming to raise. Taking the time to thank your donors through writing a letter or a card is imperative because it shows that you are grateful for their donation and will make it easier to ask for money next time you need it.

You can also set up incentives for donors. Determining rewards for the highest donors is a good way to get people to contribute more money. It also adds a bit of fun to the fundraising process.

#5: Create a Realistic Timeline

It may be easy to get caught up in raising money for your organization, but setting a realistic timeline for your fundraising will pay off in the end. Start off by planning what you need to do in order to raise money and then figure out what events you will have and how long it will take to increase your funds while remembering your expenses and other activities you have going on.

http://www.fundraisingtips.com/strategies.htm is a great website that provides information about fundraising and is worth looking over the next time you need to do some fundraising!

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Note about this article: This article is part of a newsletter series from Compete-At.com. Compete-At provides online event management and online registration for sports.