You’ve almost certainly had the meeting. You know, the one about how to survive the crunch, the crisis, the catastrophe — or whatever you want to call it. The meeting where you probably were uncertain about what to do and even about what the impact might be on your organization. Maybe the only thing everyone agreed on was that it’s a difficult situation in fundraising at the moment with few clear answers on how to survive.
So the real question can’t be simply about how to survive the crisis. The questions have to be how to grow your fundraising income. What can your competitive advantage be if it’s not as compelling as some of the big brands above? How do you address increased and changing beneficiary needs?
The answer, for an increasing number of charities in the U.S, Australia and worldwide, is innovation. The conclusion is the same in the commercial world, where marketing guru Philip Kotler calls innovation the only sustainable competitive advantage.
Yet, while almost everyone — in both the commercial and charitable worlds — agrees that innovation is important, only a small number of charities really are embracing it in a systematic way. This report explores how some leading-edge charities are tackling it and what you can learn from them. It focuses on how to create a systematic approach to fundraising innovation as a value chain.
(By the way, if you’re looking for anecdotal evidence of this reluctance by fundraisers to tackle innovation, read through the programs for recent fundraising conferences both in the U.S. and abroad. Many of them read more like the schedule for a history-of-fundraising convention — full of sessions on ideas that used to work, delivered by many of the same faces, to audiences keen on tried-and-tested answers. Where are the innovation tracks?)
Luckily, there are some notable exceptions to this “innophobia.” Internationally, UNICEF and Greenpeace International, once seen as sleeping fundraising giants, now are reinventing themselves through innovation programs.
Read more in this important article by Bernard Ross and Paula Birnbaum Guillet
Crowdfunding
Crowdfunding, inspired by crowdsourcing, describes the collective cooperation, attention and trust by people who network and pool their money together, usually via the Internet, in order to support efforts initiated by other people or organizations. Crowdfunding occurs for any variety of purposes, from disaster relief to citizen journalism to artists seeking support from fans, to political campaigns.
Crowdfunding can replace the need for specialized grant applications or other more formal and traditional fundraising techniques with that of a more casual, yet powerful, approach based on crowd participation.
Fund raising is the process of soliciting and gathering money or other gifts in-kind, by requesting donations from individuals, businesses, charitable foundations, or governmental agencies. Although fund raising typically refers to efforts to gather funds for non-profit organizations, it is sometimes used to refer to the identification and solicitation of investors or other sources of capital for-profit enterprises.
Sponsorship Resources