Overcoming Fundraising Challenges Creatively

If you are any kind of organization, this scenario will sound all too familiar: You have a great idea for helping people. You work very hard at creating an organization to attain that goal. You hire qualified people to help you help people. They end up wasting most of their time peddling for money from the government and from generous individuals. Your qualified staff are now discouraged and loose all their enthusiasm and motivation. They leave. Very few people got helped. You go back to square one.

The challenges of fundraising are incalculable, and often times insurmountable. We will explore a few facts and statistics that may surprise you … or not.

This article is meant to help the Helpers help people. We will propose a creative, yet simple and affordable, means of generating your own fundraising, without having to resort to traditional (and painstaking) methods, raging from the car washes to the gala dinners.

We invite all the charities, the not-for-profits, the amateur sports teams, the artistic groups, the co-ops, the associations of all kinds, and every other kind of organizations, to seriously consider the solution proposed here.

According to a 2013 «National Study of Challenges Facing Nonprofit Fundraising», the first challenge is the instability in the Development Director role, which they call the Revolving Door due to the high turn-over rate. More than half of the positions stay vacant for up to two years.

The second challenge is an uneven and inadequate talent pool. More than half the executives report their Development Director’s results are unsatisfactory. And the smaller organizations are unable to compete with the larger ones for talent acquisition and retention. This situation is clearly unacceptable and goes against the foundational reasons for creating nonprofits in the first place.

Consider this: the annual salary of a Development Director is about $50,000 for a small organization, between $65,000 and $80,000 for a medium organization, and $100,000 for a large organization. Now think about the fact that these amounts serve the sole purpose of finding money to pay for their own salary, the administration fees of finding the money, and finally, if anything is left, use the remaining funds to accomplish the mission the organization was initially created for.

The third challenge is the fact that very few organizations possess the right «mix» of essential ingredients for fundraising success. Even within the high-performing organizations, only about 25% have sufficient capacity.

The fourth challenge is the lack of philanthropy culture within the organization, which leads to only 15% of Development Directors being very effective at fundraising. And this concludes the vicious circle in which most organizations are inextricably caught.

Seeking the «Holy Grail» of fundraising solutions has spawned an entire industry of companies that offer extremely varied approaches, aggressively marketing their services to every organization they can find. This is not surprising, since the profit margin for those companies largely outweighs the fundraising amount given back to the organization.

Allow me a few words to raise awareness of the fact that some charities actually use 99%, like the Children’s Hunger Fund, and even 100%, like the Usana True Health Foundation, of the money received towards their cause. I strongly encourage you to make this part of your criteria when choosing where to donate your hard-earned money.

Now back to solutions. I humbly propose a very simple, yet cost and time-efficient method. Over the past ten years, I have developed a strategy to build a Usana Home-Based Franchise in such a way that the residual income from it is constant. In 12 weeks, I can help anyone build a solid stream of self-financing. Recently, I created a Contribution Project Program (CPP) for Organizations, to use this same method for the purpose of replacing or supplementing any organization’s fundraising efforts.

In this scenario, there are no more high costs, complicated accounting, time-consuming event planning, unaffordable salaries, endless volunteer recruiting, constant fear of underfunding, and all other much too familiar obstacles.

Allow us the privilege of helping your organization accomplish its true mission.

I invite you to visit this page of our website to find out how Phoenix Alliance helps organizations to self-fundraise (bottom of page), and consult this short document to find out about our Contribution Project Program (CPP) for Organizations.

For more in depth and detailed information, Phoenix Alliance offers a FREE specialized «How to free your organization from government funding by self-fundraising» seminar to its registered members.

Interesting outside link: « Today’s Fundraising Challenges »