Raising last-minute dollars at year's end

New media can provide last-minute appeal platforms or vehicles for follow-ups to mailed solicitations. Text messages, social media pages, Twitter posts, and email blasts are tools that can cut delivery time and add another "ping" to your year-end fundraising campaign.

It's a little late for DIY action, if you don't already have vehicles in place, but anyone can easily learn to add a Facebook page or Twitter account for their nonprofit organization. And for the next campaign, there are businesses that assist nonprofits in using mobile and social media. Here are a couple to look into for an early start next year:

Mobile Giving

Constant Contact

Campaigner

The best way to reach the most important donors on your list? Get all the staff and volunteers your can get together for a holiday card writing party and hand-address and sign some cards to thank donors for their past support. Don't forget to include a reply envelope!! You might be surprised at the returns gratitude brings.

In the Mail? Getting Returns?

I've just worked on seven different mailings for nonprofits in the last two months, the usual fall crush of everyone trying to get a mailer our before Thanksgiving.

I hope your organization is already in the mail and will soon start getting year-end donations, but if you're not, here are some ideas for a last-minute save. Thanks to some of my clients and colleagues for the ideas.

* Print a double-sided flyer on colored paper, or if you have a lot of brochures in stock, use those, and approach a local newspaper or free sales flyer about inserting them to support your good cause. If you include your website for making donations (you do have a page for online donations, don't you?), you may pick up enough new donors to make the modest expenditure more than worthwhile, if you consider the follow-up gifts you'll get from about 50% of these new donors.

* Approach local stores and ask them to stock your flyers or brochures, being sure to insert either a donation envelope or the URL of your website for donations.

* Send a January mailing, mentioning that a deductible donation is deductible in any year it's made. You'll find your mailer one of the few in the mailbox in that month. Many of my clients who do January mailings find it's the most profitable mailing of the year! (People are so busy at the holiday season a lot of fundraising appeals get lost in the shuffle.)

If you have some other ideas, post them here. It would be great if we could compile a list of these ideas. I'd be happy to host it on my website.

Happy many returns!

Good article on budgets and LOIs for grant proposals

About.com has a clear and easy-to-follow article on how to prepare a budget for a grant proposal to a foundation.

The article has a link to another piece on how to write a winning letter of inquiry (sometimes called a letter of interest or letter of intent -- always an "LOI"). I especially like the point it makes that the heading and the first sentence must be very well written, compelling, and make clear what it is you're proposing to do.

Older vs. Younger Donors: Which Ball to Keep Your Eye On?

The answer, of course, is both. Older donors go away because they die, but have deeper pockets and are more in tune with humanitarian realities. But younger people are getting in tune with giving at earlier ages than ever before, and a lifetime giving habit can be formed and become a strong base of support.

Here are a couple of interesting and CURRENT articles on these topics (beware articles on younger donors dated 2006 or something similarly dates):

Serious fun - how to reach young donors

Not-for-profits Reach Out to Younger Donors and Volunteers

The bottom line: as the IBJ article quotes Patrick Rooney, executive director of the Indiana University Center on Philanthropy: “They [nonprofits] are looking for ways to have a multi-prong approach to different cohorts and generations in ways that speak to each generation without affecting the others."

In other words, don't neglect your direct mail campaign to pump up your social media presence, or vice versa. It's an excellent argument (says this author, somewhat self-servingly) for hiring outside help with your donor communications. The work has just doubled. No one development executive can cover all the new territory with the same old number of hours in a week.

If your nonprofit organization isn't in the mail or inbox by now ...

You still have a couple of weeks to hit the sweet spot of the fundraising season in the mail. And mail, of course, no longer just means paper in mailboxes, but can now mean e-mailings, e-newsletters, blogs with links to your donations page, or a mashup of social networking posts with video or audio.

Communication is key in this pressured economy, sending a missive like a missile that penetrates the blather of advertising and appeals with a sharp call to make a difference to real people.

Here are some organizations that get it right, the mix of direct mail, Facebook, Twitter, blog, website, e-newsletter, and donation page that is the media mix we all live within:

Project Open Hand

Food Bank of Contra Costa and Solano

Walnut Creek Library Foundation

And here's one that has a little too much going on, and could use a Facebook page and Twitter link. But they have a good first page and print mailing program, plus an e-mailing program:

Center for Early Intervention on Deafness

I've received print mailings from these nonprofits recently that point to their web presence, linking all the forms of communication a donor might be comfortable with, giving them options for responding.

Note that the first screens of their sites link social networking, donations pages, and offers to sign up for e-newsletters and e-mailing lists, along with their basic mission statement, in easy-to-spot locations. One-stop donations shopping for the holidays!

Your thoughts? I'd like to hear about your experience in the mail this season, your mashups, and other forms of successful fundraising communications.

Searching Smart for grants

Do you make the best use of the premier resource for grantseeking from private and community foundations, The Foundation Center? They offer great tutorials for searching in their extensive database of foundations, but not everyone uses some of the tools that give in-depth information, such as the Form 990 tax returns foundations file annually, listing all the grants they've made for the year. This detailed and current information will help you determine the right amount to ask for, the geographic spread of grants in recent years, and whether the foundation tends to make repeated grants to the same organizations.

Searching smart saves time, narrows the focus, and helps eliminate exaggerated expectations about the amount of grant funding that might be available for a given project or nonprofit. More on searching smart in the next installment.

Twitter for Funds

Nonprofits should take note of the power of Twitter for building a base of support. It's an avenue for communicating with your constituency in a way that no other medium offers.

Gina Schreck's book Gettin Geeky witt Twitter is a great resource for learning about tweeting. A Facebook page for your cause is a must, but it's a static vehicle. You have to drive traffic to it, and Twitter is one way to do that.

More on this soon.

Also, guest blogger and ace fundraising consultant David Jamieson will be joining this blog soon with a series of articles. Stay tuned.