Author: JoyOlson

Successful Fundraiser of 22 years; Pet owner and lover; triathlete and sportswoman; Gardner; Love to dance; Music a must; Workaholic

The What & Why of Blockbuster Fundraising

2016 has been a busy year of putting together all the pieces of Blockbuster Fundraising, getting ready to get the training modules on line!

So what is the What and the Why of Blockbuster Fundraising! Why are we doing this and why do I want to do this? What is the purpose of this endeavor?

Having been a very successful fundraiser now for 20 years and coming into very stressful situations and painful moments at certain nonprofits, I learned how much it means and how to keep a cherished nonprofit alive and well in the community.

To be able to raise money when a nonprofit faces dire and urgent circumstances is an art that takes experience and the best of best practices! When it is a cause you truly passionately believe in, there isn’t any finer feeling in the world than to be able to keep those doors open and make wonderful things happen for those who need them to happen.

It is much nicer for a fundraiser or development director to enter a situation that isn’t so dire, but one where you can put together a fabulous plan to take the nonprofit to new heights and beyond their goals!

And fundraising has never been more exciting with greater possibilities! Nothing compares to the last few years, the dramatic changes in fundraising and development due to the internet and social media; it’s a wonderfully, exciting and creative time to be a fundraiser.

Watching Shark Tank inspired us, wanting to make our fundraising skills ‘scaleable’! Don’t you love it? Why scaleable??? Easy, because every single day hundreds of worthy wonderful caring causes come to my mailbox, arrive on my Facebook newsfeed and get tweeted to me, they all desperately need help!

But like everybody else in the world you can’t be everywhere and you can’t donate to every good cause so what can I do to make a difference in the world?

Ah-ha! I can share my fundraising knowledge, excitement, and passion with any fundraiser in the world who is trying to figure out right now how they’re going to find the money to keep their cause alive and well.

So what difference will Blockbuster Fundraising make and what is the real value of my knowledge to other fundraisers? In a nutshell, nonprofits will be able to get instant quality affordable fundraising help the moment they need it without having to hire expensive consultants or make a new hire.

How can we help? Blockbuster Fundraising is made up of only best practices, tested, current and proven best practices. Blockbuster can help nonprofits right now in 2016 raise the dollars they need to meet their goals. Blockbuster is creative and forward thinking, using all new technologies to benefit our clients. We love developing Development Relationships for development department through social media and have learned how to make it truly add to the nonprofit bottom line.

Development and fundraising is so important to every nonprofit organization in the entire world. Nonprofits struggle to find qualified development & fundraising people. Add to that that most of the U.S. non-profit organizations (currently 1.5 million US nonprofits with budgets of $1 million or less) often don’t have the budget/money to hire or even really train their fundraisers. And they flounder and so does the budget.

As of now, studies show there are less than 80,000 Development officers in the US non-profit arena, making it a field that has tremendous potential along with the great need. Because of the limited or non-existent training budget dollars in the nonprofits of this size, turnover, disappointment, and people leaving the field are rampant!

Blockbuster Fundraising is introducing in May of 2016 a tangible digital, video training product to enable nonprofits to experience success and immediately bring dollars and supporters to their mission. These are nonprofits with meaningful causes so close to the heart, and all extremely worthy, and many so in the need of help.

Blockbuster Fundraising can help nonprofits achieve their goals achievable and become sustainable.

Blockbuster Fundraising will give people the chance to truly change the world because that’s what nonprofits to do, they change the world! But to do the good that makes the changes, they’ve got to raise the money!

The goal at Blockbuster Fundraising is help worthy nonprofits with their development program, offering an affordable, immediate and proven successful training program that will get them to their goals and beyond. YOur goal is our goal! We can help make a big difference in the world by helping the worthy causes that need more dollars to stay the course!

Take care and talk to you soon. How to Achieve Successful Fundraising Plans will be the next blog subject. And when I’m not trying to figure out how to help you get more supporters and dollars in the door, I head outdoors with the WestieFore, below! Thank you for your valued time.

joy and westies on greenway

It’s a Perfect Time to Call Home!

With less than 25 days until year end, what do you think is the very best use of your fundraising time? Easy!!! Get on the phone and call home, your donor’s home that is!

Perhaps you need to put some numbers to this ‘calling home’ so consider these numbers: 1 out of every four of your donors would give you more if you gave them a call. Get out paper and pencil and let’s really look at this. If you make time to call 500 of your donors and all of those 500 gave you just $25 more, that adds $12,000 to your year end goal! Makes you want to get on the phone right now, doesn’t it? And we’re not talking your major donors and we’re not talking a major ask. just a warm hello, a thank you with a short sweet story that shows the, what their support has accomplished and holiday best wishes! And, if you are lucky enough to have thousands of donors, you can get some help from your board or volunteers.

Now let’s take a look at your lapsed list that still has not responded to your 2015 lapsed mailing. the experts say that if you give those lapsed donors a call, 19% would say yes to a donation request. 50% won’t answer, 27% will say no and 19% will say yes. Thiis is according to Simon Scrive of TotalFundraising at changefundraising.com

So yo have an annual fundraising event? Let’s call them and ask for a year end donation. Simon says that 25% will say no and 8% will say yes (67% you can’t reach). This is beginning to sound really productive, don’t you think? And really fun, too. You get better and better with each call, get to know your donors better, get really interesting feedback and feel really productive. You can also talk about the dates of your event in 2016 and what fun you’re going to have! Bragging about this great event can have huge impact on building attendance and support.

Now here is the best statistic of all! If you call your NEW Donors, you will boost their retention by 30%!! Is that wild or what? And we all know how hard it is to get new donors to stick around! Check out this Slideshare: http://www.slideshare.net/smaclaughlin/50-fascinating-nonprofit-statistics. You will be calling those New Donors as soon as you finish reading this fundraising blog.

Let’s talk about the call. You need to have an outline that asks questions that lead to “Yes.”
Introduce yourself and your position at organization. Ask if they have time to talk now. If they say they do, thank them sincerely and profusely for their support. Say, “It is wonderful that you are doing this” and let them talk. Ask them what it was that prompted their first gift. LISTEN! Tell them a short moving story that shows the beauty of their gift. Tell them you are making year end calls to see if you can get $25 more from each donor to make more stories like this happen. Ask “Can you Help?” and LISTEN!

donor retention statistics fundraising blog

Year End calls could also ask for an upgrade to monthly giving and I will tackle that in another blog. This is enough right now to get you to the phone to call home! Good Luck!

Monthly Giving a Powerful Fundraising Donor Retention Tool

Just yesterday I spent an hour with DonorPerfect on a webinar focusing on how extremely important donor retention is to your non-profit organizations fundraising plan! It’s all about the math and compounding over the years! They said that one way to improve your retention rate is monthly giving in your year-end fundraising plan and here is why.

How Do You Improve Retention Rate?
•Why Monthly Giving?
–Increases retention rates for monthly donors significantly- to 85%-90%!
–Attracts much larger numbers of smaller donors to give more than they currently do
–Worry less about cash flow – predict the future
–Give donors the convenience they love
–Attract younger donors

What do you think your retention rate is or do you know?

Click Here for your 10 Secrets

DO YOU WANT TO SOLVE THE SAME PROBLEMS?

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Just saw this wonderful graphic on http://www.queerideas.co.uk/my_weblog/2015/10/the-fundraising-paradox.html and had to share!

It is so important to ‘walk a mile in your donor’s shoes’ and to listen, really listen to what they tell you! That way you’ll know what problems they want to solve!

So many Development Directors/fundraisers have an idea and a ready presentationfor the donor’s donation that they don’t take the time to consider if it that problem makes a true difference to the donor! Often even after the donor tells them what is important or close to their heart about the organization it’s not noted or goes unnoticed. Donors need to be heard;they are the lifeblood of the non-profit.

Very recently, a donor, someone close to me, went to a non-profit she loves and gave a meaningful year-end gift. The donor went in for a specific reason/cause close to her heart and left that day thinking she was helping that cause. In fact, she was assured her donation would be used for the cause close to her heart, but when she got the thank you letter a few days later, the letter indicated that her donation went for another cause, a project that the organization chose.

The donor is goodhearted and doesn’t want to cause a stir but I think that that will be the last large gift this organization gets instead of the first of many. The nonprofit will probably never know this donor is disappointed, but the sad thing is they should know. The donor told them but no one was listening! They solved different problems didn’t they?

#GivingTuesday

unnamed (4)Are You ready for #GivingTuesday? Seems like #GivingTuesday is now the starting line for the final month of fundraising, a month that you depend on to be fabulous! Seems to me as a former Development Director that you absolutely have to get your team ready to participate because as a Development Department, you can not do it alone! You need your staff, your volunteers, your board and all your peeps to want to carry the message out and about! Without their help, your returns will be minimal.

In the past two weeks, I have attended so many webinars and read so many articles about how to make #GivingTuesday successful and am thinking about rounding it out to five best practices and wondering if I can do it with all the information overload doing jumping jacks in my brain. Let’s get started.

  1.  YOU NEED A STORY that will make em cry! When I work with development peeps, I remind them often to always always be looking for their top 4 or 5 stories of the year, real life situations that made everyone on the staff feel deep emotion and involvement with the organization, creating the moment that you know you love what you do! Then, craft that story and get photos and work it until it’s close to perfection and get ready to get it out there.
  2. YOU NEED A VILLAGE! You can’t do this alone, no matter how good the story, how great the graphics, how much you care, it all depends on having a team, a village of peeps that love your mission and are willing to share with their peeps and network. Put together a team that feels comfortable with social media and not too shy to ask for a favor. a lot of peer-to-peer fundraising is a personal networking method of helping one another and supporting each others cause.
  3. GET A MATCHING GIFT! SEE NOTE AND NEW INFORMATION BELOW    A Matching Gift at year-end is always just a terrific motivator and can make a impressive difference in your return. I’ve seen it work very well with #GivingTuesday campaigns and would suggest your give it a try. Usually the #GivingTuesday goal is not so high as to preclude you from finding a donor who would be happy to have their year-end gift matched this way for such a good cause. Give it a try!
  4. GET YOUR BOARD ON BOARD. Your board has probably been looking for a way to assist you in your year end goals without having to come up with the huge checks themselves, so they are most likely going to be glad to help share your #GivingTuesday story with their peers and social media peeps. ASK Them!
  5. MAKE SURE YOUR DONATION PAGE S TIED TO THE CAMPAIGN AND WORKS! Remember how many of your donations will be mobile. How does your landing page or donation page look? Test it out and not on just one laptop! It needs to be responsive and have impact on every level. Remember that over $45,000,000 was raised last year so it’s not a waste of your time to tweek your plan! Good luck!!

*****This year for #GivingTuesday we’re actually giving away our service for free for the weeks leading up to and after #GivingTuesday. link out to our #GivingTuesday matching gift page.  We’re trying to build awareness so nonprofit utilize our service this #GivingTuesday to grow their matching gift revenue.

The URL is https://doublethedonation.com/giving-tuesday/ and has all sorts of info on our Giving Tuesday offer.

BlockBuster Fundraising

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Whether you’re new to fundraising or a seasoned development professional, you will find Blockbuster Fundraising a great resource for your non-profit work. Best Practices are current, tested, and with proven results that can be put to work immediately for blockbuster results. CEO Joy Olson has 20 years of an extremely successful Development background.