Non-Profit Chas

Sasha Dichter wrote a fantastic Manifesto: In Defense of Raising Money

I’m sending this to all of my board members and encourage you to take 10 minutes to read it.

I hinted at this in my posts about Blog Action Day and What All Those Fundraising Books Don’t Tell You.

The difference between success and failure isn’t smarts or money. It’s not your logo or your office or your website.

You’re not more successful because you’re not doing more.

All the fine tuning, testing, strategic planning, and seminars won’t do you any good in a vacuum. Those can take you from 80% up.

But going from 0 to 80% is easy – it’s just a matter of taking action and doing something.

As 37 Signals often says, If it works, do more. If it doesn’t work, do less.

We stopped our strategic planning because it was a distraction from doing the work. We weren’t at a stage where extensive planning sessions were helping us. We didn’t have our house in order. We weren’t actively fundraising and marketing our programs. We weren’t collecting the right information. We couldn’t even speak intelligently about our financial picture.

So we hit “pause.” Six months later, we feel much more secure about all facets of the organization. This winter, we’re starting our strategic planning again.

GOYA

My designer friend Oak taught me this acronym: GOYA. It means “Get Off Your Ass.” Sometimes I set it as my desktop background just so I have a constant reminder (download the wallpaper) to myself that I need to put up or shut up.

So your challenge each day is to accomplish something that helps advance your mission. Call or visit a donor. Write a thank you note. Make a quick decision and execute.

I’m embarrassed to admit that Camp Fire doesn’t take online donations. In preparation for an appeal letter, I decided to buckle down and set it up. I’m going to use PayPal because we already have a PayPal account and it’s a quick way to take online donations without a lot of hassle.

How to Accept Online Donations

1. Sign up for a PayPal account, or sign in if you have one.

2. Go get a donation button:

Generate a button using their button wizard or grab the code and modify it manually.

3. Place it on your website. I created a donate now page I can use (and continually tweak) as a landing page. I also added it to the homepage and sidebar of our website so it was available from anywhere.

4. Options (beyond 5 minutes): I also took advantage of the custom thanks and cancellation page options to set up thank you messages and direct any abandoned donations back to our site. I wanted these to be in my control, not left to a generic message from PayPal.

5. Add conversion goals to your Google Analytics account. You do have analytics, right? Set one goal for getting people to your donate page and another goal for having them visit your thanks page (because they actually donated).

PayPal vs. Other Options

In the future, I’ll look to streamlining the process and moving as much of the form into my own site. I’ll let someone else continue to handle the transaction – I don’t want to store or even see credit card numbers. But I want as much of the experience and layout in my control as possible.

I’ve also looked into other services like Network For Good but the fees are higher. There is a trade-off, though – more customization, reporting, and fundraising tools. As we develop our online giving and have some expectations on volume, I hope to move to something more powerful.

Blog Action Day is a way to increase awareness of an issue and encourage some discussion. This year’s issue is poverty.

I don’t work specifically with poverty issues, though a big part of my fundraising work is for camperships that provide financial aid for campers.

The term Blog Action is something of an oxymoron. Talking isn’t doing. Discussing poverty isn’t fixing the problem.

Rather than write a lot about the issue of poverty, I’d rather encourage you to act. So once Blog Action Day is over, you have to do it some justice by taking Real World Action:

• Network For Good
• Idealist.org

• VolunteerMatch

This is making the rounds, and I wanted to share it here. Especially now that you’ve taken a little bit of time to upgrade your browser, protect your computer, and get started with backups.

David Pogue of the New York Times has an excellent list of Tech Tips for the Basic Computer User. Be sure to scroll through the comments at the end for more helpful user-submitted tips. Some samples:

You can double-click a word to highlight it in any document, e-mail or Web page.

You can tap the Space bar to scroll down on a Web page one screenful. Add the Shift key to scroll back up.

Just putting something into the Trash or the Recycle Bin doesn’t actually delete it. You then have to empty the Trash or Recycle Bin.

Read them all at nytimes.com…