Fundraising

3 Lessons from my first Kickstarter Campaign

Maureen Carruthers 14 Comments

Late last month the rest of the Mach 30 board and I launched our first Kickstarter campaign.

Since the goal of the campaign is  to create a SourceForge for Open Source Hardware and I don’t expect there are a ton of open source hardware folks hanging out here* I’m going to skip the “give us money part.”

On the other hand, almost all of you are interested in how to fund the work that drives you, so I’ll focus on the three big lessons we learned from our first attempt at a Kickstarter campaign–as well as a bonus lesson that applies to successful projects of all kinds. Continue reading →

Online Fundraising for Tiny Nonprofits: A Case Study

Maureen Carruthers 11 Comments

Nonprofit fundraising is never easy, but it’s a special kind of difficult for tiny, all volunteer organizations.  The people responsible for fundraising in these organizations generally have little or no experience or training to support their efforts.  It’s also difficult to teach themselves the skills they need since fundraising training resources tend to focus on organizations with professional staff and a donor base far beyond their own.

Therefore, I’m always excited to see examples of tiny organizations coming up with creative ways to start raising the money they need to move up into the “small nonprofit” category.

This is one of those stories. Continue reading →

A Free Donor Management Database that works?

Maureen Carruthers 2 Comments

The goal of Low Hanging Fruit is to help you find simple, affordable solutions to the problems that stand between you and fulfilling your mission.  I am especially happy when I can recommended free solutions that really work–unfortunately, as Pamela Grow is fond of pointing out, sometimes the free solution means you get what you pay for.

Until recently, most free donor databases fell into the “you get what you pay for” category.

Most databases optimized for fundraising purposes are really expensive, difficult to learn, or both.   There are some free options, but they often have limited capability and, unless one is willing to delete donor records, most free solutions will only get you so far.

Through the Salesforce Foundation, non-profits have free access to the company’s commercial product – which is certainly robust enough to handle the needs of most non-profits – but because it was designed for sales teams, translating it for use in non-profit situations can be difficult.

Now, thanks to a partnership with Click & Pledge, that’s no longer the case.  Click Here to read the rest at Handshake 2.0 Continue reading →

Adventures in Fundraising: Just Do It!

Maureen Carruthers 4 Comments
To-do list book.

Image by koalazymonkey via Flickr

This post is part of a series.  Click here to read previous posts.

Like pretty much every other nonprofit out there, Mach 30 launched a year-end fundraising campaign.  Unlike other organizations, this campaign is not a part of our fundraising plan.

Because we don’t have a fundraising plan.

We meant to have a fundraising plan.  We started to work on one.  And yet, as sometimes happens with all volunteer organizations, the actual planning fell through the cracks.

It was starting to look like we’d just have to put off our fundraising until after the new year.  Luckily for us, one of our board members got impatient (in the good way). Continue reading →