For Fundraising, Communication Is Our Key

I have been involved in a variety of fundraisers for a variety of organizations for my community and for my children's schools, extracurricular activities, and sports teams. Some have been wildly successful, exceeding our own preset goals and expectations, and others have been total flops when they should have flown. And the one thing that I've determined has made the difference is communication.

At the head of every great fundraiser I've been involved in has been an excellent mechanism for communication. Not only communication among the few planning committee members, but also communication with children, parents, and fundraising volunteers. And I'm not just talking about communicating needs in the beginning; successful fundraisers I've worked on have had ongoing communication throughout the entire fundraising campaign. This has included during the planning stages (including opinion gathering), the actual fundraising selling/order time period, product distribution, and post-fundraising to learn what worked and what didn't.

The thing successful fundraising campaigns figure out is that you can never get everybody involved in one place, at one time. So you need to have a solid plan for getting your wants, needs, and expectations out. And you have to utilize more than one method of communication in order to get everyone. Just a few tips that myself and others have found useful are:

- giving warning - letting people know a fundraiser will be coming later on
- asking what and how people want to sell/fundraise
- keeping good records of who has volunteered and what they have agreed to do
- reminding people of what they've agreed to via phone call
- providing good brochures and letters, as well as contact phone numbers, so selling is easy
- putting out nearly all information in letters, by telephone, posting on organization websites and in organization newsletters
- posting 'reminder' posters and sign-ups in public areas
- collecting people's opinions later on to find the best money making, easiest fundraising campaigns

Many times we've found that it is very helpful to put one planning board member in charge of communication and phone calls. That doesn't always mean they write everything or make all the calls themselves, but it means they at least delegate to other people and make sure the word is out and jobs are getting done. This is an easy thing to let go, but in my experience, communication is the one thing that makes or breaks reaching fundraising goals.