GuideStar Blog

Raising funds for a nonprofit can be a challenge. Even with the right advisers, team, plan, and dedication, pulling off a successful fundraising event can be quite difficult. Many organizations have adapted their fundraising efforts to new technology and trends; using mobile technology and donor management software has become common. Whether you choose to remain traditional or switch to more tech-savvy methods, here are some lessons that can help you increase your donations and grow your fundraising community.

I’m sure you have a long to-do list to prep for the Giving Season, but do you know how you can reach millions of donors and funders with just a bit of your time? The answer is simple—by updating your existing GuideStar Nonprofit Profile!

Your nonprofit’s information goes out to more than 200 charitable websites and applications powered by GuideStar, including AmazonSmile, Facebook, Network for Good, and Charity Navigator. To make the most out of your Giving Season, here are the top five things you need to know:

Attention spans have shrunk today, especially with board members and volunteers who have myriad responsibilities weighing upon them. In this vein, here’s a quick recounting of the most important fundraising truths they need to know.

Bitmoji of Vu Le

With #GivingTuesday and the holidays fast approaching, we wanted to make sure nonprofits in the GuideStar community were aware of a great opportunity available to them this season.

At CrowdRise by GoFundMe, the world’s largest social fundraising platform dedicated to nonprofits, we’re excited to announce our annual Holiday Challenge, a fundraising competition for charities with $300,000 in competition prizes for nonprofits. The annual fundraising competition engages charity participants by turning donors into fundraisers while leveraging peer-to-peer fundraising to amplify charitable giving efforts.

By the time you finish reading this post, Google will have processed 117 million search queries worldwide. In total, that’s about 3.5 billion searches a day.

Part 1 of this two-part series, “How to Sustain Nonprofit Relevancy and Fundraising Effectiveness,” suggested five questions to ask in order to determine whether your nonprofit is simply resting on its laurels when it comes to your fundraising strategies. If this is the case, you’ll have trouble moving forward and pushing beyond the status quo to achieve excellence.

The late Jerold Panas*, fundraising guru and author of a bunch of books (two of which, Asking and The Fundraising Habits of Supremely Successful Boards, I frequently use with boards to inspire philanthropy), left us with a gem of a final article published in the GuideStar Blog: Nurturing Your Potential as a Fundraiser.

Is your nonprofit struggling to retain members? If so, you’re not alone. Technologies like social media and online giving platforms have changed the way people behave and what they expect from organizations, making it harder to keep members coming back.

Nonprofits, just like for-profit organizations, face a variety of challenges. There are issues related to legal compliance and workforce performance. They need to keep track of employee performance, delivery of orders, different processes, and the integrity of their databases. All these issues, if not managed well, might interfere with the fulfillment of their missions.

Many nonprofits make do with spreadsheet software and email to run different operations. But, as an organization grows in size or the complexity of its programs increases, the logistics of maintaining this information manually take their toll. Multi-faceted ERP (enterprise resource planning) software that utilizes a unified database can increase your overall organizational operational efficiency.

What are some of the major signs that your nonprofit organization needs an ERP system?

When it comes to increasing visibility and funds for a nonprofit, it can sometimes feel like an uphill battle. From social media marketing to email campaigns and in-person events, your nonprofit has undoubtedly run the gamut to find what works and what doesn’t. But for many nonprofits, especially smaller ones with few volunteers or support staff, business partnerships are an often-overlooked or underestimated avenue for growth.

You already know that using a pledge campaign can be a fantastic and innovative way to engage your supporter base and build momentum in your community for supporting your mission.

But are you ready to take your pledge fundraising campaign from “good enough” to great? With our simple strategies, you can create a strong pledge campaign that exceeds your goals and helps your organization achieve its mission.

In the nonprofit sector, we’re used to hearing we shouldn’t rely too much on limited donor audiences, and that the key to success and sustainability is having a diverse set of income streams while keeping our exposure to risky funding to a minimum. Makes sense, right? As our engagement with supporters, partners, and beneficiaries becomes increasingly digital, are we encountering the same risks by relying on too few social platforms?

Nonprofit finance is complex, with layers and factors that don’t exist in the for-profit world. 

We need data and analysis tools that are relevant to our businesses and to our sector. 

GuideStar and Nonprofit Finance Fund (NFF) get that understanding and communicating your nonprofit’s financial story—the full picture of its financial health and priorities, and how that relates to those of your mission-driven peers—is just as important as articulating your vision and programs when talking with staff, board members, funders—indeed all your stakeholders.  

It’s October, which means that year-end fundraising is looming on the horizon. Year-end campaigns are a ton of work! When you’re planning a year-end campaign, you want to know that it’s going to be effective and that you’re going to hit your fundraising goals. But what happens after you reach your goals? Will your campaign be able to sustain you after the new year?

After the 2016 presidential election, news outlets reported that donations to charities associated with liberal causes had increased. Pundits termed these contributions “rage giving” and hypothesized they were a direct response to Donald Trump’s victory over Hillary Clinton. Yesterday, the Woman’s Philanthropy Institute published a new report exploring this and other issues related to philanthropy immediately before and after the election.

In the remarkable book The Future of the Professions: How Technology Will Transform the Work of Human Experts, authors Richard and David Susskind explore the changes affecting professionals—doctors, lawyers, accountants, management consultants, tax advisers, financial advisers, architects, journalists, and even clergy. Professionals, they say, “have knowledge, experience, skills and know-how that those they help do not.” And technology and the Internet are radically shifting the way people access expert information.

Do you know what your website is worth? Its return-on-investment? Is it bringing in donations, or sucking up vital funds?

Board transitions are awkward, no matter how you look at them. When it’s time for a board member to transition off your board, whether willingly or not, it can feel like your organization is losing a limb, a part of its network, and a connection to its history. The cost of losing touch with valuable board members is high, and you also don’t want to offend board members, even those who have underperformed during their terms. How do you navigate these tricky waters without toppling the entire boat?

What will you see in the new and improved GuideStar Common Results Catalog (CRC)? It’s been over two years since we’ve launched the Platinum Seal of Transparency, and we’re continuing to learn a ton from our participants!

At Dreamforce 2017, Salesforce.org announced Expedition Impact during the Nonprofit Kickoff—an inclusive initiative that is equal parts technology, community, and collaboration—to help nonprofits understand and demonstrate their impact and mission accomplishment. At the heart of Expedition Impact was the idea of community collaboration—that collectively, the sum of our impact, insights, and intelligence is greater than each of our parts—would help drive an impact-first sector.

In this post, the third in our series (read part 1 and part 2) about the new trends in capital campaign fundraising, we explore new ways to engage volunteers.

Volunteers Fuel Your Capital Campaign

We often hear from beleaguered executive directors and development directors that they are too busy to spend huge amounts of time wrangling volunteers. They wonder if it’s worth all of the time and trouble.

The answer is YES. Involved volunteers in your campaign are worth their weight in gold.

Anyone who has been in the field of fundraising for years can ply you with advice. I’m going to restrain the urge, however, and instead offer you two simple exercises for increasing your revenue.