Connecting Schools With Great Fundraising Ideas.

For the past seven months, I have been writing very regularly on the best ways to raise money for your school. I’ve offered advice on how to connect with your community, so that you can have the most productive fundraisers possible. I’ve written thousands of words on this subject. So, I think it would be fair to say that I have fundraising on the brain.

Therefore, it is not surprising that I had as strong a reaction as I did last night when I found myself, as an innocent bystander, in a real-life fundraising disaster.

(For the sake of not hurting anyone’s feelings, I will not divulge any of the details about this organization.)

Recently, I signed my four year old daughter and my five year old daughter up for a sports-related activity. They had never pursued this kind of activity before, and they were quite excited. Last night was the fourth meeting of this group. continue reading

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When you are involved with a non-profit, it seems that every conversation starts and ends with the need to raise money. You’re either discussing how much you need to raise, how much you are currently raising, or how much was raised in the past.

When the board of a non-profit organization sits down at the beginning of the year to create an operating budget, it does its best to balance the needs of the group with the opportunities to generate revenue. Hopefully, much thought and discussion has gone into setting these priorities.

Once the budget it set, the director does his or her best to get the entire community moving in the same direction. In order to achieve real success, a non-profit needs everyone to be pulling in the same direction.

Or, at least that is what I thought was supposed to happen. continue reading

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Previous to my current role as blogger at Top School Fundraisers, I was working at a non-profit summer camp for boys. Like many summer camps it has a strong tradition and long history. In fact, I, myself, was a camper there for five years, before I became a staff member. In total, I was at the camp 24 years, from the time I was 10 years old until I was 34. I told people my mom just never came to pick me up.

So, in the summer of 2000, I was the associate director. One of my responsibilities was to raise money for the camp. There was a small, but respectable endowment, but like many places, money was tight and there were always more projects than funds.

One day, around mid-July, a young man walked into the camp office. He introduced himself as a former camper, a proud alumnus. I was not surprised, as many folks drop by the camp each week for this same purpose. Some were campers (or counselors) just a couple of summers previous, while some old timers remembered the early days of the camp in the 1930s. continue reading

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