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| Re: Fundraising benchmarks for first year
Posted by balson   on 8/15/2008, 9:21 am, in reply to "Fundraising benchmarks for first year"
Wow! I would have loved to have had a goal only 10X my salary way back when I worked for a small Habitat for Humanity affiliate!! My numer was ~20X, I had very little fundraising experience (NO individual giving experience), the place was in chaos and it took about 2 years...starting from scratch...very similar to yours..except they were on the brink of going under when they hired me. We started with a Board Appeal (very TOUGH to get started), but eneded up raising $100,000 from board members (retired businessmen, mostly) thru our 2nd Board Giving campaign (the first year they all balked "we give time, not money", but we did have 100% participant and raised $20,000). Here's what worked for me 1) I found a "champion" on the Board who spent 5 minutes at every Board meeting talking about the need for Board giving & prepping them for the appeal. This person was a godsend to me 2) We handled the appeal like any other major donor (sent a letter first, with the case, goal, etc.) 3) Got one board member to pledge a "Lead Gift" and 4) assigned other board/development members to follow up (face-to-face) with board members to discuss the letter & close the ask (essential). That lead gift helped tremendously (everyone wanted to know what others were giving), or you can even mention it in the letter. Now, about the Direct Mail campaign...with no database and a few hundred names in Excel...brought in $18,000 the first year mainly due to one thing: I had ALL board members provide a list of 10-20 names apiece (friends, family, colleagues)..they signed a personal message in a holiday card, and then we hand-wrote the addresses and mailed those first class. Those cards BY FAR brought in the most $$ (a lot the board's people sent in 500-1,000+ gifts) and it was a non-threatening way to get the Board involved in fund raising. (Physicians obvously know a lot of people with a lot of money.) This effort, in turn, led to several potential Major Donors, who were easily identifiable, and I asked the Board member who "solicited" them to bring them to a volunteer event. One eventually joined the Board and gives between $20,000 and 80,000 annually. Oh yes, our first year goal with the Board Appeal was "100% participation". The second year our goal was $100,000 (our new Board Major Donor/Board member offered a $60,000 challenge gift if the rest of the Board pledged $40,000 collectively.) But I have since left. It was too much to do all that plus grants, plus marketing & communications, plus basic non-existent infrastructure like a budget.... Total Burn-out 
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