Community-Centric Fundraising: Improve Your End-of-Year Giving Campaigns
Do your donors see themselves as beneficiaries of your organization’s work? Do you?
With the giving season approaching, many nonprofits are gearing up for their end-of-year giving campaigns. It’s the end of the fiscal year for many, which tends to promote a particular sense of urgency. But how do your campaigns represent your organization’s mission? How, specifically, do you frame the appeal to your donors? What stories do you use?
The traditional charity model is based on asking those who have resources to help those that don’t. Such charity-based giving can be motivated by a genuine sense of caring and generosity, but it perpetuates an “us vs. them” view of our community. By definition, it is not inclusive.
Campaigns that elevate the status of our donors, pander to their preferences, portray ‘clients’ as victims, and ignore (read: accept) the donor’s values if they are inconsistent with the values of the organization, promote this divide.
So, with the enormous pressures that come with the end-of-year giving campaigns, how can we cultivate our donors in a way that does not perpetuate this division?
Community-Centric Fundraising provides an approach to donor cultivation that emphasizes strengths. This approach promotes inclusion and embraces our similarities, rather than dividing our communities. It also works!
I’ve chosen to highlight the following elements of their 10 Principles:
Be thoughtful about what images we use in marketing such as our website, brochures, and social media in order to avoid reinforcing the existing archetypes and stereotypes.
Avoid making changes based on donors’ wishes if it ever comes at the expense of clients and the community.
Avoid creating a sense of charity or pity among donors toward other community members and instead encourage donors to see how they and their families also benefit from the work they support.
Recognize that healing and liberation require a commitment to economic justice. This involves fundraisers and donors grappling with and addressing the root causes of inequity, including the destructive effects of capitalism and how we may be complicit in furthering them through our practices.
These strategies also uncover an essential truth about nonprofit organizations which is that we all benefit from this work; our communities are more vibrant, engaged, and resource-filled because of them.
I’d like to thank Andreas Cota Avila and Marine Brichard for introducing me to Community Centric Fundraising through their presentation at a recent AFP Coffee-Chat, and to Andrea Pacheco who presented on this theme at this year’s RMPI conference. https://community.afpglobal.org/afpcocoloradochapter/events/recentcommunityeventsdashboard