Best Practices: Nonprofit Fundraising
Failing to plan is planning to fail and while cliché; this is sometimes a hard-learned lesson to learn. Of course, you can always turn the phrase around – if you don’t begin with a vision of a desired outcome, set goals, or define your plan – it’s impossible to fail, right?
That’s certainly not the way to run a successful nonprofit fundraising event. Many steps and planning stages need to be identified and defined to ensure your event’s success. Depending on the complexity of the event, planning can be a year round effort or a couple of months.
If your organization is new to event fundraising, you may want to start with a small, less complex event to gain experience. The planning, management and execution of a successful event will give your organization the experience, skills, and confidence to move on to bigger and better events.
To begin speak to your organization’s stakeholders. Ask supporters what types of events they would be interested in attending with a simple survey. Include a field for them to answer whether they would be interested in attending or volunteering and an open field for event suggestions. Similarly poll your board members and staff. You never know where a good idea will come from. Second, evaluate event ideas determine if they fit with your organization’s mission and whether or not they will appeal to your larger community. Is your event idea unique? Is there space within the larger community calendar of events? Will it garner attention and support? Will people – prospective donors – be interested in attending?
Once you decide on the type of event, it’s important to define goals and outcome measures for the event. Think SMART Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, and Timely goals. Next, set a date and begin the process of figuring out how all the pieces of your event will fit together. You can print a sample event timeline from our new E-Book: Event Fundraising Best Practices here.