Fundraising and Special Events

Liz Adamshick shares her experience in soliciting financial donations from volunteers and her realization that volunteer administration professionals must work more collaboratively with fundraising professionals. She notes:

It took many conversations to bring us to the point of drafting and sending a letter, and logistics were central to the discussion. Philosophically, the financial development director and I were on the same page: Donating money to an organization is a personal decision, and not ours to make for our volunteers.

Up to this point, we had been making this decision for volunteer staff, simply by not inviting them to consider supporting us financially. But our respective departments each worked with separate databases for the audiences we reached and tracked. We lacked any kind of contact management system that would allow us to identify overlap between these audiences, and specific evidence of their dual support of the organization through volunteer involvement and financial donations…

So while we had a skeletal system in place, we still had to meet on several occasions to exchange and compare lists, identify which volunteers were already donors (some were major donors, and had just recently been solicited to support more substantially a different campaign), and determine what to do with donors and volunteers who resided outside our organization’s jurisdiction…

During this process of refining lists, reviewing drafts of solicitation letters, and periodically touching base on related philosophical questions, I began to think more creatively about the potential for a deeper level of collaboration with my financial development colleague, and recognized that our respective professions had more in common than either of us had explored in the past.

Read Adamshick’s recommendations for why and how we must learn to work together.

A never-before published draft excerpt from Carol Weisman’s upcoming book, Raising Charitable Children: Kids Who Give as Good as They Get (anticipated for publication in late 2005). The chapter previewed here explains the concept – and how-to’s – of a “Joy and Sadness Meeting” as a technique of helping parents and children discover the possible causes on which to focus their charitable attention. The written material is accompanied by an audio interview with Carol, as she shares three real-life examples of how to encourage family philanthropy.

Ten Thousand Villages, the largest fair trade organization in North America, works to provide vital, fair income to artisans in Africa, Asia and Latin America by marketing their handicrafts and telling their stories. The nonprofit organization has its American headquarters in Akron, Pennsylvania and Canadian headquarters in New Hamburg, Ontario, and relies on a network of volunteers to keep operating costs low and to share its story with consumers. Tens of thousands of artisans benefit from the dedication and involvement of hundreds of volunteers across North America. Whether volunteers pull and pack orders in the warehouse or unpack merchandise and assist customers in a store, they know that their involvement changes artisans’ lives.

Fund raising in Italy is deeply rooted in antiquity. We could go as far as to maintain that it was born 2000 years ago at the age of the Roman empire. Seneca and Cicero (De Officiis) might be regarded as the first two theorists of fund raising, not to mention the golden age of the Renaissance and patronage of arts. At that time the government, i.e., the emperor, did not exert the same functions as today, but we are well aware of all that was done for the arts, culture, sciences and nursing. This must be our starting point, leaving aside the American culture for a moment, which came on stage three centuries later.

The people who must raise funds often have little idea about the volunteer management aspect of their own agencies. Development staff and Coordinators of Volunteers frequently know little about the financial assets of volunteers active with the organization and rarely ask these volunteers to make financial contributions. Coordinators of Volunteers are happy to remain ignorant of the financial concerns of the agency and could not even imagine asking for money from those who already offer their time. Development staff are also unaware that funders may see data on volunteer involvement as a measure of how effectively an agency will manage their human and financial resources. Development staff also fail to recognize that there are funders who would be willing to fund projects to improve an agency's effectiveness through better management of its own volunteers.