Evan Carmichael breaks down nonprofit fundraising into three pillars: tell a compelling story about the people you help, recruit board members and volunteers with strong networks, and show donors the tangible impact their money creates. Testimonials, events, and personal outreach beat generic appeals.
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Hi, I'm Evan Carmichael. Welcome to another edition of Ask Evan. Today I'm going to answer a question from one of our forum readers who wrote in asking about fundraising. So the question is, "Hi everyone, I'm looking for fundraising ideas for nonprofits. I know I can learn a lot." Thanks for the question. To quickly answer it for you, and I've been on boards of nonprofit and charity organizations in the past, It can be really tough. You know, everybody's asking for donations and you have to separate yourself from everybody else. I don't know what your nonprofit is doing, but you have to really find a way to tell your story. And a lot of the times the people who are in charity work and nonprofit are not great marketers and are not great at telling their stories. And the ones who raise the most money are the ones who do a good job of telling their story. So I I don't know how much money you're trying to raise, or again, what it is that you do, but you have to create an emotional connection with people who can potentially give you money. So what are you trying to raise the money for, and how can you tie that home to a personal story of somebody, and draw me in, and make me want to care about this, right? We're bombarded all day with tons of different messages, and so to make somebody stop and take 10 minutes out of their day to watch your video or to go to your website and read your story, it's gotta be compelling, right? So don't just say what you do, explain how you do it and show the people who you're helping. So, you know, smiling people, have their testimonials, explain the importance of what it is that you're doing. So that's number 1. For any marketing that you do, for any awareness, if somebody's hitting your website, they see a brochure, they see a flyer, it's gotta have a strong emotional immediate impact with the person to make them care and want to at least find out a little bit more about what you're doing. Number one. The second thing is I try to get people involved in the organization who have some connections. So when I was on the board of Junior Achievement, part of what we did was raise funds through our own connections. So you're bringing on people who can help not just with their volunteer time, but can also help raise money either personally or through their friends. So often they'll have events, if it's a dinner or golf tournament or something fun where you can try to get corporate sponsors, but also the people who are involved try to line up their own sponsors, their own connections to be able to buy some of the spots. So you want to try to create a board of advisors or board of directors who can also not just give you advice and can work hard and be volunteers, but can also provide you with financial support and connections to financial support. So the most successful charities and nonprofits, again, are the ones who have a good board of advisors or directors who are actively involved, committing their time, but also committing their dollars and getting their friends involved as well. So along with telling your story and along with getting the people involved, the, the last thing I would think of is really have a clear vision for what you want to accomplish. So what is it that you're trying to do, and how is the world gonna be better because of it? Right, so as much as possible, you want to tie people into that vision and get them excited about the new world that you're gonna be able to create if they help you with ABC, right? So there aren't that many visions that are easy to get excited about. Again, people are bombarded with messaging, so if you give them something that genuinely they can get excited about and be really happy about, then they are more likely to get involved with you. What is the world that you want to create? It might be a massive vision. I don't know what the nonprofit, again, is about. It could be a local community vision. It's fine, as long as you have a clear vision for what you want to do, number of people helped, something you want to build. All the benefits attached to that. The more you have a clearly defined vision that gets people excited, the easier it's going to be to get people to come on board and help out. So hopefully those ideas helped you. If you like the video, please give it a thumbs up. It makes me want to do more for you. And if you have a question about this video, or you have a comment of your own, or a question about your own business, I'd love to hear from you if you want to leave it in the comment section below. I always read those. I appreciate them. And I really like seeing them come in. So thank you, and we'll see you on the next episode.
