Mentored Fundraising Assignment 1

Mentored Fundraising Assignment 1 Homework Instructions
6-Month Mentored Nonprofit Fundraising Certificate Program
This week’s resources:
Class Home Page for Mentored Fundraising
Fundraising Assignment 1 Discussion

Use the Assignment Instructions in conjunction with my example assignment to simplify the process:
Magee Example of Fundraising Assignment 1

Assignment 1. 1) Define your goals for online nonprofit support and 2) the type of new individual supporters you are looking for. Do you want supporters that give a donation, volunteer, subscribe? How many do you need to meet your goal? 3) Prioritize one goal to be used in this training program.

What are you hoping to achieve (brainstorm the different thematic areas that you are to increase or improve)?
Examples may include building your subscription list, driving people to your website, branding, donations, or a volunteer program.
Choose a priority from your list of goals (donations, volunteers, subscribers) in preparation for developing your first campaign.
How many supporters? How much money? When? Where?

Getting started.
Part 1: Brainstorm about your organization’s goals: What are you hoping to achieve?
As I mentioned in this week’s discussion, for the purposes of this course this assignment isn’t meant to be a board retreat about annual goals. Chances are, you already have a good idea of what this year’s goals are—or you can connect with a colleague to find out more information.

Your Support Needs
First: Get specific about your support goals. Do you want supporters that are donors, volunteers, subscribers, buyers? How many?

So the first step in this week’s assignment is to make a short list of a group of goals that perhaps your organization wants accomplish this year. Typically for nonprofits this could include an increased number of individual donors, connecting with appropriate volunteers, growing your mailing list with engaged subscribers, driving people to your site, branding your organization—and even letting constituents know that you have services that you can provide for them.

So get out a sheet of paper [or write right over the top of my A1 example], and make a short list of two or perhaps three (at the most) general goals that you’re hoping to achieve the next 12 months. Leave space beneath each of the goals listed for adding detail.

Part 2: Quantify your goals.
Articulate your list of goals for your donations, volunteers, subscribers. How many? How much? When?

So, beneath your list of goals, quantify each goal with:

Who: Professionals, volunteers, donors?
How many: How many donors/subscribers will you need to achieve your goal. How many volunteers for that fall clean-up?
How much: (dollars to be raised, number of volunteers needed, an increase in subscribers).
When: Are you going to build up for an end-of-year fundraiser? Do you want consistent funding throughout the year?
Where: Are you hoping to reach local donors or volunteers? Could there be countywide or statewide interest? Is it possible that some could be national?

Part 3: Prioritize your goals in preparation for developing your first campaign.
Okay. So you’ve come up with three goals you would like to achieve over the next 12 months and you quantified them. They probably all seem very important. But for the purposes of this course and for enhancing your learning experience let’s prioritize one of them. Your priority could be “simplest first” so you can learn quickly. Or your priority could be a “long-term goal” so that you can get started now and move towards successful achievement at the end of 12 months. You choose.

In this course you are only going to create a campaign for one of your goals. This will make a lot of sense as the course progresses: simple is best when learning how to develop campaigns! Plus, over the course of the training program your simple campaign concept will grow as we add components.

Action: Start a campaign template collection by identifying the campaign that you want to develop in this 6-month program. Learn now, grow your nonprofit, and work faster on your next campaign using your new collection of templates. Begin your campaign template collection using a simple Word document that I will provide to compile your weekly findings. Use my example of this week’s assignment as your first template. Get an old 3-ring binder, label it with “Online Fundraising” and the name of the goal that you chose and slip this first assignment template in the notebook.

This is really important for several reasons. One, by the end of this course you will have a collection of detailed information showing both the background that you researched for developing your first campaign—and an example of the campaign components in one place.

This can refresh your memory in the future when you return to this campaign template, it can act as your own personalized template for developing a new campaign, and, if you get promoted to CEO the person that takes over your online fundraising project will know exactly what you did and how you did it.

In Summary: In this first assignment, you will brainstorm a list of goals, you will quantify them, you will prioritize them—and and then you will pick the one that is the most appropriate for launching your first campaign during this course.

Homework: Follow the Magee Project Example exactly in order to turn in your homework assignment —it is the format we are looking for. Pull it up on your screen and type right over the top of what I’ve written. This will really speed up the process for you—and also begin the process of creating a set of templates for speeding up the development of future campaigns

The complete Assignment One homework to turn in will be:
1. Your simple list of a group of goals that you have chosen.

2. Quantify them so that we know exactly what we looking for.

3. Prioritize one of them. For the purposes of this course, choose one of your goals that will be best for developing your first campaign.

4. Begin developing campaign templates using a simple Word document that I provide to compile your weekly findings. Use my example of this week’s assignment as your first template. Get an old 3-ring binder, label it with online fundraising and the name of the goal that you chose and slip this first assignment template in the notebook. Save your assignments electronically too in one easy to find location so that you can copy paste into future assignments.

Go to Magee’s Example Project Assignment 1 to see what this could look like.
See you next week in Assignment 2.