Fundraising for Social Change, 7th Edition

chapter 20 Opportunistic Fundraising

Recently, I gave a workshop at a conference on the topic of opportunistic fundraising: how to recognize a time when you are with someone (or hundreds of people) doing something not related to fundraising, and suddenly asking for money would be exactly the right thing to do.

I asked whether anyone could think of such opportunities. One participant said she had been tweeting from a fundraising event she was attending. Her tweets were positive about the group and she was sharing some information the speaker was giving. She said, “I could suggest that people give money and put the link in the tweet.” An appreciative murmur filled the audience. (One could assume that someone even tweeted this suggestion to people not at the workshop.) Another participant said that at his family reunion many people congratulated him on doing the fine work they knew about because of his blog. In his next blog post, he mentioned donating money to a specific organization, and by the following week, several people in his family had given. Another even more appreciative murmur . . .

Then someone said that she and other people in her organization led popular workshops for teachers and coaches that always get rave reviews. She suggested that her organization send a follow-up mail appeal to people who attended the workshop. I like to encourage almost any fundraising effort, so I said, “Great idea. Or even faster and possibly more effective would be for you to figure out ...