The Money-Raising Nonprofit Brand: Motivating Donors to Give, Give Happily, and Keep on Giving

Chapter EightGreat Fundraising Offers in the Real World

Here are some powerful, proven fundraising offers being used by leading nonprofits. You are allowed to steal these ideas!

There are probably more good fundraising offers than there are flavors of ice cream. Because, as with ice cream, only our imagination limits what we might invent. Any time you can connect your donor's desire to make the world a better place with real-life activities your organization does—you have a fundraising offer.

Here's a quick tour of some of the powerful fundraising offers that are raising millions of dollars for organizations around the world. You can take any of these and modify them to your circumstances and your donors.

Child Sponsorship

Child sponsorship is one of the best fundraising offers ever devised. I don't know who invented it, but that person is the Captain America of Fundraising as far as I'm concerned.

You know how it works: You sign up for a specific child in a poor community, then give a monthly gift. In return, you get information about the child—usually a photo and report, updated periodically. In most cases, the child writes you letters and you can write back.

The specificity of that relationship is powerful. You get regular and believable proof that “your” child is real, and getting helped. Compared to that, most other fundraising offers—where you are helping somebody in some way (at best) are pale shadows that only approximately connect donors with the difference they ...