Why Online Fundraising is like Ice cream!

Before we get down to it, if you are in Austin, and interested in being a more effective fundraiser, we still have a couple of spots left in my Lean Fundraising workshop at the Center for Nonprofits tomorrow. Get on it!

This post is 3 posts for the price of one!

Today I have a post on Causevox about how fundraising is like ice cream. Go check it out!

Excerpt from that post:
“You have one lick, and then you want more and more! It’s so delicious that you wonder why everyone isn’t eating it.

You get totally inside of it, and then you remember, oh, snap, I can’t create a whole fundraising meal out of this!

It’s, like, fun, but, like, lacks nutritional value.

And by nutritional value, I mean that you wouldn’t want to make every meal out of ice cream. You’d want to include it once in awhile.

What DOES have nutritional value?”

Read more.

I never told anybody this, but this is the story about how I started fundraising, a guest article on Empowered.org.

“I’ve never told anyone this, but I started out fundraising as a volunteer.

When I was twelve, I walked the 26 mile Walk for Hunger in Boston two years in a row. I got pledges on my pledge sheet that people would pay depending on how many miles I walked. I remember eating the juicy orange slices, and the blisters on my feet the next day. I remember feeling the sweet relaxation that total exhaustion can bring.

Somehow, this experience didn’t come to mind when I started to think about what to do with my life. Fast forward to sitting in NYC at my job at the Economist, 7am, September 11th, 2001. It was quiet, but eerily quiet. Something felt odd. Someone came running into the room. “A tower exploded! We can go home!”

So I started to walk slowly down towards where the towers were. Dust filled the air. Mobs of people ran to and fro. I was strangely calm. The next day I walked to work on deserted streets, where not even a cab went. That was the day where I decided that there was more to life than New York and commuting and editing at the Economist. I handed in my resignation that month.”

Read more.

And a post up on http://YouStartMonday.com about how getting a job in the nonprofit sector is a good idea, and how you can start to transition into the sector.

Here’s an excerpt from that post:

“If you are an HR professional, a web programmer, a graphic designer, an accountant, or even a plumber, you can find a place in a nonprofit. How do you take your skills and core competencies and translate these into a nonprofit job? Check out this worksheet from the Center for Nonprofit Organizations at Austin Community College.

If you’d like to read more about the Texas Nonprofit Sector, I’ve got a blog post with the latest stats here.

How much do jobs at nonprofits pay? You can research this for each nonprofit that you look at. Go to Guidestar.org. Go to the nonprofit’s 990 form. You can see if they have made more money for the last several years, or if they are in the red instead of the black. You can see how much their chief executive makes. You can extrapolate from this what your salary range will be.”

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