Fundraising for Non Profit gets Creative in a Recession Year

Almost never have people involved in fundraising for non profit organizations seem a time like the one we live in today. For as long as anyone can remember, American businesses and private citizens have always been generous in the way they supported nonprofits for what they favored. Each year that fundraisers have tried to raise money so far has without exception been better than the year that came before. Fundraisers remember how in the mid-80s, nonprofits experienced some terrible years. They thought they had left all that behind them until the financial crisis of 2008 arrived. Donations actually dropped 3% that year. After a couple of years living on donations that have been smaller and less generous, nearly 10% of the country's nonprofits risk shutting down this year. Volunteers who give their time to help raise funds for nonprofits have been growing desperate. Clearly, they can't spread out and ask for people for their generosity; that has clearly proven to not work. Instead, they are turning to finding ways to persuade existing donors to be more generous. They are branching out internationally and trying new ways - such as micro-donations instead of large ones for fewer people. Facebook fundraising for nonprofit is the latest thing. Things are finally beginning to look up now for the nonprofits; but they still have a long way to go.

One of the newer areas that fundraisers are looking at these days to make up for lost income is telemarketing. They just hire telemarketing agencies to do their cold calling and soliciting for them. Which happens to be a real shame; because the telemarketers come at a real cost. They get to keep 60 cents for every dollar they raise for the nonprofit. Of course, the nonprofits can't really mention this in their literature - it would look really awful. So they just try to hide this on their balance sheets by calling it something unexpected - like calling it program costs.

Fundraising for nonprofit can be kind of a science. While cold calling certainly is no science, a part of what fundraising volunteers do involves poring over databases to try to find out who the high net worth individuals are to approach. They buy these databases from firms that put them together based on who the high-rollers are. Anyone who owns a yacht, who owns a large parcel of real estate - these are the people usually feature on these databases. This practice does raise a few privacy issues too. But you have to understand that they do it for a good cause.

Other more regular methods of fundraising by nonprofit groups have recently come under criticism too. For instance, the good old box rattling method, where volunteers stand around traffic intersections asking motorists for a donation, while it can be very successful, can endanger the lives of overzealous volunteers when they venture out into traffic. In some places, methods as simple and as well-known as bake sales have come under criticism - for making kids fat.

Of course, there is no way to go about doing something as tough as funding a good cause, without doing anything controversial at all. Especially when times are as rough as they are today.