FUNDRAISING IDEAS

How to Recruit Volunteers and Identify Sponsors in Your Community!

Now that you have decided that a fundraising campaign is a highly effective way to help your organization raise funds, you have to understand some of the basics of fundraising. Assuming that most of the potential fundraisers are the people who live in your community, you should develop a relationship between the community and your organization.

Building a solid relationship with the community will help you find a lot of volunteers and benefactors for your organization.  You must use the power of persuasion in convincing your potential benefactors. Phoneraiser can help with this by helping you create the necessary promotional materials that you can share with your community regarding your Phoneraiser fundraiser.

For the sake of easy understanding, lets say we have three distinct steps in building an effective relationship with the community.  The motive behind this exercise is to search for potential sponsors and volunteers for your organization or for your cause.

The first step is to sell your benefits to the society. Everything you do to help someone or some organization outside of your own comes under the benefits tag. You must take careful steps to make people realize how your organization brings benefits to the community. Many fundraising campaigns fail to do this effectively. This step lays the foundation for bringing in volunteers and sponsors! Through this effort you are trying to create awareness about your organization in the community.  You can’t expect a new soccer team to have a big fan following, if no one knows about its existence! You must stop being a ‘nobody’.

Building a personal relationship is the second step in this relationship building exercise.  Put to use all the techniques you have to build a strong relationship. Invite your community members to a relationship building event. Make sure the people who attend your event are inspired by the way your organization works and start to see your organization in a new light!  You are passively converting people who are politely curious about your organization into active sponsors and volunteers.

The final step is the most important of the lot. You have no way of reading the mindset of the people who have attended your relationship building event, unless you are psychic. If you fail to follow up with the attendees all of your efforts till now would have been wasted! The relationship building event is just a warm up session. You must identify potential volunteers for your cause and recruit them, and this means staying in contact with them. It is very difficult to get volunteers otherwise.

If you think you have spotted a potential volunteer go out and talk to them right away. Give them small responsibilities at first and encourage them. You can gradually increase the workload as time goes on. This will make them enjoy the work and contribute to your organization’s cause. This is the most effective way to bring in volunteers. And people passionate about your cause are the most effective ambassadors.

You can easily convince the community that bringing in used mobile phones and ink cartridges are a great way to contribute both to your organization and to the environment.  It will be much easier for you to make them understand the potential benefits of their actions. If one begins to appreciate their own actions they will be much more forthcoming in contributing towards your organization’s cause!

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