Strength 
Training for 
Fundraisers

✔ Invite donors to ask questions. Make it easy for them.

✔ Show donors "their files." Offer them online access to their accounts and to any other information that's held on them.

✔ Promote your organization as financially prudent and well-run (make sure first that it is). Invite your donors to come and see for themselves.

✔ Make available, to those donors that wish to have them, details of your financial systems, risk and impact assessment procedures, and other techniques and systems of good governance. Circulate key audiences (staff, volunteers and donors who ask for them) with details of what happens at your board meetings, including full minutes (editing out anything of a genuinely sensitive or confidential nature, i.e., a disciplinary procedure). Many organizations now post highlights of board meetings on their intranets or websites. Donors, I am sure, will approve.

10. I'd focus on the major motivations that attracted our donors to our cause in the first place

Most organizations have access to several motivations. Often these are quite different from each other and from those that can be accessed by other organizations. After I had identified all of the main motivations that apply in my organization, I'd make sure everyone else knows about them too. Then I'd build strategies addressing these motivations and blend them into our future communications.

For example, a nonprofit serving children with disabilities may have donors who are there because of professional connections, or because they feel sympathy or pity for the children, maybe they have family members with this condition, or are angry that more isn't being done and so on. Creatively addressing these fundamental, yet very different and distinctive, motivations ensures our donors get more from their support of our cause. When this happens, I'm confident our fundraising results will rocket.