An Interview with Pamela Brannon, Executive Director, Children of Uganda

The mission of Children of Uganda is to support and empower hundreds of orphans and vulnerable children in Uganda to lead successful and productive lives.

FundRaising Success recently spoke with Children of Uganda Executive Director Pamela Brannon …

FundRaising Success: How does Children of Uganda fund its mission?
Pamela Brannon: More than 50 percent of our annual income is derived from individual child sponsorships.

FS: What fundraising venues/strategies do you use?
PB: Direct mail, e-mail solicitations, social media, major gifts, third-party events.

FS: What are your fundraising strengths/weaknesses?
PB: Our fundraising strengths are really in our sponsorship program. Our children write letters directly to the sponsors, and a number of those sponsors keep in regular touch with their child. Our sponsors feel a very strong bond to the children they sponsor as we encourage a consistent exchange.

Our sponsorship program has also proven to be one of our weaknesses as well. We rely so heavily on these donors, and many of them have begun to reach their "expiration date." Donor fatigue has been a big challenge for us in our sponsorship program.

We're also a staff of two and have not had the opportunity to develop a strong grant program.

FS: How do you engage donors and other supporters and potential supporters in ways other than purely fundraising efforts?
PB: We maintain a Facebook page with regular updates, send out a newsletter once a year with updates from the ground, and we also recently introduced a monthly e-mail newsletter and a quarterly one-page hardcopy newsletter. Donors have loved this!

FS: Can you share a recent fundraising success?
PB: We recently launched our second annual "30 in 30" campaign. This is an online campaign where we invited 30 of our most passionate donors to raise $1,000 in 30 days. Our goal was to raise a total of $30,000 in 30 days. We ended up raising over $30,000 and at very little cost to us. We used FirstGiving as our fundraising platform. Each donor had their own page, and we highlighted 30 of our new recruits.