How NOT to fundraise successfully

Suppose you are a new board member, a foundation director, or the chair of a fundraising committee, and you are brimming with enthusiasm eager to create a profitable new fundraiser for your non-profit organization. Or perhaps you are a tired, burned out fundraiser looking for something new. You realize that the traditional ways you've been doing things are beginning to yield diminishing returns because you are bugging the same people over and over again. Your events are becoming ho hum and not really fun anymore. And, you are running out of grant sources. What to do?

Maybe you will think of bringing up your browser and doing a search on terms such as non-profits, fundraising, charitable giving and so forth. You will be presented with a bewildering plethora of choices. Google yields over 35,000,000 results on the term fundraising. You could spend the rest of your life clicking on these links. So, you will probably read the first couple dozen before you grow too weary to continue.

Most of them will offer to send you a free catalog or will want your email address. Some will even be sites that represent a host of other companies and hope to match you up with a fundraiser that fits your fancy. Watch out!

You are setting yourself up for the greatest SPAM bomb ever created. Instantly your inbox will begin to bulge with emails offering fundraising solutions, and it will take forever to get off these autobot lists.

Unfortunately, virtually all the fundraising solutions you will receive will have the same negative factors in common.

Negative features of fundraisers

1. Most fundraisers require an upfront investment for products to sell.
   
2. Products are junk that nobody wants or needs.
   
3. You can get stuck with leftover product you don't sell.
   
4. The profit margin isn't big enough to justify the sales effort
   
5. You have to organize and sustain a sales force.
   
6. You have to spend money advertising, which reduces your profit.
   
7. You are tapping the same pool of weary volunteers over and over again.
   
8. You are hitting up the same old people for money and they are losing their enthusiasm.
   
9. There are no guarantees of success after all your efforts.
   
10. The effort uses precious staff time that takes away from your mission.
    
11. It is difficult to find board members and volunteers for these projects.
    
12. The fundraiser does not produce a sustainable residual income.
    

Sustainable residual income

The first eleven negative features of most fundraisers out there are bad enough, but if it doesn't offer a sustainable residual income, forget it. However, I guarantee you that it will be an almost impossible task to find such a source. What granting institution offers residual income? What bake sale offers residual income? What private donors offer residual income? Maybe some donor would give you an apartment house with so-called residual income. But there is maintenance, tenant turnover, and taxes to consider so that it is not a very good residual income after all.

What is residual income anyway? It is simply money that comes in perpetually for doing the work to set up the system once. The problem with most fundraisers is that you have to do them over and over and over again each year. Most libraries have annual

What if you could set up a system once with almost no effort on your part and it would continue to make money for your organization 24/7 like a perpetual motion money machine?

What if you could set this machine in motion without having to ask your supporters to pull one dime out of their pockets yet they would be supporting you by doing something they are already doing anyway?

There is such a system that taps into a 30 billion industry that will siphon some of the profits to any legitimate non-profit institution with a base of supporters.

To find out if you qualify and to set this system up for your organization, please click on the OurGV boxes to the right.