Fundraising as Building Friendships

22 Sep Fundraising as Building Friendships

Fundraising as Building Friendships: Image by Jaume Ventura, Barcelona, Spain uploaded to Wikimedia Commons, accessed via Creative Commons Search.

Fundraising as Building Friendships

As this is published, I am in Beverly, West Virginia at an historic preservation conference. My workshop is Any Place We Love Can Be Saved Fundraising as Building Preservation Friendships. (The workshop description downloads when you click on that link.)

The purpose of this post is to advance the idea that

fundraising IS primarily the act of what those two women are doing in that photo: building friendship.

Primarily in the way they are doing it, too: Relating. Discussing. Considering. Responding. It’s such a subtle photo.

Fundraising is NOT primarily crowdfunding,  asking for grants or large amounts of money,

although we’ve posted (click and see) on how to do each of those things.

Those things are merely vehicles for people to pour money into your cause, project, organization. They will not build your friendships for you. Only humans can do that. Here’s an example as it applies to marketing.

Please remember this as you raise funds for your non-profit (or even investments in your for-profit).

If you’d like the agenda plus the handouts I designed for this workshop, you can download them here. If you’d like me to design a workshop for you, contact me. At the bottom of the page you will come to if you click here is a list of all the areas in which we have already designed workshops.