Do you seminar?

This post will be all about doing seminars and workshops as a means to augment your fundraising income or increasing your ministry's exposure.

A lot of non-profit organizations can already be considered as experts in their field. Some can be called authorities in disaster relief, community transformation, livelihood training, adoption, health care, a host of other things.

So ask yourself, what is your organization's asset that you can make a seminar out of? CBN Asia's humanitarian arm, Operation Blessing Philippines has been invited to disaster management conferences. CBN Asia's missionary training arm, Asian Center for Missions, has been doing conferences on how to take care of missionaries. It provides these organizations with awareness and networking opportunities.

You need to evaluate yourself to find out what your organization's strengths are and you feel that it is unique or not so many are are teaching or sharing it, then you may have something that may be worth selling to other organizations.

Where's My Umbrella?

I'm talking about premiums. They call it giveaways here in the Philippines. They are also called "freemiums" by other fundraisers.

I may say that we should be very careful when we use premiums in our fundraising. They can be very good at getting people to give but you may also sometime question the motivation for giving. I've read quite a few fundraiser say that premiums have a high initial response rate as against a no premium appeal. But this technique is also low on loyalty and long-term value.

What does this mean?

Well, simply put, people give to your organization not just for the good feeling but also they are interested in the product that you are using as a token of your appreciation. A lot of people flock to this but when you do not have something to offer in return for their giving, then the response rates goes lower.

Here in the Philippines, I have not seen a lot of local organizations offer premiums except for the magazine subscription companies. There are a couple of churches I know that have used merchandise to motivate people to join a campaign where everyone benefits, but for general fundraising. Not so much. Or maybe, I'm not in many non-profit orgs' mailing list. Who knows?

So keep this in mind when you do your next fundraising campaign. Premiums or not? Your choice. God bless!

Is your non-profit Green?

You hand out your non-profit's flashy annual report to your major partner and then the guy lashes at you for using so much excessiveness in your annual report. And you thought you were giving the partner a favor by making the report look oh so good! Hehehe.

Ther are partners who understand the value of showing your best foot forward in terms of communication. And then, there are those who smack you in the face for not being a good steward of your non-profit's money. So how do we balance it?

In reality, a non-profit should not be using all sorts of flashiness in any communication that partners will misconstrue as a misuse of money. There should always be restraint even if another partner is paying for all the flashy stuff.

So think wisely, and also use your non-profit's money wisely.

Twittering in Times of Disasters

Its a very wet season here in the Philippines and the wet season means typhoons. Tropical storm "Jolina" just passed and our humanitarian arm Operation Blessing was already mobilizing in the wake of the storm.

As par of our fundraising efforts for the storm season, I ventured into twitter.com. I created an account for our organization, obphil, and started inviting people to follow. I used Facebook for this initially. My observation is that I may be doing something wrong as the followers were not coming in.

I was envisioning using Twitter to reach out to partners, both current and potential, and this experiment may be proving that our partners are not the crazy about this phenomenon called Twitter.

Which leads me to a very important point. Experimentation. We need find out if new technology or techniques can be useful for our own organization and for our own fundraising efforts. Twitter may be the fad today but it may not be for everyone.

God bless!