Do you suffer from any of these common fundraising problems?

• Fishing in too small of a pond: your database of donors and prospects is too small.
• Not catching much: you are not converting enough prospects into donors.
• Over-reliance on big fish: you rely on a few big donors (or grants!).
• Pond is shrinking: you lose 30-50% of your donors every year.
• Not having a big “fishing fleet”: you’re lucky if you have a director of development and a team; many non-profits can’t afford either.

All of these problems can be solved by moving from “fishing” to “farming”.

Move from “Fishing” to “Farming” 

“Fishing” means your fundraising efforts are ad hoc. You hunt for schools of fish and occasionally land a big one, but you never know for sure whether your fundraising efforts are going to pay-off. It’s time-consuming, wasteful and – worst of all – unpredictable.

“Farming” means you build a large, sustainable fish pond and automate many constituent interactions. You have a large and steady pool of contacts whom you convert into donors when they’re ready and retain for the long-term.

If you are fishing, you have to figure out where the fish are and try to catch them.

If you are farming, you build a healthy habitat for fish and sustainably harvest them. If you need more, you just expand your existing fish pond or build another one.

Advantages

Farming donations rather than fishing for them is:

• Efficient: you can save huge amounts of time and money. Thus, you can get by with a smaller development staff or have them focus on other priorities.
• Predictable: just follow a set of clear steps and you will be able to “harvest” donations with a much higher degree of predictability. It takes work, but it works!
• Automated: while it is not possible to automate every aspect of the fundraising process, you can automate many common interactions so that your donations are literally growing while you sleep. This will also free you up to devote time to the “personal touch” that will wow your donors and prospects.
• Repeatable: instead of constantly having to re-invent the wheel, you can create the key parts of your online fundraising infrastructure and you will only need to occasionally update them or tweak them. This again saves you time and money.
• Measurable: the performance of well-established digital fundraising infrastructure such as prospect funnels is relatively easy to measure and can be tracked over a long period of time. Moreover, you can continuously optimize your digital fundraising infrastructure based on the results you achieve.

> CONTACT ME TODAY to find out how you can do more with less by “farming” donations rather than “fishing” for them.