Here's our best advice on fundraising for your favourite cause
Whether you're fundraising for a charity you love, or helping out with a crowdfunding campaign, we've collated some of our top tips from when we successfully raised over $21,000 for our own crowdfunding campaign. Thanks Thea!
How can I talk about this with friends and family?
First off, I want to acknowledge how normal it is to be nervous when asking your friends/family to pledge support/donate/get involved. We’re all here as super committed people, and the reality is that many others aren’t in the same head space. It doesn’t mean that they are bad people, just that they have channeled their care elsewhere, and that’s totally fine.For the majority of people you approach, their order of priorities will be:
- You
- What they’re having for dinner that night
- All the other things in their life
- The fundraising/crowdfunding campaign
This is totally fine, it just means that to encourage people to donate we need to play to THEIR priorities. And you are one of those priorities. So we need to not just tell them about YFM, but instead, tell them about you, and why you care about YFM.
Three strategies
These are three separate strategies but ultimately can be combined. It’s important for you to know your audience - a strategy for one person in your life won’t work for others, so it’s really about recognising which strategy/combination of strategies will work for your audience:
1. Share your story
The golden rule is that people don’t care about what you do, they care about why you do it. Go watch this interesting talk with Simon Sinek who makes this point really well.For example, my sister can say to me ‘I’m going to walk to the shops’, but I don’t care that much. But if she says ‘I’m going to the shops, because I think our lives need more chocolate and that’s what I’m going to bring us back’, then I’m in, and I’m excited she’s going to the shops. One step even further would be for her to say ‘I’m going to walk to the shops, because I’m terrified of talking to the shopkeeper, and for me, it’s really important to overcome that fear’ then I am going to be her biggest damn supporter. I’d give her whatever money she needs to buy chocolate, if it means she can overcome her fear.This is why we really encourage everyone to set personal goals and reflect on what they want to learn from the campaign, because it allows you to share a story with your friends, and add it to your emails and general conversations, anything.How does this translate to crowdfunding? A conversation could go like this:Friend - ’Hi Jess, how are you?’ Jess - ‘I’m really good. Actually, it’s been a bit of a hectic week, I’ve been working on this thing and I’ve set myself a challenge of raising x amount of money. And I’ve never done that before, but I really want to learn how to do it”Basically, if you share what you’ve reflected on - what you’re good at, and what you want to learn, people will be naturally curious, and already they’re part of the story.
2. Ask their advice
Bring people into your story. This is basically an extension on the advice above - it’s about bringing them in to help them fix your problem.So you’ve said you’re doing this fundraising/crowdfunding, it’s a question of actively getting them in on the convo and encouraging them to sharing what they might know about this topic. Questions might be “Have you done this before? How did you overcome any challenges you face? Do you have any advice? How would you try and reach this goal?”People feel good when they can help you fix your problems. By the time you have that convo, it’s really natural to simply ask them to be part of your crowdfunding campaign. A simple “would you like to support the campaign too?” is all you need.
3. Ask straight up
Just ask people. “I’m doing this campaign, this is what it’s for, will you support it?”. You probably have some people in your life that you can just ask this straight up. If so, then go for it!Remember, not everyone you approach will donate and that’s fine. If you can get 20-30% of the people you approach to donate that will be excellent!Love this advice? You'll probs also enjoy this advice on changing behaviour (without being a dick).Image credit: Nikki To