Future Fundraising Now

Detailed reporting respects donors of all sizes

I wish all nonprofits would do this, but almost nobody does: actually tell donors where their money goes. Not in the form of a pie-chart of the entire budget, but what one donor's giving specifically made possible.

Hip online fundraiser charity:water is doing it. They have a program called Dollars to Projects that actually tells donors, Here's the specific project you helped make possible.

Donors of even modest gifts can track their gift to a specific single project. They get its name, the type of project, how many people it reaches, some background context and photos, and who else donated to it (most of them seem to be anonymous). Donors can even find their project on Google Maps.

Here's an example report.

I wish this wasn't noteworthy. I wish most nonprofits were doing this for their donors. That would help overcome one of the most common reasons people don't give: My gift won't make a difference. How many donors would say that if they knew they could expect reports like this?

Everyone who's not doing this (i.e., virtually everyone): Take charity:water's example. Treat all your donors with the respect that's due them. Figure out how to report what their gifts make possible!

Fundraiser lets donors connect with kid-focused projects

I love this: My Action for Children. It does a great job of letting donors navigate through a variety of projects and fund the ones they like.

Donors can search by type of project or geographically within the UK. Donors are promised email reports from the projects they support.

As with any fundraising, this donor-choice genre has a lot of learning to do. What choices are meaningful to donors? What choices are confusing? How much detail does it take to motivate gifts? How much is too much? What's the right type of post-gift feedback? The only way to learn these things is to field the project and start measuring what happens.

It seems UK fundraisers are pulling ahead of US fundraisers in donor-choice sites like this. Fellow Americans, are we going to let that keep happening?

I have two minor complaints about this site, which I voice in hopes that they'll fix them to raise more funds:

• The photography majors in picture-perfect, cute-as-button children who appear to be stock photos, not real children. As you dig through the site, you start to see evidently real kids, and the authenticity factor goes way up. The site is at its best when the photos are real.
• There's an odd tagline on every page: "As long as it takes." Gosh, that's discouraging. Maybe that's a legacy brand element. They should take a second look at constantly reminding donors that helping needy kids is difficult and takes a long time. It may be an operational reality, but it sure seem like a marketing drag.

Award winner lets donors fund specific cancer research projects

Congratulations to the first-ever winner of the Fundraiser of the Future Award.

It's Cancer Research UK for its My Projects fundraising website.

The geek name for this approach is crowd-sourcing, because it pulls together a crowd of people to accomplish things individuals can't on their own.

As you can see, users can sift through cancer research projects and choose to fund one they like. They can search by cancer type or location of the research. Then they can either donate, join a "giving group" created by another donor, or start their own giving group and recruit people into it. (I don't know how they inform and update donors to specific projects; I hope it's rich and detailed.)

Donors can fund a project for any reason they like: Maybe a project sounds promising; maybe they know the researchers; maybe it's aimed at a cancer you or a loved one fought. The choice is the donor's

And as far as I'm concerned, that's the magic. It connects people's passion to their giving, which is how it ought to be.

Nay-sayers will note that this cedes the role of deciding what projects should be funded to non-experts, which could lead to important but harder-to-understand projects going underfunded. While I don't doubt that not all projects get equal donor attention, I thumb my nose at that objection. It's an anti-donor smokescreen that a smart organization can (must) solve.

I'm especially glad to see this being done in health fundraising; as a sector, health has been least open to empowering donors. These guys are doing it -- it's possible. The old excuses for traditional top-down, trust-us fundraising are falling away.

This is the way a lot of fundraising will be done in the coming years. Giving donors choice. Treating donors as partners, not ATMs.

Congratulations to Cancer Research UK!

This award is given periodically to fundraisers who get it right in a notable, creative way. If you know of others who deserve the Fundraiser of the Future Award, let know.

Thanks to Giving in a digital world for the tip.