Cooking up a recipe for fundraising failure

Here are twelve bits of advice that you need to ignore when you’re asking for donations to your nonprofit:

 

Oh, sure, when you’re building out your nonprofit’s fundraising campaign, pay no attention to digital trends completely. Who needs engagement anyway?

Don’t bother considering your nonprofit’s purpose or crafting an effective elevator pitch. Just throw things out there, see what sticks, and hope for the best.

Don’t waste your time establishing an audience of donors. The more random, the better!

And forget about engaging recent donors and community partners. Who has time to ask for their support anyway?

Compelling multimedia is completely overrated. Stick to plain text and boring graphics.

Why bother filming short-form videos when you can just stick to text-based posts? Nobody wants to see your face anyway.

Who cares about tailoring your posts to different social platforms? Just copy and paste the same thing everywhere.

Don’t bother linking to your nonprofit’s website. Make people hunt for it themselves if they really want to donate.

And definitely don’t encourage your nonprofit staff and board to share your campaign on their personal social media pages. That’s just being pushy.

Why bother automating your posts when you can spend hours manually scheduling them every day?

Analytics? Too nerdy, no time. Just blindly throw time and money at your campaign, cross your fingers, and hope for the best.

Matching gifts? What a waste of time. Let your donors keep their money and spend it on themselves instead.

Yes, a little snarky, but the point is that there are things you need to pay attention to as you seek donations from supporters. You’ll find lots of helpful tips and tricks, plus my special 2-step fundraising system that will help you, in my new book, “The 4-Hour Fundraiser: How To Drum Up Donations In Just 20 Minutes A Day!” If you hate fundraising then you’ll love this book. Watch for it next month, available in paperback on Amazon.com.