Fundraising Outreach—What Works Best?

I recently read an article called “Email:  The Hottest Revenue Generation Technology in Social Media,” and it got me thinking… What works best in fundraising?

Here is my answer:

1. Events
2. Telephone
3. Personal Email
4. Blast Email
5. Facebook
6. Internet Advertising
7. (Direct Mail–not generally profitable)

We have been at this game for a couple of years, and members of our team have been at it for over a decade. All hype and hyperbole aside, we have helped our customers raise over $200M, and we know what works if your objective is raising money.

The more personal, the better the Yield. Yield is the combination of conversion rate (% positive response to an appeal) and gift size. This dynamic is not surprising, as fundraising is a social activity. It always has been, and it always will be.

But this is only a partial answer. Yield is not the only dimension of Efficiency–we also have to consider Effort and Reach. There are different tools for different jobs, and not every organization has all tools available, so the answer is more nuanced than the list above.

Fundraising Efficiency Curve


Consider the four-year college with a rich history of fundraising and giving. For them, one of the most effective ways or raising money is direct approaches centered around reunions (events) and calling campaigns. More and more, colleges are recruiting current students and alumni to help make these calls (volunteer fundraising), which scales the operation considerably. With Fundly tools, they are also adding a scalable approach to personal emails—getting individual alumni to send appeals to their friends to help meet a goal.

For a smaller organization with less affinity, it may be impossible to get a critical mass of volunteers to raise money for you. You may also not have the budget for large events, or the geographical concentration to pull that off. In this case, you want to use more web-based and social media to get your word out. This is highly efficient too, but along a different dimension: Reach.  These media are terrifically efficient at getting the word out, and if you can get the word to enough people, even a small Yield will produce big results.

We have found that a combination of the above efforts is the best. The trick is managing this all from the same place, with the same management tools, reporting, database, etc. That is why we built the Fundly platform—you can execute up and down the efficiency curve seamlessly, depending on timing, resources and circumstance.