Answers to the following questions are your framework for crossing the gap:

1. How do you educate people about your organization?
2. What action steps do you have in place already?
3. Where do you position yourself in the market?
4. How do you plan to achieve your fundraising goal? Refer to your fundraising plan.

We began working with an organization February 8 who answered the questions the following way. The updated answers follow (2 months in).

• How do you educate people about your organization?
  • Feb. 8 – We share our message through newsletters. We invite people to come into our office and we show them around. We do pretty good with our Facebook page. We are members of the chamber and go to events.
  • April 5 – We invite people to a networking event and facility tour at our location each month. We reach out to our partners, invite them and encourage them to become advocates because of the benefits we offer in return.
• What action steps do you have in place?
  • Feb. 8 – We invite people to come in and learn about us. They can volunteer too.
  • April 5 – We designed a postcard invite for our networking events and tour. We give these out to people at events, and encourage advocates to share. We developed benefits for our advocates and share this with people. We train people on how to talk about our services. We talk more about our services and invite more people in. There’s momentum building.
• Where do you position yourself?
  • Feb. 8 – We help people who are ____________. We have grown so much these last couple of years as more people have gotten to know who we are but our fundraising program is struggling. We host an annual event and two years ago we had 300 people attend. Last year we had 200. We have not met our fundraising goal but feel changing our event to a dinner will help.
  • April 5 – As a leader in the community. We educate people on services and we help people to get back on their feet. I love my job. It’s super, super busy but I wouldn’t have it any other way.
• How do you plan to achieve your fundraising goal?
  • Feb. 8 – We will host our annual event in six months. Most people cannot come during the day so we’re doing a dinner instead of a lunch. We’ve already secured a speaker and the location. We will host in six months. Invitations will be sent to our mailing lists.
  • April 5 – Continue moving forward one day at a time. Keep this system that’s building active, among all of the other things I have to do. Our level of success is when we continue to move toward the goal. The process will take time but we will get there and it will be beneficial because of the relationships we’re building.

The statements above were paraphrased. The organization mentioned here learned about the program described in the book “SOAR with Network Fundraising” on

February 8. They have chosen to begin hosting networking events and to follow the system through consulting.

SOAR

• Share your message with others
• Offer opportunities for people to be involved
• Accept the way people want to be involved
• Respect and appreciate all people, ideas, and decisions

SOAR offers monthly, six month, and year-long programs. There is also a fundraising workshop during the summer, July 6 and 7, in Colorado. This is for people to learn the system and resource the tools to help grow a fundraising program. Learn about the different avenues to be involved through this link.