So do you ever talk to your donors? Or Did you know that your donors are actually people

This isnt applicable to those managing corporate donors and the large individual donors. Those fat cats get a fair degree of face time (how scientific that process is is an altogether different matter). This is more about your average donor who expects little and gets even less.

Its important that anyone who has fundraising responsibilities is proactively communicating with donors. There's a wealth of information that can be gleaned by spending time communicating with these donors - vital insights for creating strategies or designing communication. And each of these interactions ensures that you build a loyal base of donors and ambassadors for your organisation.

The most accomplished exponent of this was (& probably is) Ingrid Srinath, ex-CEO at CRY who never lost an opportunity to insert her mail i.d in key communication pieces and thereby opened direct channels of access to a legion of supporters including donors, volunteers and media persons. The investments invariably pay off and i'm sure that most of those people continue supporting CRY in some form or the other.

Most of us dealing with large numbers of donors prefer donors to be this large faceless mass that should be kept at an arm's length. With the increasing proliferation of outsourcing to multiple agencies, that distance has now grown to more than just an arm's length!

So pick up that phone (no dont use a script - have a real conversation) or take a walk with the FTF executive as she knocks on doors... it can be a pretty humbling experience and also a very enriching one.

Power of going viral

I suppose the ultimate test of any good idea or creative is that it becomes the subject of conversation at office lunch tables - the Zoo Zoos being one such.

Here's a super-successful case of an online viral from Brazil that made it big on the back of a smart idea

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DgIvcijPTY8

Dont know how useful this might be to you, but its such a cool piece of work that it needed to be shared :D

First of hopefully many posts

I've been a reluctant and mostly lazy blogger. Most previous attempts have only added to the infospace garbage pile but fortunately have not exceeded two posts. Hopefully I'll fare a little better with this attempt.

Why start this blog - I'd been getting a number of requests from smaller non-profits to assist in their fundraising attempts and unfortunately have had to turn them down on account of a somewhat busy schedule and I also didnt think I was qualified enough to give gyan!Ok ok..the last bit is a bit of a lie :D

However of late, I've been somewhat pissed off by the fact that some real clowns have been trying to pass off as fundraising experts and in the bargain ripping off organisations of hard-to-come-by funds! So i thought it best to share a little of what I've accumulated over the last few years thanks to my work at CRY and Save the Children. But its not just these two organisations - there's a whole bunch of donors, vendors, corporates, blogs and of course a gamut of civil society orgns that have taught me a thing or two. I just can't resist adding this one significant contributor to my education - the church as a marketing organisation- which started penetrating Tier 2 and Tier 3 towns even before they had acquired that status; and were customising their pitch and talking the native languages way before Unilever discovered the potential of localisation!

I'm writing in the hope that there are people interested in fundraising and will find this useful. It would be even better if this becomes an interactive space for sharing of ideas.

Thank u.