3 Lessons on Fundraising from the Obama Campaign

1. Craft your message with a sense of passion and urgency

Change can happen. I was very impressed with the tone that the Obama campaign used to convey his message. Early on, we heard Martin Luther King’s quote “The Fierce Urgency of Now,” used repeatedly to answer the question of why Obama felt this was the right time to run, even though he was relatively new to government service. . The words of this slogan set the tone absolutely right for what Obama was trying to accomplish, which was to seize the opportunity.

I urge you to look at the situation you are facing in your own non-profit organization. What is the fundamental question you must answer about yourself? What do skeptics say about your organization? What inspires you (specifically) to get up every morning and throw yourself into your work?

Once you answer these questions, boil down a specific answer to just a few words. I guess the Obama campaign people realized early on that a lot of people would ask him why he thought he should be running at this time. He is a young man, after all, and more Senate experience could be good for him. I assume he responded to this question with something along the lines of “Because the situation in this county is pretty dire right now, and I’m the guy to get us all together…” This line of thinking eventually led Obama to remember the MLK . he quotes about the things that are fiercely urgent about the present.

Can you think of a famous quote that applies to your situation? If you can’t, grab a copy of Bartlett’s Quotes or even the online quotes page to get you started. Once you’ve found something that’s catchy and really hits the right tone you’re looking for, start using it. Put it on your letterhead. Put it on your website. Tattoo it on the forehead. (Just kidding about that last one.) But you get the point.

Now this is a lot like revising your mission statement, which is always a good idea. Helps you determine if you are truly on track with your organization’s institutional goals. But please understand that I am not suggesting that you abandon your mission statement in the slightest. However, I believe that adding a famous and pithy quote to your communications can help people to support your cause.

2. Don’t be afraid to set extremely high goals.

I admit that the numbers used in the Obama campaign make me swallow hard. $150,000,000 raised in a single month seems almost fictional in my experience. However, this is not imagined. That’s cold, hard cash. I think one of the main reasons these numbers impress me so much is that I’ve never had to think THAT big before. But, upon further reflection, I realize that no one in the history of presidential fundraising has thought big either. So I’m not alone in my relatively small mindset.

Early on, the Obama team realized that if they really wanted to win the election, given all the inherent challenges ahead, it would take the boldest fundraising effort ever undertaken for this purpose.

But is this really that different from what we face in our own nonprofits on a day-to-day basis? Of course, our needs aren’t in the $150,000,000 per month category, but I’d wager that most of us have plans, dreams, and aspirations that seem proportionally out of reach.

When I was working at a private elementary school, for example, we wanted/needed a whole new playground. Do you know how expensive playground equipment actually is? Neither did I until I started researching it. I mean, how expensive could a slide and some swings really be? But quickly, I began to see that if we wanted quality items, it was going to be way beyond what our budget could afford. $100,000 could have been $1 million to me.

But if playground equipment had been so important to our school, we shouldn’t have been afraid to be bold and set high goals.

If Barack Obama had been scared off by the high cost of a national campaign, he would not have even started his run for the White House, and for millions of Americans, that would have been a great loss.

Therefore, I urge you not to be afraid of seemingly large numbers, even if that number only seems large to you. The numbers are achievable, even the highest, it is only your commitment that needs to be properly calibrated.

3. Seek small donations from a large group – increase the size of the group

What I respected most about the Obama campaign is that the average size of their donations was less than $100. This tells me that we, as nonprofit administrators, don’t necessarily need a big sugar daddy to foot the bill. Of course, that’s always a good thing, but Barack proved that it’s not necessary.

Like most people, I don’t find asking for money to be a pleasant experience. I get especially nervous when I have to ask someone for a lot of money, which in my experience was any gift above the $5,000 level. I think about my own bank account, and $5,000 seems like a pretty big number, so of course it makes me sweat a little.

But I feel much more comfortable asking people for $50 or $100. I think most of us are. So if we really want to raise money and avoid heart attack-inducing stress levels, we just have to ask a lot of people for smaller gifts.

Going back to the playground idea: If the goal was $100,000, you could have broken it down into a campaign where you were looking for 1,000 people to donate $100 each. Or to put it another way, you would need to find 100 people who could get 10 people to donate $100 each. I know this still sounds daunting, but if your mission is that important to you, it’s worth a try.