Many organizations miss the obvious.
Most fundraising is focused on getting cash. There's direct mail, and lots of ways to do that. There's foundation work--developing relationships with foundations, submitting grant proposals and ideally receiving grant proposals. For the more mature organization, they may well focus upon online giving, including credit card and electronic transfer transactions. For the most mature, they may well add a planned giving component.
A quick note on planned giving: most are slow to enter this area because it means a long wait typically. Sometimes a planned gift is 10-30 years in the making. It usually requires a different expertise and thus either a need for outsource or a new hire. That new hire is a hard cost to justify because of an organization's current need for cash.
So what are we missing?
The answer is that the real wealth of this world is not tied up in cash. It's the non cash. It's things like boats, cars, RVs, collectibles, jewelry, timeshares, real estate and business interest gifts. And by the way, I'm not talking about publicly traded stock. Publicly traded stock is almost like cash. It can be sold quickly and virtually every organization can take in stock of that kind.
It's all these other non cash gifts that frankly are hard to handle that represent great opportunity. If it were easy everyone would handle them. But this is where the money is. Giving USA recently completed its numbers for 2006 and told us that nearly $37 billion of non cash gifts were completed. But that is just scratching the surface. For now, I want you to consider the possibilities for your ministry. One source of information is www.iDonate.com or www.adtechinternational.com.
William High