Organizer’s Forum: Grassroots Fundraising
Come learn about simple ways to raise money for your community group or organization! We’ll talk about the ADAPT Fun Run, house parties, raffles, social media, etc.
TUESDAY, MARCH 18, 1-2 pm Eastern time, 12-1 Central time, 11-12 Mountain time, 10-11 am Pacific time
- Call in number: 1-213-342-3000
- Code: 193134#
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MARK YOUR CALENDARS! The Organizer’s Forum has a call on the 3rd Tuesday of each month, 1-2 pm EST (10-11 am PST).
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Background
The Organizing Workgroup of the National Disability Leadership Alliance hosts these calls the third Tuesday of every month as a resource for disability organizers, in an effort toward building the organizing capacity of the disability community across the country. They generally follow the format of a Welcome followed by 2-3 experts in a given area speaking for a few minutes on their experiences, advice and challenges. The calls include a 20-30 minute question and answer period.
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- Say your name before each time you speak
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So you can mark your calendars now, Organizer’s Forums are held on the 3rd Tuesday of every month. If you have suggestions for call topics or presenters for upcoming topics, please email them to jlehman7@gmail.com or dcoleman@cdrnys.org.
Looking forward to talking with you all!
Date: 03 18 14
THIS TEXT IS BEING PROVIDED IN A ROUGH DRAFT FORMAT. COMMUNICATION ACCESS REALTIME TRANSLATION (CART) IS PROVIDED IN ORDER TO FACILITATE COMMUNICATION ACCESSIBILITY AND MAY NOT BE TOTALLY VERBATIM. THE CONSUMER SHOULD CHECK WITH THE MODERATOR FOR ANY CLARIFICATIONS OF THE MATERIAL.
>> Jessica: We will give people a couple of minutes to join before we get started.
>> Female: Okay.
>> Jessica: What about our do we have our speakers on yet?
>> Joan: Yes, this is Joan.
>> Jessica: Thank you so much for joining us.
>> Joan: It is my pleasure. This is a terrific group.
>> Jessica: Good. And Ted and Bob, are you there?
>> Bob will remember the central time for him, right?
>> Jessica: I don’t know. If he responds to my e mail or text. Should we remind him?
>> Diane: I can. I think I can do that.
>> Jessica: Just send him a quick e mail but I don’t have his number. Why don’t we go ahead and get started with those of us that are on. We can do introductions and people can join us as they get on. So first welcome everyone. Always good to have some of the same voices and some new voices on this call. This is the Organizer’s Forum. Hopefully everybody is in the right place. The Organizer’s Forum is a project that we designed a couple of years ago and the idea is to really expand and support community organizing in the disability community. We’ve changed the format a little in the last few months. What we’ve been doing now this year is alternating between months like this where we talk about strategies for organizing and tips and tricks of the trade for people that are doing this work. Also we sometimes cover different outreach or how we think about the intersections of disability with race or immigration or gender, other identities. And then in the alternate months we are doing more issue based calls. So in April actually we’re going to talk about accessible tax fees and kind of what is happening with that particular issue and what can people do about it. And the Organizer’s Forum is a project of The National Disability Leadership Alliance which is a national coalition of cross disability organizations that have really come together to build a stronger voice for people with disabilities. And the two Co Chairs of the Organizer’s Forum are myself and Diane Coleman. My name again is Jessica Lehman. I work as the Executive Director of Senior and Disability Action in San Francisco and I worked for an Independent Living Center for a number of years. Also involved in hands and hand organization an organization and Diane, do you want to introduce yourself?
>> Diane: Yeah. Hi. I’m Diane Coleman. Head of [inaudible] which was a national disability group that goes with assisted suicide and opposed to assisted suicide and works on various end of life issues as they’re called. And steering organizations with the national disability leadership alliance and things that I like to mention about the alliance Steering Committee is that every organization in it is run by people with disabilities as distinguished from our various supporters and allies. So they’re disability run organizations.
>> Jessica: If you want to learn more about NDLA or keep up with the Organizer’s Forum we have a website now. Huge thanks to Kristin and The Center for Disability Rights in Rochester, New York for keeping up on that. It is www.disabilityleadership.org. And Kristin does a great job of getting information up there as I get it to her. I think I’m a little behind. I apologize but we generally have transcripts and recordings of past calls up there. So if you miss a call or if you know someone who did let them know. They can get it on the website. And then so we have a call the same time every month. Always the third Tuesday of the month at this time. If you are wondering what the next call is about, you can look at that on the website as well. We are always looking for new ideas for topics. If you have some ideas please talk to Diane or me. And thank you to NDLA for covering the captioning for this call. So I apologize that I had not realized that we had the wrong link up. So hopefully we have some people on our chat. You can always log on there and type questions and then we can read those out on the call in addition to the questions that people can just say on the call. A couple of other reminders for the call, please speak slowly and clearly and say your name before you speak so we know who is talking. This is an important one. Please whatever you do, do not put us on hold. We’ve had problems with somebody walking away and the hold music drowns out the rest of the call. If you need to step away for a moment just hang up your phone. You can always call right back when you come back. And please mute your phone if you’re not speaking. You can just hit star 6 and mute it. You can hit star 6 again to unmute if you would like to talk. The other thing I want to say before I move into the topic we recognize that an hour a month is not really enough to do justice to the meaty topics that we bring up. We are working expounding the conversation in different ways. We have liserv. It is Organizer’s Forumsforum@yahoogroups.com and we invite everyone. You can go to yahoogroups.com and do a search for Organizer’s Forum all one word and there is not a lot of traffic your in mail won’t get filled up but it is a good way to share some information and be on the calls to, hey, you know, this stood out. I would like to talk more about this. Same thing on FaceBook. We have Organizer’s Forum there. For those of you that are on FaceBook during the call or after the call we would really encourage you to post something that stood out to you questions so that we can kind of share that beyond the call. I’m sorry I have a phone ringing in the background wish I could mute that. I think I covered it. I always ask Diane to remind me if I forgot anything.
>> Diane: I can’t think of anything that you have forgotten.
>> Jessica: Thank you. Today’s topic is grass roots fundraising and we’re delighted to have a good slate of speakers to do this last minute. My apologies for that. Basically we felt like this is an important call because all of us who are organizers have had to raise money for our organization. And if we’re doing organizing we are maybe not getting major grants but it is about what are some of those fun and symbol things that we can do that involve the folks that we’re working with and bring in money to keep our work going. So our three speakers today are Bob Kafka, who is a national organizer for ADAPT and we have Ted Jackson who is a statewide organizer for Statewide Independent Living Centers and we have Joan Flanagan who is a fundraising trainer and author of the The Grass Roots Fundraising Book. Doesn’t sounds like people had a preference for who goes first. Bob, did you join the call?
>> Bob: I’m here.
>> Jessica: I was going to leave it up to you and Joan who was going to start us off.
>> Bob: I’ll begin. Joan I read her book and she is like the paramount person on grass roots fundraising. My name is Bob Kafka. I’m with ADAPT. We do a fun run disability and one thing I learned about fundraising everybody hates it. It is the thing that people least like to do and everybody hates to ask for money. The thing I learned in our fundraising is if you don’t ask you can’t raise any money. It is really sort of foundation my thinking that how can we get people to ask in the most simple way. What will motivate people to do that. Also recognizing that people don’t have a lot of time like Jessica just outlined and how are we able to get people who don’t have a lot of time who hate to fundraise in the first place. Our fun run and with a couple of things in mind. One is that it is an easy way. Gives a way for people to ask. It is disability rights. It is a shared opportunity. And organizations benefit. An ADAPT fundraiser but also is fundraiser for other organizations. It is simple for people who have computers is that you can register online if you get what you call your own personal link. Very much like you have seen in political advertising you click on it. And it falls down and then they can sponsor you. And the thing that made it a great opportunity for people all over the country is that it ask it can be done without actually fizz Italy and people become virtual runners. And it is on organizations that people can support. When people click on that. They register and it benefits them and benefits Adam. Currently we have 30, 40, 50 organizations that are listed many of them are the ADAPT local groups but we also have like ADA25. We have parent to parent. NCIL is listed so different organizations. We can list any organization thereon. All they have to do is let me know and then they can register, click on that organization. Any individual that registers and clicks on that organization will benefit. It is a simple way in terms of time and effort. It allows people other thing is it frequently there is sponsoring you not because they know the organization. But they know you personally. It is another thing that people will support individuals if they don’t really know your organizations. So many people don’t know ADAPT. There are many Independent Living Centers that have joined and not know the name of the group but they will support somebody individually if they know that a running they’re running for that organization. So it has been a simple way to respond to the amount of time is limited so it doesn’t take a lot of time. Total accountability. Done through the computer and all secure and nothing done with many of the names and we have a lot of participation. You know. A lot of it online so you can get in touch. But it is just paramount. We have learned in ADAPT that, you know, one of the things that stopped people from participation is just the lack of funds. And, you know, the amount of time that some other things take are, you know, people like I said don’t have a lot of time. So they people that don’t do a lot of things that can raise money like, you know, raffles, bake sales, garage sales, things such as that. But we have, you know, inti fun run into a range of other things that we do so we have different sources of money. So I will I think I’ll stop there. If you have questions or if you want more information, you know, my information is Jessica sent information and you can contact us and let us know if you want to participate. Thank you.
>> Jessica: Thank you, bob. That was really helpful. I realized that I have to apologize I did not do a long introduction and I was going to ask each of you if you would like to say who you were. Bob should I give you a chance to introduce yourself more before we go on?
>> Bob: Sure. I’m an organizer for ADAPT. ADAPT of Texas. Been involved with disability rights now for 31 years. Thirty one years with ADAPT and have been fighting and working on the issue of access on the mainline transportation. Now we’re working to get key people at nursing homes and other institutions. ADAPT if you don’t know is very grass roots. Very activist and known for our direct action and deal with disobedience and also do quite a bit of assistant type of work. I think that is all I want to say.
>> Jessica: Thank you. I appreciate that. I’ll turn it over to Joan. Please introduce yourself and
>> Joan: Okay. This is Joan Flanagan. In Chicago. And a voted early this morning for our primary. I wrote the grass roots fundraising book in 1977. And had been learning more and more about grass root fundraising from whoever I talked to. My question for Bob is, how much money did you make?
>> Bob: ADAPT nationally made about $75,000 with our fun run. Our local groups made about the split made somewhere about $45,000. Distributed to the various different groups across. Again it is the concept is take a small amount of money from a large amount of people. So it is a lot it is very, very productive even though it seems so simple. It really can raise quite a bit of money.
>> Joan: Do you activate those people to become volunteers or participants in your actions? Do you get your donors to be act?
>> Bob: No. We’re scrupulous we don’t do anything with the e mail addresses. It is the ownership of the organization because so much is concerned about privacy. And we assure people that we don’t send out other fundraising or other, you know, mail because frequently we’ve heard that people don’t like to be on mailing lists. The information is only available to the organization who participants with those runners and sponsors in that area. So we just encourage the people who are within the ADAPT network to get involved but those other organizations, that is their information.
>> Joan: For the advance people if you raised $75,000, that is a lot of money. So then do you go back to those people and say, you know, we’re taking five bucks to Austin. Get onboard.
>> Bob: The local groups, I mean, this is where the benefit again people ask how, you know A captain brings so many people. It is each local group doing their own grass roots fundraising and different groups, you know, work harder or whatever and others to do this and, so, again, it is we use the national money to help subsidize the rising costs of hotel rooms in Washington because they’re approximating almost $300 a night. That is how we use a lot of the national money raised. But the local groups use that money purchase travel and hotel space in Washington, D.C. So it is very grass roots in the sense that the local groups sort of drive how much they can raise using this or that one fundraiser and we encourage people to do other types of things sort of some of the stuff that you have outlined in your grass roots fundraising book.
>> Joan: Here is my last question. What would you do differently next year?
>> Bob: The thing that I have been sort of grappling with and maybe people who are much more expertise in fundraising than me is to try to find out why people are not participating at the level. It is one of the simplest ways to raise dollars that I have ever seen but it is I don’t know if it seems too easy then people think there must be something or some hook that is not there. So again what I keep looking for is how to explain it better so that we get more people to participate because again there is a self interest from ADAPT perspective but also again if we don’t get grass roots people raising money, they can’t be active in their local communities which is really the heart of what ADAPT is about in terms of not just the national but really the local groups so it is really looking for a better way to, you know, get to market I suppose is the best thing or to publicize it, you know, so that it reaches a larger audience. That really are looking for ways to raise money.
>> Joan: Good. Good. Excellent. I’m proud of you. This is Joan Flanagan. And I have been fundraising since I sold girl scout cookies when I was 10. I am now 66. So I have done a lot of fundraising. As a community organizer I think the most important thing your people need to know is fundraising and especially grass roots fundraising is organizing. What I hear is people say well we don’t have time to do fundraising because, you know, I’m taking people downtown to City Hall and going to the state capitol or doing this online. Oh my we don’t have time to fundraise. I think if you do it right, your fundraising is part of your organizing. What I think is the goal of organizing is to build a majority organization. So you want to get 50% of the voters plus one to be advocating for our side of the issues. And to be advocating for funding for our side of the issues. And in order to do that, you need unrestricted money. Grass roots fundraising is the way to get unrestricted money. So what I mean by grass roots fundraising it is things that is not grants. Although grants are wonderful and we love our friends in the foundation business. It is not government funds. It is money that comes from the people who share your values and your mission and want to support your work. So if you begin to look at it as a way that you do your organizing, it gets a lot easier. It isn’t like it is something else that we have to hold our nose and do but like all the organizing we do, it is the way to recruit more people and to identify our leaders. Leaders are people who have followers. So it honestly doesn’t matter if you do the fun run or you do a bake sale or you do a book sale or you sell raffles, whatever is appropriate for you. The goal is to find who has networks. And what is wonderful about fundraising is you can trace the sale. So if no good brings in 20 people and [NAME] brings in 100 people, you know [NAME] is the real leader. Whether or not she ever says anything in a meeting so I think the goal of fundraising is to be intentional about capturing names and involving people at the rate they want to be involved. I think the least is being online activist which is really important and literally anybody who is over seven can do that. Then to be a participant as of a lot more people will volunteer than be leaders and then everybody would. Organizing, business, what government, everybody is looking for leaders. And our job is to find leaders and then make them better leaders. Better leaders are the less it falls under the shoulders of the organizers to have to do this. Last thing I have to say is your job as organizers is to take your people, whoever they are, and whatever their challenges are, and make them better leaders. And in a perfect world, you design your fundraisers so that the first year the organizer does a fun run and say I do it as the organizer with Fred. Second year Fred does it with Mable and I do a little bit of advice. Third year I put on my party frock and go to the party. Fred and Mable hand us a check. The long range goal is to develop leaders that can handle your event fundraiser and ideally your membership fundraising and your job is to just do like you’re organizing is to motivate, encourage and train and reward them. So they’ll do it and it is your job then you can do more program and issue organizing.
>> Joan: Hello, Jessica.
>> Jessica: Are you done speaking or did we lose you?
>> Joan: Yes. It is my five minutes.
>> Jessica: Okay. Thank you. I really appreciate you talking about that and our next speaker is Ted Jackson. Ted, have you joined us?
>> Ted: I certainly have.
>> Jessica: Do you want to introduce yourself a little further and then go ahead and speak.
>> Ted: Great. So thank you first of all for inviting me to join this call. I have joined it as a participant several times and have always enjoyed these calls. My name is Ted Jackson. I’m the community organizing director at California Foundation For Independent Living Centers and I work on a project called The Disability Organizing Network or the DO Network which connects system changed advocates or organizations at the Independent Living Centers across California’s and about 1000 volunteers to work on our access now campaigns to build accessible communities. But that is my job here at CFILC, I’m the fundraiser for capital day which is the nation’s longest day of cross disability and unity at our state capital here, about 3000 people. So every year I have the pleasure of raising about 45 to $50,000 on top of everything else that I’m doing to make sure that the event goes off and goes off well. And in my previous through out my career I have always been in a position where there has been a fundraising element. I come from working on campaigns. Bond initiative, some electoral stuff a lot of nonprofit work. I actually got my start politically as a fundraiser. I work at equality California and doing political work and field organizing but there was a fundraising component. And so what I told Jessica that I would talk about a little bit today is really kind of the fundraising planning in those planning pieces that you need to put in to being successful so that you can fund your very, very important work. And so there is kind of three things that I would like to start off with on people’s minds and one is you need a plan. You need a fundraising plan. What I usually recommend that folks do whether you’re planning to fund something for 3 months or whether you’re really planning to fund your organization for the whole year, you want to start by taking a look at your budget. So you’re going to start by doing your budget. Working collaboratively with other folks within your organization to craft that budget. Although as an Executive Director or head of a project you might have the final say in putting all the pieces together there. And you want to map out throughout the year or throughout the few months, whatever the period of time is, when you’re going to be spending money. That is really, really important. Put it on a time line. We’re spending $5000 this month. Spending $1000 here. Spending 10,000 here. And you want to make sure that you’ve got the money raised and in the bank to be able to handle that, at least a month in advance. So you’re going to have kind of two lines there on your time line. One line is when money is spent and one line is when money is raised and in the bank. That is really going to help you begin to think about what are the things that you’re going to do to raise that money? The next thing is fundraising is grass roots. All fundraising is grass roots. Money is nothing more than a sign of support in the same way that, you know, someone signs a pledge or identifies themselves as a voter to support a particular issue or commits to, you know, doing something; however, those signatures or those commitments sometimes are small and sometimes they’re really big. But it really is a sign of support and so that you know, the variation of that support kind of grass roots model is going to be different. Sometimes the check is going to be $5 and sometimes it is $10,000. But it is not all going to come at once. And you have to realize that there is large pots of money and sometimes small pots of money. What I used to do, electoral campaigns, back in Ohio several years ago, I worked with a candidate that was really, really wonderful. He was a really, really good fundraiser. You see all the huge checks come in but when you average out his donations they average out to $35 a person because there was such a large pot of money at 5, 10, $20. And, so, you have to figure out that it is just like getting pledged signatures. If you’re going to get a thousand pledged signatures a month not that you go out one Saturday and get 1000. It is 15 this day, 10 this day, 20 this day. it really is. Whatever your fundraising is, it is going to be grass roots. The last thing is that you need to have a diversified plan. This is where I’m going to spend the most time talking. A diversified plan, you have got to be getting that money from many different forms and sources. We just heard someone talk about grant fundraising and I’m not a grant funder. I have been part of a team that has applied for grants. I have helped out in that process but I have not been the grant writer. The one thing I can say about grant writing I think that it is important and I have certainly worked on grants. They have paid for my work. It is that you have got to be really clear what your outcomes are. So I’ll give you an example. Your indicators when I worked at equality California we had a grant given to us to change change attitudes on gay marriage across California. From nonsupport to support. It was for a public education campaign. 501(c)(3) type of work so it was not PAC or C 3 type work we were talking about support and not voting and the lead up to eight and ran concurrent through with it. And we were very careful, you know, to write that in the grant what our indicators were. Our indicators were going to be dollars raised at house parties and number of donors. And number of people who signed a pledge support. Because we were not going to be able to in three year’s time go wow we have got gay marriage in California or we have changed the world. So you know those types of things are important grant fundraising but diversified plan you really are going to look at where you are going to get money from individual small donors, where you’re going to get them from individual large donors and then events. House parties. Jessica, did anyone discuss events or house parties yet? I know I was a little bit late.
>> Jessica: That has not been discussed yet.
>> Ted: Thank you. Then of course social media. I’m going to quickly go through each one. I love to talk about events and house parties because I actually think they’re one of the greatest things that you can do to raise not just money but to raise a fundraising base of donors for your organization. An event or house party is really cool. It is fun. You have people in a social environment but you have people who are coming together because they care about an issue. There is a lot of feel good stuff that happens there. Usually there is some wine and cheese. Wine is not bad at fundraising sometimes. Especially when you’re going to ask folks for money. But, you know, if you want to do a house party system or an event planning system you really need to find that team of like five or six people who are willing to host a house party themselves, invite all of their friends in let you invite people that are in their area. You’re going to probably go for a lower dollar donation. I have seen some big dollar donations go at house parties. Bringing people together at someone’s home to talk about an issue that is important to all of them. Is to hear from a staff member in a particular organization that was addressing that issue. It is really, really important. There is a support thing that happens there that is well beyond money. Then they’re able to each donate whatever the amount suggested donation is. If it is $25. I have done them at $10. I have done them at 100. I have done them at 500. The great thing is if you have 50 people in a room. Everyone donated $10. At the end you have got to say $500. So all of a sudden people are part of something larger than just themselves. The other thing is you get face time with people. That is really important. You get face time in a social environment where they really kind of get to know you and get to like you if you’re the fundraiser there. I highly recommend that because the person who came for the $10 at the house party maybe decided to give an extra $25 is someone that you may be able to talk to later on down the line about a $500 donation. So it is where you’re going to meet a wide variety of people who may be able to do more down the line. So house parties are very, very important. The other thing is you’re probably going to find people who want to do their own house party. House parties tend to produce other house parties because people really get on the bandwagon. When I have been working on either public education campaigns or political campaigns where house party was part of our structure, I don’t think that I have ever had a house party that didn’t lead to doing two or three more house parties where people wanted to host them as well. And then you have got the individual donations. And as you’re you know, in your diversified plan we talked about house parties. Individual donations where you’re going to sit down with coffee for someone or you’re going to get on the telephone for someone and individually ask them to support. So it is a one on one rapport thing. I highly recommend that phone is okay for the individual donors. You can even do phone banks if you have got a list of people that you think you can target that they’re going to do $50 or less, you want to pull your staff together for a phone banking day, do a training with them on the issues that you’re raising money about and do calls through the list and get those donations over the phone. But the large donors I definitely recommend that you want to sit down maybe have lunch. Maybe have coffee. Because you’re going to want to give a much larger conversation and a much larger look at your organization and the work that you do. And understand with large donors that if you’re especially if it is a first introductory conversation, don’t go for the full 10K. You might want to start at $500 or $1000. I tend to edge my asks up a little bit. If I think I can get $1000 out of someone, I will ask them for 1500. Gladly thankfully accept 1000. That way in the kind of power play there they kind of feel like, you know, they have won in the situation and they’re doing something good and you want to make sure that you also don’t ask them for too much money. The one thing I will say when you’re asking, even if it is an individual small donor or individual large donor, explain your organization. Answer their questions. Then go in for the ask. Don’t say a word. There is always an awkward pause. When you ask someone for a couple thousand dollars or 500 or whatever it is, there is always an awkward pause there. Don’t feel the burden and the pressure that awkward causes because what they’re really doing in their mind they’re going through their checkbook in their mind to figure out if they have that to give you right now. Or what they can do. The other thing that you can do sometimes is to break it down. This is if you have got a house this is a good spiel for house parties where you have got some possible large donors in the room. Maybe you ask people for $25 to come to the house party. If you want to do an additional ask, this works both at a house party and works well also with large donors just to say something like, how about spreading out your contribution? I’m going to ask you for $1200. Maybe it is $100 a month. Who here can do $100 a month. I like to tie $1200 in $100 a month into it is the price of a Starbucks Coffee once a day. People can relate to that. So you can find those large donors out there if you relate on a daily experience with them. Then also as you’re building these relationships, because again you know fundraising is a grass roots thing. You’re building relationships. You want to make sure that you’re cultivating good relationship with those people that have the capacity to donate a lot more than you’re asking for them. Asking from them. And I call them the come to Jesus donors. Maybe they’re someone you started at $1000 or 500 and they have kind of slowly built up to, you know, last year was 1000. This year they’re giving 2500 but you know they have the capacity. Maintaining a regular relationship of information. You’re making sure that they know about your successes and the progress. So that if that period of time comes up where you have the opportunity to do something really big, you need something from them, you know, a larger pot of money. You can go and ask them. Or, you know, we’ve been doing so much and doing so well. We’re going to struggle and make payroll. My very first campaign we had a donor who ended up donating a bunch of money because he started out it was an important issue to him. Started out $500. Ended up putting $100 in campaign and a couple of times he had to save us on payroll so we could pay our field organizers and that was all through the relationships. And then the last thing in your diversified plan I highly recommend social media. In social media I include e mails. They’re not as affective. When you compare them to other things. But they can be greatly affective as a low dollar form of donations. You’re not necessarily going to get, you know, $1000 out of someone. Although it will happen once in a while. But using FaceBook and the causes tool and a regular e mail blast with a donation ask in it, you’re going to find that over the course of the year someone might give you five or $10 each time and I can’t tell you how many times I have seen a $1200 donor who like donating $100 a month. They also send 20 bucks in every time we send them an e mail. If we do that, you know, every week, we got an extra thousand dollars out of them. My
>> Diane: I think I probably should these are really great ideas and I have the feeling given our usual audience that they’re going to want to ask specific questions that will draw out what you’re saying and what the previous speakers have been saying. So if it would be all right since we have got about
>> Ted: That was my final point anyway. Interrupted at the right time.
>> Diane: So are there any folks that have been listening that would like to start with comments or questions? If your line is on mute it would be star 6 to unmute.
>> This is [NAME] from ADAPT. Hello.
>> Cart Provider: Hard to hear her.
>> Diane: Yes, I can hear you.
>> Female: I’m interested in [off mic] about the social media. I like to get a little bit more information on that. I wanted to ask Ted if, does he have a transcript or any type of literature handwritten about the house parties and social media that I could possibly get?
>> Diane: Did you hear that?
>> Ted: I double hit mute. Sorry. I do have some house party kits. I’ll send them on to Jessica and she can send them out to everyone. Really I think one of the organizations that has the best materials if you go on their website is the national gay and lesbian task force. That is who trained me. I think some of the materials they have on there are one that we worked on collaboratively w they have house party kits and stuff. I’ll find you some stuff from campaigns and things like that, that I have done. To the social media question, the interesting part about social media whether it is an e mail blast or I consider e mail with that. Just all the web stuff. Whether it is a FaceBook causes page where you’re putting something out on FaceBook. Whether it is a tweet about hey you know this is coming up. Are you going to join the fundraiser. You going to join the house party? It is a way to keep your need for funding as well as your message constantly in the minds of people. It is a way to like it is kind of wringing wetter out of a damp towel. They have got your money but you have the last fits because they tend to donate 5, 10 or $20. Not much at all. I had a friend that maxed out to Howard Dean before the primary began in ’04 with $5 donations. Every time he got an e mail. So you wring out that little bit of money. The other thing that you need to know I think that is important is there is a little bit of a misnomer about about social media and FaceBook and all of that web presence. That presence really starts by building a face to face relationship. And you know I know Jessica is really a good grass roots organizer and she and I have a lot of similar ideas about that whole face to face experience being around people and then getting data. Never send people out without getting people to sign up on a list. It is when you get them on that list after your personal interaction with them, that you can then send them an invite to join you on FaceBook. Then send them an e mail. All of that is just a reminder of, you know that, personal interaction. You know, the best example that we have seen has been the Obama campaign in two elections the way they use social media. But you know before they started to maximize social media, they had outreach centers in every single state during the primaries in 2008. They spent an enormous mount of money to send field organizers and volunteers out to fairs and festivals and canvassing door to door and getting a personal connection and then able to connect through electronic connection. Does that answer your questions?
>> Female: Yes it did. Thank you very much.
>> Diane: I don’t know if Joan and Bob have anything to say about the use of those kinds of tools as well.
>> Joan: I would say the best way to learn how to do house parties is to go to house parties. If you get invited to anything, go. Offer to help. Even if all you can do at the beginning is clean up, do it. When Obama started his first campaign he lost to Bobby Rush, he was lucky if he could get his neighbors on his block to do a house party for him. He was glad to get $10. But now he won’t walk in your door unless you guarantee him $15,000. You have got to start some place. So this is an election year. Pick a candidate who shares your values. Offer to be in his or her house party campaign. A good candidate can do like five of these a night. It is a master’s class how to do house parties. I think on social media I agree it is the way to keep you top of mind and the rule here is the customer is always right. There is some people who would never go to the most wonderful party in the world but they’ll get connected to you on e mail or FaceBook. In that case, we want to involve everybody so offer that as an option.
>> Female: Okay. A question on that or sort of a statement. As far as the social media, it is better to have met someone face to face before you develop your group that you’re FaceBooking or tweeting to by meeting them face to face first before you contact them instead of just contacting them through e mail?
>> Ted: Yeah. Your outreach efforts are really important. They’re going to introduce you to other people. They’re going to help build your universe through electronic contact through their friends so there is an electronic contact you’re going to make as well. You make you want to make contact with the coolest people on FaceBook because then their friends will electronically contact you. So not everyone you’re going to meet face to face. But to get yourself started that is the best way to work. I can’t tell you how many people I have seen who like just opened a FaceBook page for their cause and think that the world is going to arrest to them and no. It is you have to do a lot of hard work to build that base. Once it is built you’re golden.
>> Diane: I would like to add to the social media discussion and connect it back to the fun run, Bob, if you don’t mind. And I have been gradually working with my Board of Directors to get involved in the fun run. The way of fundraising both for adopt and Not Dead Yet. So my board members are all over the country and they’re not going to DC in May with ADAPT. But they have the ability to sign onto the system be a virtual runner or have to be in the city where there is going to be a fun run. Fine. And they can take the sign up that they do and gives them their very own little web page that they can put a message in or the message is already there if they want to stick with the one that is there. They can edit it at will and it gives them a lig. They can send that out through their FaceBook. Through their Twitter. And whatever to all the people that they already know and who would want to support them. When those donations come in, we split them basically 50/50 between Not Dead Yet and national ADAPT. Both causes that are board members and their friends want to support. So it really is, you know, very easy and very productive and good for two causes. I know what Bob said it was issue of getting everybody to participate. Some people don’t realize how easy it is going to be until they do it.
>> Bob: The fun run is what we have been doing but it is easy to raise money if people know what you’re rating it for. Not just to raise money. That is again through the social media you can actually, you know, promote that. But again, you know, sometimes people go into fundraising saying I just want to raise this amount of money. They really never actually say what it is for. And so it is you know, again if one is going to use social media and today it is very powerful. Again the way that Diane has described how Not Dead Yet has been raising money, you know, illustrates how simple it is to be able to do that when it can be incorporated with a whole bunch of other types of things that you do. But this one is literally with a couple of hours of just signing up and then sending it out to your e mail address book or putting it on FaceBook or Twitter, it is, you know, it has benefits because what it does is that it gets it out to a large amount of people. It gets your name of your organization out there and it gives you a way to ask and what is so great about it is that people can just delete it and it stops or they can select a way to sponsor you as an individual. They can pay immediately to through PayPal or send the check or wait until they get an electronic Bill and, in addition, it has for those that don’t have computers, it has traditional walk around form on our website adapt.net [sp]. So it is time and very limited but also has a way to be productive very much like Ted said, you got a small amount of money but the reason why it raises so much is if you start calculating it, you send it out to a lot of people. You can raise 500, 600 as an individual with some times a garage sale or bake sale might do that. Hours and hours and days of planning that can literally be done with a couple of hours of individual work. If you outreach not only to people in your organization, people who just want to support. So if somebody is not a Not Dead Yet member but wants to support of the work of fraternity or sorority that wanted to help they can all sign up register for the fun run and when the screen drops down which organization they want to support they can select Not Dead Yet many they can select Independent Living Center whichever group is listed. Social media in addition allows you to get it out on your FaceBook page and your Twitter account and all the others that I’m not as aware of that would benefit.
>> Female: This is [NAME] again from Massachusetts. We’re a fairly new organization. I did do fun run last year. We’re not sure if we will be able to make the DC action this May. But we are going to be doing the fun run. We have put it in motion without new members. But yes. I do agree that that is a good way to get the money. And I’ll
>> Female: I have a question. Can you hear me? I have a quick question. Sorry to I feel like we’re focusing too much on social media and I want to ask a question. I don’t think it has been answered but I jumped on late. I wonder what are some unique best practices or barriers within the disability community of fundraising that we could all utilize moving forward.
>> Diane: Who would like to tackle that one. That is all we’re going to have time. For
>> Ted: I would be happy to chime in on that. That is a really, really good question. There is two things that come to mind right away. One that is we have high unemployment rates in the disability community especially for those organizations that are working with consumers. And consumer populations and that tends to be your universe or the consumer populations of an Independent Living Center or services or benefits. And so you’re not going to get that kind of money in. That is a barrier. So what you really need to do is to be building a broader base community of support that goes out to nonconsumer to stable community members. Folks that you might meet at something attainabilities expo or something like that. But then also branching out to the company that make assistive technology. That are making money off of stuff. You know. Eventually, hopefully, going out to the community at large. Getting people who are who think they don’t know someone that is disabled who have not considered issues of the disability community to consider those issues. That is why things like house parties and social events are so good because you’re going to get people to reach out to their own personal networks. You know, if the model that seems a little odd to be reaching so far out but essentially it is what has helped the LGBT community and the change that we’re seeing on their issues across the country. It helps expand their fundraising quite a bit. The other thing that we need to consider what type of organization you work for and how is it the core funding for that organization? Are they restrictive funds or nonrestricted funds? So, for example, whether they support you going out and fundraising or not. If you work for an organization that is funded mostly off of grants from the federal or state government you’re going to be in restricted funds. Your fundraising abilities are going to be constrained a little bit about who you can ask and what you can be doing. That is why it is so important.
>> Jessica: I’m sorry to cut you off again.
>> Ted: Cool.
>> Jessica: Finish your thought there.
>> Ted: I was finishing. Your timing was excellent, Jessica.
>> Jessica: Good. Good. I just realized we’re at the hour. I want to close before we lose our captioner and respect everybody’s time. Just a couple of things before you all sign off. A huge thank you to our speakers, Ted, Joan and Bob. You were excellent and I think we all learned a lot. I really appreciate how you covered some different types of fundraising that I think will work for different people. Thank you so much for being on. If you do have follow up items a couple of you mentioned different things, as Ted mentioned please send them to me. I can send those out. What I’ll do is send them out through the Yahoo! group. If you’re not on there go to yahoogroups.com, do a quick search for Organizer’s Forum all one word and click join. It is easy if you have any problems you can e mail me let me go. I can pass those on. We also will have in information on the website www.disabilityleadership.org from the transcript and the recording will be up there in probably about a week. And again, I would really ask people to take a second and put any quick thoughts or question on FaceBook or the listserv so people who were not on today can hear a little bit about it or for those of us who are we can keep this session going. Thank you to our captioner.
>> Cart Provider: You’re welcome.
>> Jessica: We really appreciate that. I don’t want to forget that. Our next call is Tuesday April 15th. Always the third Tuesday of the month. Same time. I’m not going to try to tell you because I’ll mess up the time zone. Our next call is going to be led by United Spinal. It will be on accessible taxis. Then our May call we actually have already set it is third Tuesday in May. That is going to be about the different language we use around disability. Please go ahead and mark your calendar. I think we covered it. Thanks everybody for getting on. We look forward to talking to you soon.
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