Power Your Organization's Fundraising: How the Partnership Paradigm Will Change Everything

Find new donors! Improve donor loyalty! Influence funders! Build enduring funding partnerships!

A new paradigm for finding sustainable funding for:

• Fundraising Professionals
• Development Directors
• Grant Professionals
• Executive Directors

Raising money is about forming partnerships with people who add to your organization’s bottom line. Power Your Organization’s Fundraising defines a partner as any person or group of people who is interested in the success of your organization. Partners can be not only collaborators, but also staff, board members, volunteers, donors, and vendors. They usually have one or more goals similar to yours. Sometimes, though, partnerships are based on common market bases and your partner seems quite different from you. So different that it seems you have nothing in common with each other. You might have to dig very deep for commonalities.

Defining partnerships in such a broad way allows you to accept all kinds of contributions - contributions that go beyond money. There are an almost infinite number of ways that a potential partner can give to your organization. Limiting the contribution to a monetary one is reaping only a fraction of what can be gained.

Power Your Organization’s Fundraising will help you:

• Identify new donors
• Relate to different types of donors
• Meet your donors’ needs
• Acknowledge and validate your donors
• Affect the greater funding environment
• Form win-win funding partnerships
• Ensure maximum profit for your agency

Power Your Organization’s Fundraising will tell you how to broaden your base of partners by understanding and meeting both your needs and theirs. You will learn about good communication and relationship-building skills. You will explore the role of values and how connecting on the basis of values improves the strength of your partnerships. You will understand different types of revenue streams and the tools needed to accept and receipt them. You will also find out about the larger partnership context and how to influence the larger environment such as the effects of culture, the economy, political systems, and the media.

You will then learn how to analyze your partnerships using financial concepts, with plenty of examples of how to predict whether your partnership will be profitable or not. The topic then turns to actually making the deal, both through fair process and fair outcome. The book ends by briefly discussing how to maintain partnerships once they are formed.

Partnerships help your organization further its impact. Furthering your impact only helps your organization become more financially stable. Strong organizations that make substantial impact with leveraged resources are attractive to all kinds of funding partners. So your bottom line soars.

About CharityChannel's In the Trenches Series

You'll know an In the Trenches book not just by its cover, but by the author's fun, upbeat writing style. But don't be fooled by its down-to-earth approach and ample use of sidebars. In the Trenches books are authoritative and cover what a beginner should know to get started and progress rapidly, and what a more experienced nonprofit-sector practitioner needs to move forward in the subject.

Joanne Oppelt has been improving organizational bottom lines since 1993. Currently Executive Director at CONTACT We Care in New Jersey, Joanne manages day-to-day agency operations, develops budgets, increases net revenues, and oversees organizational marketing and resource development efforts. She is also an adjunct professor at Kean University, where she teaches courses in nonprofit management and fund development.

As Development Director at Community Access Unlimited (CAU) for nine years, Joanne personally raised more than $9.3 million through government, corporate, foundation, and individual support, increasing agency annual operating revenues by more than $1.75 million. She also generated hundreds of thousands of dollars in cost reductions by negotiating strategic vendor relationships. In addition, Joanne created the agency corporate marketing materials and instituted the CAU Community Network.

During her tenure at Prevent Child Abuse-New Jersey, Joanne oversaw a $1.2 million U.S. Department of Education grant. She formed a statewide Parental Assistance Advisory Committee, bringing together groups with competing agendas in a common goal. She also garnered national and state recognition of the organization as the NJ Parents As Teachers State Coordinating Agency.

While at the March of Dimes Central Jersey Chapter, Joanne facilitated the funding allocation process through the volunteer Health Professionals Advisory Committee. She also facilitated the volunteer Community Health Education Committee, where she implemented professional education conferences and increased volunteer participation in the Babies and You Speakers Bureau by 200 percent.

Joanne’s other books include Moving Up to Executive Director: Lessons Learned from My First 365 Days, Succeed in Your Nonprofit Funding Partnerships: Analyzing Their Costs and Benefits, and Confessions of a Successful Grants Writer: A Complete Guide to Discovering and Obtaining Funding. Joanne holds a Bachelor of Arts in Education from Bethany University in Santa Cruz, California, and a Master of Health Administration from Wilkes University in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania.

She lives in New Jersey with her husband, Rick.