How do you raise $14 million in four years?
Well, for starters… we’re contacting about 2,000 businesses that are earning $5 million or more per year in sales and are located within our service area. We mailed the top executive at each business and asked them to please include us in their budget for the coming year with a pledge of $10,000 per year for four years. If you do the math on that then you’ll see we have about $80 million in pledge requests currently out.
How do we convert that into actual donations?
You start with a simple phone call each business and ask, “Who handles your donation requests from local charities?” Once you get the name and are connected to that person, simply ask if they received the letter of request we just mailed to them. You’ll be amazed at how many do not recall getting the letter. That’s fine. It gives you an opportunity to drop by to hand-deliver a more detailed request pack with a copy of the original letter.
This takes time. It also takes timing. We mailed the letter in early June because we don’t know which businesses are on a calendar year or a fiscal year. Why does it matter? Because many businesses have donation committees who consider requests and make recommendations for yearly budgets. If the company is on a July to June fiscal year then you don’t want to miss out and have to wait another year to begin the process. If they’re on a calendar year or on a third quarter fiscal year then your June request is a little early… which is fine. You just need to make sure you do plenty of follow-up like providing the committee additional info packs closer to their decision time.
I’ll cover the follow-up calling plan in detail in the next post. So, stay tuned.
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