I’m not proud of this, but I’m obsessed with the Proust Questionnaire feature on the back page of Vanity Fair.  Made famous by the responses from Proust at various ages throughout his life (I prefer age 20 to age 13, for the record), the questionnaire is a smart little treat.  It’s a perfect coda to enjoy after reading the magazine’s take on the whole Colzine travesty, Christopher Hitchen’s last piece (on Dicken’s, with customary affectionate but unsentimental tartness) or, say, a long piece on the lavish life of Valentino (possibly one of my favorite magazine articles- and movies- of all time, if only for the bits about the pugs).  I like the questionnaire not only because it provides essential (read: non-essential) information- Ralph Fiennes and I have the same greatest fear- being eaten by a shark- and the same greatest joy- swimming in the sea- quelle surprise!- but because it makes me reflect on what my own answers to the questions, which are simple but telling, might be.

While the extravagant preposterousness of this feature and of Vanity Fair itself is clear, I started wondering if the questionnaire could be a potentially unifying and clarifying tool for non-profits trying to find their own spirit and voice.  I think that often the most useful tools are the roughest and that’s why I decided to create a new version of The Questionnaire, for non-profits, to take a brief measure of their organizational character.

As with the original questionnaire, this one is designed to help your organization get to know yourself a little better- not just in terms of measuring metrics or creating long-or-short term goals- but in getting a holistic picture of what your organizational values are, how you operate in the world and, yes, what animal you’d be if your organization were one.  The trick here is to think of your organization as one living, breathing entity; your staff, mission, values, and practical work are now one dynamic and vibrant whole and your answers to the questionnaire should be, if nothing else, in the spirit of this unified organizational force.

I’ve linked to a PDF of this questionnaire below, so jump over to it, print and answer away!  To more thoroughly illuminate the intended spirit of this exercise, I’ve also included DonationPay’s responses to the questionnaire  (and adjusted it in two spots to make it relevant to our growing business, rather than organizational status)- we took some time to get feedback from our team on all these questions and the answers are included below.

Faux-Proust Questionnaire For Non-Profits:

What do you regard as the lowest depth of organizational misery?

An unhappy client or an uncorrectable mistake.

What do you regard as the greatest peak of organizational joy?

Helping an organization exceed their internal fundraising expectations, saying yes when other services say no.

What is the greatest flaw in your organization’s leadership?

Disorganization and chronic silliness.

What is the greatest strength in your organization’s leadership?

Love of the work, diligence.

How does your organization define success?

Having happy clients that are effectively fundraising online, happy staff members that are motivated and enthusiastic, and providing an agile service that adapts and innovates.  Also: learning, constantly.

What is your greatest fundraising success, to date?

N/A

What is your greatest fundraising failure, to date?

N/A

What qualities do you most desire in a prospective employee?

Adaptability, humor, boundless capability.

What qualities do you most admire in a prospective donor investor?

Flexibility, an innovative and strategic mind.

If your organization could be represented by the work of one artist, living or dead, who would it be?

Chuck Close.  Each tiny square and moving part has an enormous impact on the whole.

What are the guiding principles of employees of your organization?

Consummate friendliness, fairness and thoroughness.

What are the guiding principles of your mission?

Collaboration, innovation, fairness, support of progressive causes.

What is your organization’s biggest fault?

Impatience.

What is your organization’s greatest expenditure of resources?

Staff energy.

What is your organization’s greatest expenditure of capital?

Staffing.

What qualities do you most admire/desire in a volunteer?

Willingness to stuff envelopes until 3 AM.  Lots of creative energy and ideas, but no mania.

What animal would your organization be if you had to choose one?

A sea otter.  Agile but solid,  playful but potentially fierce!

Who is your organization’s greatest hero of literature?

This was a hard one to agree on, but we are all quite admiring of the tenacious, moral rabbits in Watership Down.  Building a happy and functional community through hardship and adversity is something we really admire.

Who is your organization’s greatest hero in real life?

We have lots!

We truly are lucky to work with so many organizations that are heroic and inspiring to us.  Also teachers (hi, Mom!) and all committed advocates and activists for equality, peace and change.  Also, we think Mimi Silbert (and the Delancey Street Foundation) is freaking awesome.

What historical figure does your organization most strongly identify with?

 August Escoffier (1846-1935).  Everyone here is an avid foodie and we were all in agreement that Escoffier was a total badass whose spirit and verve we’d like to emulate.   He cooked inventive yet basic meals for both the nobility and the poor in London and improved kitchen basics in a revolutionary way (he invented the Soyer field stove for the Army, heightening the chances of embattled soldiers getting proper nutrition and created ovens with adjustable temperatures and refrigerators cooled by water).  He also created soup kitchens for the stricken public during the Irish potato famine and was a generally democratic and creative person.

Your most marked characteristic?

Energy, curiosity.

Where would your organization like to live?

We’d love to have offices in San Francisco, New York, Seattle, and Austin.

What is your organization’s present state of mind?

Preoccupied with forward motion.

What is your motto?

Agility, affordability and adaptability FTW.

If your organization were to die today, what would you most want people to remember about you?

That we provided a terrific service, at a fair price point, and that we positively impacted the online fundraising trajectory of our client organizations.

Where do your see your organization in 5 years?

Giving Network for Good, PayPal, and Convio Blackbaud a run for their money.

If you’d like us to publish your organization’s Faux-Proust Questionnaire For Non-Profit’s on our blog, take a few minutes to fill it out and send it in to us at info@donationpay.org.  With your questionnaire, send in your a brief description of your organization’s mission and practical work and any other info you’d like us to print.

DonationPay Non-Profit Questionnaire

Being an extremely avid reader, I spend much of my time out of the office with my nose firmly planted in a book.  While my recreational reading tastes run toward contemporary fiction (in case you’re curious, this year my favorites were Freedom, Swamplandia!, A Visit From The Goon Squad, The Marriage Plot, The Tiger’s Wife and The Uncoupling, as well as a few others I can’t bring to mind off the top of my head), I will read almost anything (though not the egregiously terrible and overtly offensive Twilight series, for the record).  Though I am usually a fiction-or-memoir-reading fiend, I do manage to occasionally sneak in some work-related stuff as well.  I’ve been meaning to write some reviews on this blog of the most useful and interesting NPO-related texts I’ve come across this year, but being almost pathologically busy, I haven’t really made good on many of my best-laid-plans for the blog.  So, instead of doing regular book reviews, as I’d planned, I will instead be condensing the best reading, non-profit-related material into a handy top ten list, though organized in no particular order.  It’s a top 8, not a top 10- give me a break, it’s a half day today.

1.) Guerilla Marketing For Non Profits, by Jay Conrad Levinson and some other folks.  This book is a very quick read and is broken down into management suggestions, tasks and chapters of essential info on building a marketing and media presence on the cheap and in a way that effectively communicates your non-profit’s brand and message.  There are some cutesy flourishes about the writing that I don’t appreciate, but the information contained within is totally solid and I’d highly recommend it, especially to folks that are trying to stretch a tiny budget a very long way.

2.) Social Media for Social Good, by Heather Mansfield.  I have pretty much become a groupie for this book and for the great Heather Mansfield- this book is an agile distillation of many of the most conceptually and practically useful of social media strategy.  It contains not only practical tips, but a very, very persuasive argument for why social media is the tool to use to expand the mission, work and community engagement for your organization.  I really loved this book and I think it’s well on it’s way to becoming an indispensable text for NPO’s looking to make an impact on the web and beyond.

3.) Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard, by Chip and Dad Heath.  This book is not strictly for non-profits and I’m usually firmly opposed to self-help books of any kind.  This book doesn’t have a lot of self-helpy language and it’s message about making changes when there are actual circumstantial complications that make things difficult could easily apply to most non-profits I know.  It’s good and no-nonsense and full of very practical advice.  I’d recommend it to anyone looking to make significant changes in their organization in 2012- staff, board, work, mission, anything.

4.) Engage, Revised and Updated: The Complete Guide for Brands and Businesses to Build, Cultivate, and Measure Success in the New Web, by Brian Solis.  This is great.  Full of interesting concepts, information and good writing- just try to ignore the foreword by professional dunce Ashton Kutcher.

5.) Viral Loop: From Facebook to Twitter, How Today’s Smartest Businesses Grow Themselves, by Adam Penenberg. This one is full of real-life examples, case studies and tips on how to emulate the most successful businesses and organizations, in terms of marketing and social media.  Looking back at my reading list for the year, I realized that I read a lot of books about corporate social media and marketing growth and have been ruminating about how to apply good business principles to help grow non-profits.  This is a very good example of this ongoing trend in my reading habits- lots of good information about how corporations grow, much of which is very applicable to the non-profit world as well.

6.) The New Community Rules: Marketing on the Social Web, by Tamar Weinberg.  This is a very persuasive guide that details why it’s pretty much essential for all companies (and non-profits) to join the social web.  Many, many, many amazing tips and stories here and the writing is first-rate.  I read this book in about two settings and afterward felt inspired, motivated and really, really impressed.

7.) The Zen of Social Media Marketing: An Easier Way to Build Credibility, Generate Buzz, and Increase Revenue , by Shama Kabani and Chris Brogan.  Substitute the word ‘Revenue’ for ‘Donations’ and you’ve got yourself a winner here.  More along the same lines, but one of the best of the bunch.

8.) The Networked Non-Profit, by Beth Kanter and Allison Fine.  This is not super new and most of our readers here are likely already devotees of Beth Kanter of their own accord, but just a reminder: if you’re not reading Beth’s blog, you should be.  If you haven’t read this book, you need to abandon whatever you’re doing this lovely New Year’s weekend and get started on it, right away.  Seriously, you’ll thank me.

Happy New Year and Happy Reading!

-AJ

(photo credit: TheMiddleShelf.com)

As we’re all headed off for the annual collective pig-out, I thought I’d send you off for the long weekend with 5 quick ways to really make your donors feel appreciated.

1.) Make it Personal

No ‘Dear Donor’ or ‘Dear Giver’ or ‘Dear Friend’- use their name, the specific amount and time of their gift.  In my opinion, as long as you have an automatic receipt going out that acknowledges the donors initial gift and gives them a quick ‘Thanks for your donation’ immediately after their payment is made, it’s a better idea to wait until you have time to write up a personalized thank-you email than to send out a form letter accompanying the receipt.  Organizational staff is fraught at the height of fundraising season and as a donor, I’m well aware of that.  I’d rather wait a few weeks or a month to get a handcrafted acknowledgement letter than get something half-assed right off the bat. My point is, if you have to choose, I’d favor personalization over immediacy.  Donors know you’re in the thick of fundraising season, so my recommendation is to send one form email or receipt immediately when the donor gives, then a follow-up after the new year.  If you don’t have time to do it right immediately, do it right as soon as you can.

2.) Make It Exciting

Another way of saying exciting, to donors, is ‘specific’.  Tell your donor what their gift did and be specific, and fun.  Heifer International is an incredible successful organization, with great longevity and a powerful ongoing fundraising plan that’s been effective year after year; much of this, I believe, is because of the specificity of their concept:  pick an animal, let it change a families life.

Specificity does not equal an exhaustive level of detail; don’t be boring, for the love of god!  It’s just much easier, as a donor, for me to visualize one family raising a goat or flock of chicks than to visualize what my $50 did to ‘help stop the world hunger crisis’.  The wording in your personalized thank you letter is important: you want the donor to know they had an appreciable and tangible impact on your cause, but you also want them to feel like they’re part of an ongoing movement.

3.) Everyone Loves Free $hit

Everyone.  No exceptions.  Seriously.  It’s crazy and senseless but I get super excited about branded pencil erasers, t-shirts, bumper stickers and the like.  And I love those NPR totebags.  Not that your organization’s great work isn’t enough to encourage donors to contribute. . . . but, a travel coffee mug branded with your organizations logo certainly doesn’t hurt.

4.) Add Media, and stir!

Charity Water has been much-ballyhooed for their personalized thank-you videos.  And rightly so.  It’s a really cool idea to add media components to your acknowledgements and appeals in particular to younger donors.  If you can find a way to embed a video or give donors access to an MP3 or something similar, do it!  It’s a way to dress up traditional acknowledgement and make your donors feel extra special enough to contribute in the future as well.

5.) Build The Relationship

It’s also important to let donors know what they can do to help moving forward; the assistance a long-term supporter of your organization can provide is not limited to financial contribution.  If your organization utilizes volunteers, letter-writing campaigns, personal fundraising for events or similar, let your donor know that they can be a part of your organization in a variety of ways.  Basically, you want the acknowledgement to bring your donors further into the fold, not give them a brusque thank-you and send them on their way.  Building a sense of community and responsibility with donors will go a long way toward building a sustaining donor and volunteer base that will generously serve and contribute to your organization for years to come.

Happy Thanksgiving!

All that is happening in the social media sphere, every 60 seconds.  Seriously.

Rachel was kind enough to let me pick her brain a little bit for some ideas about how non-profits can modify business social media practices to strengthen their donor bases, engage their community and advance their organization’s position as a creative leader in the industry.  Rachel’s answers to my questions are in italics below and our conversation has been edited a bit, to omit my ‘ums’, ‘likes’ and nervous chatterboxing (gad, how horrible is it to hear your own voice on tape, amirite?!).

Me: What are five basic things you’d tell an organization to do to begin getting started with social media from scratch?

Rachel:  What I would tell them is to look at different non-profits and charities they admire and they wished they were more like and see what they’re doing.  The problem is, a lot of organizations just don’t do that great a job with social media, so a good strategy is to look at the ones that are really strong, like CharityWater, UNICEF, the ASPCA-they do an awesome job with their social media- so I would check out first organizations that are well respected in the social media sphere. Also, Mashable is a really excellent blog that’s all about social media and they spend a lot of time on public good and they just had a conference for non-profits.  Get a ton of ideas and inspiration of organizations that are doing it right.  Start with a presence on either Twitter or Facebook first.

Which one is typically better to start with, for organizations that are just making their first foray into social media?

It depends- if you’re trying to build thought-leadership and build your brand and get more people to know about your organization, then I’d start with Twitter.  If you feel like you already have a lot of people involved and you need to focus on fundraising and engaging folks you’ve already developed relationships with, I’d go to Facebook.

How do you recommend organizations use their limited staff resources to focus on social media?

I think that having a process to manage it and making sure that everyone knows it’s an organizational priority and if they can somehow create a framework so that anyone in the organization can participate and give ideas, but there’s one person who’s managing the editorial calendar.  You need to set a process for social media management like any other function within the organization- kind of like how with traditional PR, you have one regular PR person but they don’t know everything that’s going on in the organization.  They need to interact with other people to tell them what’s happening- same thing needs to happen with social media: it can’t be an island off on it’s own.  In order for it to be really successful, there needs to be a controlled way for everyone to give input.  

What are some social media mistakes that you see from organizations that put you off?

 People who only use it to sell, sell, sell, or for constant ‘Donate Now!’.  It’s important to use social media to build relationships, connect with people, and give them a behind-the-scenes look into your organization in terms of the good work that you do.  You need to tell stories and show pictures and post videos and then you can soft sell people to participate with your organization.  

What are some of your suggestions for organizations looking to make revisions to their social media campaigns without being too disruptive to their ‘voice’ in social media?  What if their social media presence isn’t as effective as they’d like it to be? 

It really depends; I think that a lot of organizations don’t use pictures and videos enough.  I think, though, recently on Facebook, one of the Facebook blogs showed that single posted photographs get a lot of response and interaction, so I’d have to know the specific situation to make correct recommendations.  I always recommend having more specific calls to action and asking people questions to get them involved.

What companies or organizations do you think are doing a great job with social media?

Virgin America does a great job with their social media and branding and tying it in with their customer service.  They have a special dedicated area of their social media for customer service.  It’s important to have, for instance, one Twitter feed that’s for branding and one that’s for customer service issues.  You don’t want to mix customer or donor complaints with all of the positive things you’re trying to do.  That stuff needs to go into it’s own bucket.

Major thanks, again, to Rachel Masters for gamely answering all my rudimentary questions and for agreeing to a follow up interview early in 2012, when we’ll dig a little deeper into what makes social media so essential for non-profits.  Learn more about Rachel Masters and Red Magnet Media here.

Follow Rachel on Twitter

Follow RedMagnet on Twitter

Support Elemental

This holiday season, we’ll be showcasing some of the innovative ways our clients are using our service by taking a quick tour through their DonationPay pages to showcase particularly awesome features.  We’re so proud to support all of our client’s fundraising efforts this holiday and at any time of year.  Today, I’m starting with pages from the New Global Citizens and Nikela- enjoy!

Donate to New Global Citizens

Donate to Nikela

Fertility Planit

Fertility Planit is the social network for people around the world who want to start families.  Founded by Karin Thayer after her own experience with fertility treatments and the process of having her (now 6 month old!) son; she’s created a supportive online network where people can support each other, share resources, write reviews on related goods and services and generally get connected to the community .  Fertility Planit supports the desire to have a family regardless of gender, relationship status, religious background or sexual orientation. . . which is, obviously, awesome!

Local Orbit

Is totally rad!  In their own words:

Local Orbit is a new way to buy food and other local goods direct from producers in your community. Our marketplaces offer a diverse selection of local produce, meat, fish, dairy products, eggs, baked goods, grains, prepared foods, personal care products and specialty items. 

Farmers manage both wholesale and retail sales through a simple business dashboard. They can sell their products in multiple markets from a central account.

Consumers pick up their orders from a central location, or hub. Wholesale orders are delivered to the business.

Hubs are run by farmers markets, entrepreneurs, farmers co-ops, community organizations, institutions and businesses who are working to expand access to local food in their communities. They manage each local marketplace, approve sellers, and work with Local Orbit’s marketing tools to promote sales.

Check them out immediately, if you love local food or if you’re closet hippies, like us.

Autitouch

Founded by the awesome Freena, Autitouch helps speed diagnoses of autism using intuitive software.  From their website:

We develop intuitive software (through a Natural User Interface a.k.a. NUI) on multitouch platforms. This software makes it possible for children starting the age of 3 to “make contact with” and “communicate through” hardware like e.g. the Microsoft Surface.  Per their website:

Our mission is to develop intuitive software to aid in diagnostics and treatment for children and adolescents with autism and/or related disorders, with help of hardware based on multitouch technology, e.g. Microsoft Surface. Our focus lies on improved diagnostics and new treatment methods for development of social and communication skills. In other words, stimulate (spontaneous) social behavior and communication skills (collaboration).

It’s the Autitouch vision to, in time, make mulitouch diagnostic and treatment methods usefull to a broather audience then is described in our mission statement. Other age groups, other disorders, supplemental techology and an ongoing expansion of our market. It’s the Autitouch vision to be one of the leading companies in the world to build intuitiv software for diagnostics and treatment of autism and related disorders using multitouch technology.

So awesome, right?

OllieMe

OllieMe is a new social network for teens looking to engage in a productive online space.  They are a teen-only mobile and online community, organized around networking and gaming concepts that kids can understand and get behind.  They’re in beta testing now, so if you know any interested teenagers, send them over to Ollie to become beta testers!

That about wraps it up: our experience with Astia was all-around amazing and it helped us feel much more connected to the business community, as well as providing a lighted path for us to follow as DonationPay grows up.  Back to regularly scheduled non-profit programming from here on out. . .

Happy Fundraising,

AJ

Being a mission-based business that is in the process of expansion can be a tricky minefield to navigate.  Staying true to our vision of the company, product and service is difficult when you’re also weighing all the factors necessary to effectively grow.  Me, Noah and the rest of our powerhouse DonationPay team are all devoted, truly, to helping non-profit organizations reach their fundraising goals.  Noah and I founded DonationPay because we happened into a relationship with a banking partner that would offer technical services to our non-profit clients for next to nothing and because, as a web development team, we knew that there was enormous frustration in the non-profit sector with the available options for online fundraising.  We’re not business school students, or cutthroat serial entrepreneurs or numbers wunderkinds or anything like that- we’re two people who have worked within and been deeply connected to the non-profit sector for many years and we founded DonationPay to alleviate some anxiety in the industry around the next frontier of online fundraising.

Noah and I don’t believe that the future of non-profit fundraising is in elite service providers like Convio and BlackBaud, who do great work for the kinds of extreme sums that only very robustly funded non-profits have at their disposal.  Rather, we believe that the services available to the midsize non-profit is where the changes and growth in the industry will be reflected: user-friendly, comprehensive and affordable fundraising services available to organizations of all sizes (and budgets) is what we’re all about!  As such, we’re dedicated to offering better, friendlier service, for less, to non-profits who want to improve their online fundraising capabilities and boost their web presence. Most of our wonderful clients already know this, our origin story, but it’s been on my mind during the past week. I met many incredible women and men who are also working to grow businesses at the forefront of industries impacted by the changing Internet landscape and, like DonationPay, are constantly adapting to the rapid migration of all personal processes and sectors to the online format.

The truth about DonationPay is that we’ve spent an enormous amount of time and care developing a better product- a product shaped in large part by feedback from development directors and other non-profit staff.  The lions share of the work here was for us to build an internal infrastructure that would allow us to catalogue each built-to-order feature we developed with the input of real non-profits, for use on future fundraising pages.  We’ve ended up with a cutting edge system that allows us to build custom pages with incredible efficiency and customization, while keeping the cost to our clients extremely manageable.  Our library of available features grows weekly and one of the truest joys of the job is being able to build a functionality to order for one client with an innovative fundraising plan, then see that same feature put to use on other client pages, boosting everyone’s donation volume.  Of course, the credit-card processing component of our business is not always 100% under our control, but our banking partner offers many technical features (including their Payment Gateway and individual Merchant Accounts for all our clients) that are invaluable to our client’s online development.  This is our favorite part: the building, the strategizing, the forward motion, the page creation, the incredible work our client organizations are doing that we get to be a part of.

That said, there are many other elements of DonationPay that aren’t client-facing: the expansion plans and staffing, the systems development, the investment fundraising, the ongoing and constant negotiation with our banking partner, the beyond-our-control changing rates and regulations in the card-processing industry and many other components that I will not bore you with here.  At Astia, I was so relieved to dig into these parts of our business and the support and whip-smart nature of the community there got me thinking about transparency in business development.  Engaging in Astia’s curriculum gave me the time and space to take a deep-dive look into our company’s structure, financial plan, organizing principles and growth strategy and I started to feel that we should be adhering to the transparency principles I have, time and again on this blog, referred to as a crucial element of best practices for building a sustaining donor base.

Transparency is a conceptually essential part of any fundraising plan, for any organization.  Donors need to know where their money is going- why and how and what and when, too.  To put your support dollars behind an organization requires a leap of faith; fundraising transparency makes that leap a manageable hop and closes the gap between the call and the action.  Similarly, I thought that because we’ve been so blessed to work with our ever-expanding roster of clients, I should use this format to share what’s happening on the administrative end of DonationPay and to make some commitments about the future of our service.

What We’re Up To:

-Expansion: beginning with our move to new offices in Berkeley this summer and in an ongoing way with adding additional staff, developers and investors to our behind-the-scenes team.  We’re also currently developing CityPay, our companion product to DonationPay, which will offer a lot of the same customizable features for cities and municipal governments that are looking to coordinate their online payment options into a manageable whole.  Sign up for CityPay updates here.

-Relationship Cultivation: we’re working on several projects that would allow us to partner with existing providers of other non-profit services (like CRM’s, insurance-providers and the like) to bring DonationPay to a wider swath of the non-profit sector.  Another great thing about the Astia program was the genuine connections made between business owners- I’m sure we’ll have exciting news about partnerships that have grown from the program very soon!

Building The Team: as we have big plans for DonationPay, we’re currently expanding our team of in-house staff, as well as investors and advisors.  The idea of cultivating relationships is the same as cultivating a donor base that really supports what you do.  Finding investors or an advisory team that is actually behind the mission, growth plan, team, and product your business provides is just like finding the kind souls who understand and support your organizational mission and practical work enough to put their hard-earned dollars behind you, time and again.

Our Commitments:

Being Our Best Self: we’re committed to continuing to improve our service, using the feedback of real non-profits we work with.  We will always keep our service as agile, customizable and innovative as we possibly can.  If there’s a feature we don’t have that you want (or just think might be super cool!), please speak up and we’ll do our best to bring it to market.  DonationPay is designed to adapt to your specifications, so let us know how we can help our service work best for you!

If it’s good for you, it’s good for us: we’re absolutely committed to continuing to offer our service at a price point that is affordable to non-profits large and small.  As we expand, there will absolutely be changes to our service and pricing, but please rest assured that Noah and I have no plans to stray from the base founding principle of DonationPay: offering the best value donation processing and management service out there.  Also, we’re counting on you, our loyal users, readers and clients, to give us a tough-love reality check if we start unexpectedly veering into a disastrous, Qwickster-style fiasco- thanks in advance, y’all!

Supporting You However We Can: one of the best and most exciting parts of our job is that we can sometimes get out of the office and attend the fundraisers and other awesome events our clients are doing.  We’re totally committed to being physically present as much as possible for our clients and, in a more ongoing way, to dedicating a portion of our staff’s and our own time to volunteer efforts with local organizations in our community.  If you have an event coming up in the Bay Area or thereabouts, let us know and we’ll do our best to be there.  If you have a further-flung event coming up, let us know and it’s likely we can build you an awesome online system to make payment and information collection a breeze.

That about covers it; as you’re moving into the crucial holiday fundraising push, I just want to let you know that we’re here, happily barreling into our hectic holiday season as well, and that we’re delighted to support your vital work in any way we can.  More on the amazing entrepreneurs and businesses I encountered at Astia and social good through business communities coming up in Part 3 tomorrow!

Happy Fundraising and happy Tuesday,

AJ