If you’ve been following along, you’ve now got your target amount you need to raise and a long contact list.  If you’ve made it this far, you’re probably overwhelmed.  That’s good.  This post is intended to help you get from overwhelmed to the beginning stages of organized by focusing on processing your contacts (before you start cold-calling) and then laying out a time-phased plan for making contact with your contacts.

Processing Your Contacts
What you likely have right now is a long list of everyone you know.  If you’re good, you’re still adding to it and if you’re good, it’s a long list.  In order to start making the task of contacting all of these people reasonable, you need to process your contacts.  One way to do this is to add some categories.  If you’re a good little nerd like me, your list is in Excel.  If you’re an extra special little nerd, you’ve already got a column for last name and a separate column for first name so that you can sort your contacts alphabetically.

The problem with sorting them alphabetically is that it doesn’t really help you.  What is helpful at this point is to categorize all of your contacts in two ways.  First is a sub-group type.  For each contact in your list, assign that person to a “sub-group type” (like Family, friends, co-workers, current church, past church #1, past church #2, college friends, etc).  By creating a category column in your contact spreadsheet, you can quickly sort all of your contacts by a grouping that makes sense to you.

The second category to add is “contact type.”  Here is where you begin to think about how you will contact this person.  As a general rule, it is always best to meet someone in person.  It shows that you respect them, that you respect their time, and that they’re important enough to get some of your time and attention.  As you look across your list, however, you’ll realize that meeting every single person is impossible and and in some case infeasible.  By categorizing your contacts into contact types, you’ll be able to start discerning how you’ll make contact with a set grouping of people.  Some examples of contact types are as follows:

• Local and personal – these are people that live in your area that you can easily meet with.
• Local and non-personal – these are people that live in your area but for some reason, it doesn’t make sense to meet with.
• Distant and personal – these are people that live distantly, but regardless of the distance between you, it still makes sense to meet with them.
• Distant and non-personal – these are people that live distantly and it doesn’t make sense to meet with.
• Local Church/Organization – local churches or organizations that you will want to meet with.
• Distant Church/Organization – churches not close by that you will want to be in contact with.

The above are just suggestions.  They are, in fact, the categories I used as I processed through my contacts.

In a later post, we’ll explore architecting a plan for contacting each of these contact groups.  Before moving on though, let me just add a few more general thoughts.

1. It is still always best to meet someone in person.
2. If someone is a high potential giver and they live 15 hours away, it may be worth your time and money and effort to buy a plane ticket and go sit down and talk with them.
3. While my friend Bob says that “letters are what 14-year olds send when they want to go to summer camp,” sometimes you’re going to be making contact via mail.  This should be the exception and it should be more than a letter.  We’ll explore that in a later post as well.
4. Be realistic.  Know your schedule and the amount of time you can commit to this.  Don’t sacrifice your family at the expense of raising support.
5. Prioritize your contacts.  This sounds awful, I know, but when the rubber meets the road, you’ve got to know which contacts are most important to contact and why.  I won’t elaborate here, but I will encourage you to prioritize your high potential givers.  High potential being defined as either someone very likely to give or (regardless of their likelihood to give) someone who has the potential to give significantly.  This may be another column in your spreadsheet, or it may be something you do with color-coding.

When To Start
Now.  Chances are if you’ve read through this much information on fundraising, you’re in a spot where you need to start now.  We started about a year out from when we intended to quit my full time job and move to where we’re planting.  As I write this, we’re in the middle of that year and thus in the middle of fundraising.  As you start to think about when to start, remember that getting a couple of strategic partners behind you ought to be your first priority.  After that, start knocking out the people you’ve listed out in your individual/organizational list (see earlier post here).

At this point it is also important to review your time-phased budget (see earlier post here).  One thing I did that has been immeasurably helpful in keeping a status of how we’re doing versus how we need to be doing is to lay in some rows in my time-phased budget for projected (or target or estimated) fundraising income for each month.  The result is a spreadsheet that has both my time-phased budget (an estimate of how much will be spent each month) and my time-phased fundraising estimate (an estimate of how much money will be coming in each month).

This let me toss around some numbers and start looking at how much I needed and when and how that was going to flow into and drive my fundraising.  For example, if you’re planning to quit your job on December 31st and your first big check isn’t going to hit until February 1st, you’ve got a problem.  Obviously all you’re doing at this point is estimating, but what the time-phased estimates allow you to do is fundraise in advance to the amounts needed so that when big expenses hit (like startup costs), you’re covered.

The other thing I’ll encourage you to do while you’re in your spreadsheet is to make additional rows for actuals.  As money starts coming in (and going out), feed the actuals in and compare them to your estimates.  These rows will also then allow you to track your cash flow (amount raised vs. amount spent) over time.

Hold Your Horses

By now you’re either chomping at the bit or throwing in the towel (or calling your old college roomate who seemed to get personal pleasure from spending hours in Microsoft Excel).  If you’ve still got your towel, chomp on it in addition to the bit as there are a few more things to cover before you turn yourself loose.  In the next post, we’ll look at some of the logistics of fundraising and in the one after that, we’ll look at architecting an overall fundraising plan.