Funding Formula Stage 3
Using LinkedIn For Fundraising
The professional social network LinkedIn now has more than half a billion users from more than 200 countries. LinkedIn has a paid premium service, allowing users to see extra information, such as who has viewed their profile. A free, standard membership can also help with donor mapping – but few Civil Society Organizations are making use of the free tools to reach potential donors.
1. Find the right organization
There are hundreds of foundations that give internationally. Some, like the Bill & Melinda Gates and Ford foundations are widely known, but there are so many others – and how do you find them if you don’t know their names? The online Foundation Centre directory allows anyone to search American grant-making foundations, and you can then find what connections you have to current and former employees and board members at these foundations. Make sure you are aware of potentially different legal and tax environments.
It’s all about creating the most informal introduction, in the warmest way
2. Find the right person
Once a potential donor has been identified, the next challenge is finding the right person to approach, as well as the right person from your organization to reach out. Someone may have only a few followers on LinkedIn, but the connections of these people’s connections open up many more secondary and tertiary followers.
In addition to board members, staff and volunteers, don’t forget former employees as potential connections — something that’s also easily searchable on LinkedIn. People move between jobs, but they take their contact book with them. The aim is to turn a LinkedIn profile into a database of its own, to create a huge and powerful tool to facilitate that informal introduction that you’re looking for to those previously identified foundations.
3. Avoid cold calling
When trying to forge a new connection on LinkedIn, as a rule, somebody else should make the introduction – someone who has a relationship with the funding officer, which means that the funding officer completely trusts the recommendation and will take your call or your email. Where this is not possible, it’s important to add a customised note on the invitation to connect.
That’s your chance to create that human connection from the beginning. LinkedIn is a supporting tool rather than an end in itself.
4. Be visible, but not flashy
When writing your own profile, either as an individual or organisation, there are a number of common errors. Young people may write too much about themselves and they overpromise. Or, they are hesitant, and they don’t write enough! For a non-profit organization looking to grow its visibility and credibility, it is important to create content in the form of videos and blog posts or contributing to groups. Groups are often around a specific theme, for example, refugees. Through these groups you can also contact people from foundations because they are often members too. Once you’ve connected in a group then you have a much more equal basis to approach somebody.
Make sure the LinkedIn page also links to your organisation’s Twitter and Facebook, and website – but don’t overdo it. What matters is not your profile: what counts is the way you approach people.
5. Bide your time
When approaching someone on LinkedIn, it’s important to put yourself in the other person’s shoes. It’s about tact, and making the other person eager to interact with you. That means withholding from asking for money straight away.
In a perfect world the asking doesn’t even come from you, it comes from the donor. There are many stories where the cultivation phase went very well, people got to know each other, and at a certain point the program officer from the giving foundation advises that there are funds available for your project – it does happen! At the same time, be strategic about who you connect with. As a fundraiser, the last thing you want to do is connect just for the sake of it.
Fundraising is all about thinking from the perspective of the donor and trying to adjust your work to that.