Fundraising tips for the Avon Walk First Timers

Hi Everyone. Here is the email I sent out a couple of weeks ago with some initial fundraising tips for those of us who are doing the Avon Walk for the first time. The second half of this entry also contains some helpful quotes for all fundraising. I will try to do some more fundraising research soon and get back to you all! Good luck!

An easy way to start fundraising

My first step in beginning to raise my $1800 was to send out an email to my friends, family and acquaintances (including my Arlington, VA roommate from 1996-1999 whom I haven't spoken to in over three years...she hasn't donated yet, but I'm not giving up on her!) asking for their support. You can easily send out a mass email by registering for the Avon Walk, creating your personal page (the Avon Walk website walks you through this. However, if anyone has questions, please let me know), creating an online address book in your Avon Walk account and then sending out a mass email to everyone in your online address book. It's a lot easier than it sounds. The Avon Walk website is a great help in that you can create your own solicitation email, use one of their provided emails, or edit the Avon Walk provided solicitation emails to make them your own. If you send out your solicitation emails this way, you can also track when your email was read and if your contacts accessed your personal site.

Power Words

When I sent out my first solicitation emails, I wanted to personalize the email or at least add some language that would strengthen my email and prompt people to donate to me. I don't think I fully achieved my goal. I now have some additional names that I have added to my contact list and I plan on sending out new solicitation letters in January. I recently came across some "Power Words" or quotes that are supposed to help propel people to donate. Hopefully you will find some of these helpful and your contacts will find them inspirational! The source of these quotes is Stephen L. Goldstein, who calls himself the "Fundraising Guru".

• Sharon K. Yntema: “You are rich enough to give small amounts of money to worthy causes when you can buy all the groceries you need.”
• Franklin Delano Roosevelt: “The test of our progress is not whether we add to the abundance of those who have much. It is whether we provide enough to those who have little.”
• Sanskrit proverb: “He who allows his day to pass by without practicing generosity and enjoying life’s pleasures is like a blacksmith’s bellows—he breathes but does not live.”
• Friedrich Nietzsche: “Nothing ever succeeds which exuberant spirits have not helped to produce.”
• Ancient proverb: “One hand cannot applaud alone.”
  Winston Churchill: “We make a living by what we get. We make a life by what we give.”
• Simone de Beauvoir: “That’s what I consider true generosity. You give your all, and yet you always feel as if it costs you nothing.”
• Marya Mannes: “Generosity with strings is not generosity; it is a deal.”
• Confucius: “To be able under all circumstances to practice five things constitutes perfect virtue; these five things are gravity, generosity of soul, sincerity, earnestness and kindness.”
• Sir Francis Bacon: “In charity there is no excess.”
• Scottish proverb: “Charity begins at home, but shouldn’t end there.”
• Thomas H. Huxley: “I have no faith, very little hope, and as much charity as I can afford.”
• Jewish proverb: “If charity cost nothing, the world would be full of philanthropists.”
• Stephen L. Goldstein: “Angels rush in where fools fear to tread.”
• W.J. Slim: “When you cannot make up your mind which of two evenly balanced courses of action you should take, choose the bolder."
• Samuel Taylor Coleridge: “The lamentable difficulty I have always experienced [is] in saying ‘no.’”
• Herman Melville: “We cannot live only for ourselves. A thousand fibers connect us with our fellow men; and along those fibers, as sympathetic threads, our actions run as causes, and they come back to us as effects.”
• Albert Pine: “What we have done for ourselves alone dies with us. What we have done for others and the world remains and is immortal.”
• Sydney Smith: To do anything in this world worth doing, we must not stand back shivering and thinking of the cold and danger, but jump in, and scramble through as well as we can.”
• Phoebe Low: “Someone said of nations—but it might well have been said of individuals, too—that they require ‘something sufficiently akin to be understood, something sufficiently different to provoke attention, and something sufficiently great to command admiration.’”
• Kevin Kelly: “The only factor becoming scarce in a world of abundance is human attention.”
• W.M. Paxton: “Ideas go booming through the world louder than cannon. Thoughts are mightier than armies. Principles have achieved more victories than horsemen or chariots.”

Good luck getting started!