First, what is a small non-profit? I’d say anything with a budget of less than $500,000. A very small non-profit has a budget of less than $100,000.

Small non-profits are limited by their resources:

• they can’t afford expensive fundraising events, which always carry a certain risk if you don’t sell enough tickets (they carry many other risks as well, actually)
• they can’t afford to invest resources without seeing fairly immediate benefits (a development director will usually take at least two years to pay for the staff time invested)
• they (likely) have fewer potential donors, since their small size often means they don’t have name recognition with the wider public

What does that mean for fundraising for small non-profits?

All fundraising efforts will involve either volunteers or the Executive Director, so they have to be cheap. They can’t carry too much risk. And they have to be professional enough that you can ask those same people for money the next year (after all, if you only have a small number of people who have heard of you, you don’t want to alienate them with an unprofessional ask).

And that’s why I wrote The Little Book of Gold, because this process exists. There is a virtuous cycle of fundraising that makes perfect sense for small non-profits. You don’t have to endlessly come up with new ideas (“Let’s sell chocolate bars!”) but you can use these steps to raise money quickly and effectively. Check out the excerpt in the side bar or download the Kindle sample.