Fundraising Quotes

“Fundraising is an extreme sport!”
― Marc A. Pitman, Ask Without Fear!: A Simple Guide to Connecting Donors With What Matters to Them Most

“Business is still more often about whom you know, not what you know.”
― Alejandro Cremades

“If building a startup is a roller-coaster ride, then fund-raising is a roller coaster in the dark - you don't even know what's coming!”
― Uri Levine, Fall in Love with the Problem, Not the Solution: A Handbook for Entrepreneurs

“In order to build community we must clearly honor community and each other in meaningful ways and sharing our collective genius is the gold standard with this empowering program.”
― Iris K Barratt

“If you want to glide toward money, you have to make sure your message is clear as a bell, and you need to ensure that you have a unified team capable of communicating it.”
― Alejandro Cremades, The Art of Startup Fundraising

“Don’t let comparison kill your creativity.”
― Jeremy Reis, Magnetic Nonprofit: Attract and Retain Donors, Volunteers, and Staff to Increase Nonprofit Fundraising

“Nurturing a donation is unlocking a donor’s desire to express their joy for caring for others.”
― Jeremy Reis, Magnetic Nonprofit: Attract and Retain Donors, Volunteers, and Staff to Increase Nonprofit Fundraising

“Emotions play the biggest part of moving a donor to give, but statistics and impact reinforce the decision to give to reduce donor’s remorse.”
― Jeremy Reis, Magnetic Nonprofit: Attract and Retain Donors, Volunteers, and Staff to Increase Nonprofit Fundraising

“Major donors want you to be effective and efficient — but most of all, they want to know you understand and value their partnership.”
― Jeremy Reis, Magnetic Nonprofit: Attract and Retain Donors, Volunteers, and Staff to Increase Nonprofit Fundraising

“Thanking your donor should be an opportunity to brag about the donor instead of your organization.”
― Jeremy Reis, Magnetic Nonprofit: Attract and Retain Donors, Volunteers, and Staff to Increase Nonprofit Fundraising

“If you hate asking for a donation, you don’t understand your donor. You’re stealing their joy.”
― Jeremy Reis, Magnetic Nonprofit: Attract and Retain Donors, Volunteers, and Staff to Increase Nonprofit Fundraising

“Your donor is the hero. This doesn’t take away from the great work your staff is doing.”
― Jeremy Reis

“People aren’t giving you money to fund programs. They’re donating to see results.”
― Jeremy Reis, Magnetic Nonprofit: Attract and Retain Donors, Volunteers, and Staff to Increase Nonprofit Fundraising

“Fundraising isn’t about the money, that’s just one outcome. Fundraising is about people.”
― Jeremy Reis, Magnetic Nonprofit: Attract and Retain Donors, Volunteers, and Staff to Increase Nonprofit Fundraising

“Don’t expect investors to be throwing millions on the table for you to go off and buy a bigger house, get a new car, party half the week away, and generally upgrade your lifestyle.”
― Alejandro Cremades, The Art of Startup Fundraising

“As assistant director of programs, Anne was struggling with how to get more food out where it was needed.

"Donors love pictures of cute little kids having snacks at school," she said. "And they support meal programs for seniors. But nobody's lining up to say, Gee, I want to put food in the cupboard for really poor black mothers who use drugs; I want to buy groceries for everyone living in the projects. Very few donors trust poor people enough to just give away food without conditions."

Anne held a dim view of charity kitchens that kept poor people waiting in line two or three times a day just to get a meal ladled out.

"They're convenient for staff," she said, "but they take away people's dignity, and they reinforce dependency. They're about control." In addition, she said, institutional meal programs, such as those in school lunchrooms, tended to provide unhealthy food that was fast to make—bologna sandwiches on white bread, instant mashed potatoes, canned fruit cocktail.”
― Sara Miles, Take This Bread: A Radical Conversion

“The only reason some people think finding investors is difficult is because they don't know where to look. Think about this: people with money--millionaires even--are around you every day, whether you recognize them or not. Everybody--even your friend who works at McDonald's--has some sort of paycheck. It may be two hundred dollars or it may be two hundred thousand dollars, but almost everyone has a source of income. The question is: what do they DO with that income?”
― Monroe Mann, T.R.U.S.T.: How Psychology and a Simple 5-Letter Acronym Will Help You Raise the Money You Need, Recruit the Team You Want, & Engender the Support You Crave

“Something fundraisers (and potential investors alike) often fail to realize: a 'return' does not need to be of a financial nature!”
― Monroe Mann, T.R.U.S.T.: How Psychology and a Simple 5-Letter Acronym Will Help You Raise the Money You Need, Recruit the Team You Want, & Engender the Support You Crave

“Charity usually begins at home, and usually ends there, without having left.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“the thing I can't take is being nice to people and asking them for money.”
― Jimmy Dore

“There are some seismic cultural shifts that are underway online, and they are adding new vital layers to our digital landscape.”
― Brock Warner CFRE, From the Ground Up: Digital Fundraising For Nonprofits

“Brochures didn’t disappear when websites arrived. Text messaging did not destroy telefundraising. As tactics, tools and platforms pile up on top of one another, we tech-savvy digital fundraisers have to hone and maintain our ability to wade through these weeds of ever-increasing uncertainty and complexity. We need to be able to embrace it. Plan for it. Leverage it. Tolerance for ambiguity is a sign of maturity in our lives, which includes our fundraising careers, because the digital ecosystem we operate within is constantly evolving. It has a food chain, complete with predators and prey. It has seasonal shifts. It gives and supports life, but it also generates and disposes of waste.”
― Brock Warner CFRE, From the Ground Up: Digital Fundraising For Nonprofits

“You don’t have to master every new tool right away, but an understanding of what it does, who it’s for, and how it works goes a long way in helping you understand how it might fit alongside what is already working for you. Going all-in on the latest social media platform won’t be a wise use of time, effort or money for the majority of charities.”
― Brock Warner CFRE, From the Ground Up: Digital Fundraising For Nonprofits

“I believe it [a year end appeal] is often so successful because it is one of the few—if not only—times that many charities deliver a clear and “hard” ask for a gift, along with a deadline. Specific, urgent, and time-bound. These are qualities that we shouldn’t hide in storage ten months a year like pumpkin spice and Michael Bublé.”
― Brock Warner CFRE, From the Ground Up: Digital Fundraising For Nonprofits

“No matter the amount being requested, writing a grant is an extremely rigorous one that impacts and involves every aspect of leading and operating a business.”
― La Juana Chambers Lawson, A Project Manager's Guide to Grant Writing, Vol. I

“Grant writing is one part of a fundraising plan that should be analyzed for expected (or planned) benefits or rewards and their associated costs or risks (or actuals).”
― La Juana Chambers Lawson, A Project Manager's Guide to Grant Writing, Vol. I

“I have usually proceeded on the principle that persons who possess sense enough to earn money have sense enough to know how to give it away.”
― Booker T. Washington, Up from Slavery

“Too many founders run out of capital trying to perfect their product.”
― Jason Hishmeh, The 6 Startup Stages: How Non-technical Founders Create Scalable, Profitable Companies

“I see many startup founders chasing 'AI pipe dreams'. I encourage them to focus on solving real customer problems and not trying to impress investors by showing AI on their pitch deck.”
― Jason Hishmeh, The 6 Startup Stages: How Non-technical Founders Create Scalable, Profitable Companies

“For any project you need two things: people and money. I had no qualms about people. All my experience suggested I was not going to be left as a lone lawyer working from an office in a basement. Money, though, was a problem, because you can't run an independent organization in an authoritarian state without a budget.

In the past, politicians had asked rich people for money, oligarchs. By 2011, however, the oligarchs wouldn't come within cannonball range of me. And neither did I want to owe them any favors. So I put a post on my blog saying, "I know how to work, I know what to do, I will find and hire the necessary number of staff, but the financing has to come from you. Give me money. You need to donate a modest amount to a good, useful project, and that will save me from having to run around trying to cadge funds from oligarchs and businessmen." These micro-donations were the base that enabled me to become independent. And there was nothing the Kremlin could do about it. It was easy for them to arrest and intimidate one or two big donors, but what could they do against tens of thousands of people?

Nowadays there seems nothing special about that approach; it is standard for a fundraising campaign. But in 2011, everyone thought I was out of my mind. What on earth was a micro-donation? How could you possibly raise money for investigations and legal work online, especially in Russia? In our country no one had ever done anything like it before. There were no models to follow, there was no habit of donating regularly, there was no financial infrastructure. And yet people began transferring money to me, ordinary readers of my LiveJournal blog. At first I collected the donations in my personal account and later published a bank statement and report on my blog. The average donation to RosPil was 400 rubles (at that time about $15), and in one month I collected almost 4 million rubles, more than the annual budget I had originally set.”
― Alexei Navalny, Patriot: A Memoir