© Mark W. Pettigrew
When planning The Artistic Rescue Project, I've found it very helpful to do research pertaining to the things various nonprofits and charities are already doing for fundraising purposes.
Sometimes, I've gotten some very good ideas, which might be adapted to this project, in various ways. In other cases, however, I've gotten more ideas with regard to how not to do things.
That's not to say that I think that such strategies are horrible. Usually, they aren't. Such strategies may even be effective, to some extent, as long as organizational objectives and goals are fairly modest, and as long as efficiency is low on the list of priorities.
If that's the case, one's particular fundraising strategy is almost irrelevant, as long as money is occasionally changing hands. One can even raise funds by setting up bake sales at local churches, if one's expectations are modest. One probably won't make very much money, and such events are often more trouble than they're worth, but they do sometimes make money, and maybe even a modest profit which repays the cost of the groceries needed to make those products. (It really isn't true profit, if the fundraising event merely breaks even, but that's usually enough to make such people happy, since the real objective is often to keep the organization in the public eye, in the hope of getting additional support later on, in the form of straight-up donations.)
However, most professional organizations want to be able to rely on professional methodologies, not on luck.
Therefore, I want to be able to offer artistic fundraising services consisting of things nonprofit organizations usually can't do for themselves (without hiring substantial numbers of additional well-qualified staff members, or without occuping the time of staff members who are usually annoyed about being expected to do tasks they never claimed to be good at doing).
I want to focus on strategies likely to make the most money, with the lowest possible investment in money and in paid or unpaid labor. Those criteria aren't very different from the criteria used by for-profit companies in order to evaluate proposals pertaining to strategies.
With that in mind, I have certain criteria which will help to shape my own fundraising strategies. In this blog post, I want to focus on two criteria in particular: Flexibility and Variety.
FLEXIBILITY
In order to accommodate the needs of multiple organizations, I want to have the flexibility to enable me to adapt strategies to the needs of different specific organizations, and to different specific fundraisers within those organizations, whether they are huge organizations with tons of available resources, or (as is common far more often) small organizations with noble goals but very limited available resources.
Because of factors I've already discussed to some extent in previous blog posts on this site, any organization which is able to create its own website, and to create links on that site, is a potential client of mine. Or at least that's the plan, once this project gets rolling in a serious way.
With the exception of furnishing those organizations with the information and graphic image files they'll need for the purposes of publicizing my online sales using their own e-mail messages and websites, I will not usually be involved in the design of their websites or e-mails at all, so there will be no need for such organizations to pay me a salary or large fees. (Their current web designers can breathe easy.)
My compensation, for the most part, will be the cut I will take from each product sale, so that I can continue to pay my rent and buy the groceries, and so that I can pay the expenses of making the actual products being sold. (I may also have other small expenses, which I will report on this site in the form of blog posts, so that everything will be done in an honest and transparent manner.)
There may be (and hopefully will be) exceptions, in the earliest stages of this operation, if I am able to persuade particular organizations (and especially organizations which are already fairly well funded) that it is in their best interests to help me with the startup costs for this project, so that they might benefit from my services later on. But that is not the general operational model on which I am basing this project.
Many different factors can affect how much money any organization will be able to make by using options I plan to offer. Not the least of those factors will be the amount of time and effort the organization is willing to expend in terms of publicizing those online fundraisers (since web traffic is crucial); but then again, any organization which depends primarily on its own web site and on e-mail for fundraising purposes should already be well aware of how to add links to those items, in a way which is not obnoxious (which would clearly be counterproductive). After all, my success will be their success as well, since all products sales connected with this project will translate into donations to rhe related organizations. (I plan to periodically document the fact that those donations are being made, in a manner which will enable skeptics and potential buyers to "check up on me" and keep me honest!)
Such organizations should also learn about current ways of encouraging people to visit certain web pages and web sites, in scenarios which do not involve the direct use of links.
It's pretty common knowledge that if one wants to encourage traffic to a web site or web page, one should add the domain name or web address to one's printed materials whenever feasible. In addition, more and more companies and organizations are now discovering the use of 3D bar codes (also known as QR or Quick Response codes), especially now that there are "smart phones" capable of reading such codes, which can be printed on all kinds of materials, such as garments, church bulletins, sidewalk signs, vehicles and much more. (I've already written and posted a blog article, on this site, pertaining to the applicability of QR codes.) Short URLs can also be useful for such purposes, for people who lack their own smartphones.
I plan to use those promotional options myself, in order to bring visitors to the websites pertaining to the Artistic Rescue Project, but I can only do so much by myself, especially with my limited budget. In order to derive the maximum benefits from any of my online fundraisers for specific charities or nonprofits, those beneficiaries of my fundraisers will therefore have to do their part.
I will furnish such organizations with the web addresses pertaining to all fundraisers from which they might potentialy benefit, and even with the QR codes and short URL addresses for those pages and websites, but those organizations will only benefit to the extent that they are willing to print such items on their own printed materials (brochures, T-shirts, stationery, flyers, church bulletins, etc.) and to the extent that they are willing to add links to their web sites and outgoing e-mails.
Given the fact that promoting those pages may reap substantial benefits, without much additional work on the part of those organizations, it's kind of a "no brainer" as far as I can see.
Now, I do plan to raise funds for big charitable organizations such as World Vision and Convoy of Hope, specifically for purposes pertaining to well-publicized needs (such as the ones pertaining to the recent tornado in Joplin), but it doesn't make sense for me to only serve such organizations, or to raise funds only for massive projects and needs. For one thing, one cannot predict with any certainty that every year will be equally newsworthy in terms of the types of short-term crises which immediately capture the attention of massive numbers of people. This past year has been unusual in that respect. But things could calm down, a year or two now, and there might not be any similar crises during the following years.
In fact, I sincerely hope and pray that that's the case! (After all, the tornado which recently ripped Joplin apart was just about 70 miles or so west of my mother's home. That was way too close for comfort!)
Regardless of the future direction of this project, however, it is highly unlikely that the need for fundraisers for nonprofits will ever entirely end, until Jesus really comes again (and in that case, I won't need to make a living selling art products, or for that matter, to earn a living at all).
In the short term, I plan to publicize specific projects using individual blog posts which will focus on those projects. This will enable me to use each blog post for the purpose of giving information about the product or products being sold, and about the agency receiving a portion of the proceeds from that particular sale, and about the ways in which those proceeds will be used.
For example, I might have one project where I would use sales of prints, consisting of photos or art images of dogs and/or cats, so that I could raise funds for organizations focusing on the needs of pets living in areas hit hard by natural disasters. Those particular prints might be appropriate for raising funds for such charities, whereas other images might be better suited for the purpose of raising funds for organizations focusing specifically on the needs of orphans or abused women or professional musicians.
It wouldn't be like selling products, such as candy bars, which have little or nothing to do with the organizations benefitting from the proceeds from such sales. (Not that I have anything against Newman's Own, which does sell food products specifically for the purpose of raising funds for nonprofit groups. After all, everyone has to eat, so that's a big market, and Paul Newman was very smart to create the Newman's Own Foundation. He had the resources and name recognition with which to quickly create his own brand of food products, and in order to pay for distribution in the nation's grocery stores. Most ordinary people lack those resources.)
Tailoring the products sold by the Artistic Rescue Project to the needs of the specific organizations or charities would be fairly easy to do, if I obtained the digital files on which to base those "made to order" products from image sources offering vast selections of images. My designs might even include text and/or graphics (such as organizational logos) specifically tailored to those organizations. But that won't be the norm (as discussed later in this blog post).
In some cases, the organizations themselves might be able to furnish appropriate images on which to base products to be sold for fundraising purposes. In fact, if those designs included corporate logos, I'd pretty much have to get those graphic images from the companies themselves, along with written permission to use those files on those particular design projects.
A lot of people involved in charitable work take photos related to that work on a frequent basis, because they're smart enough to understand that visual documentation can be useful for web sites and multimedia shows created for the purpose of persuading people to support their charities and ministries. Those people, however, are only rarely knowledgeable enough to turn those images into artistically compelling products for which people would want to pay when the images had been turned into high quality fine art products, such as prints on canvas. I have the Photoshop skills needed in order to do that. (I may occasionally subcontract work pertaining to Adobe Illustrator, since I've never been an Illustrator whiz. But I plan to eventually develop those skills, too, once I've bought that software!)
I've mentioned that I will initially be using this blog in order to furnish potential buyers with information about specific products being sold in relation to specific charities and projects. That model of operation will enable me to work with multiple charities (or nonprofits) and multiple products tied to those organizations.
However, that won't be the best strategy to use in the long term, once the number of products and projects and clients has grown too large to be easily managed.
In the long term, once I have a single online e-commerce site, I plan to use subdomain names connected with the primary website for ArtisticRescue.com in order to enable people to easily find specific products connected with specific organizations and needs. With a little bit of help on the programming end, I also hope (eventually) to create and add an online search tool for the purpose of enabling people to find all the e-commerce listings being used to raise funds for their favorite participating charities.
I hope that I've adequately explained how the criterion of "flexibility" applies to how I intend to operate this fundraising project and business. If not, feel free to write to me in order to ask any additional questions I haven't thought to answer. Now I'm going to move on to the second primary criterion: Variety.
VARIETY
A lot of the time, one will visit the website for a particular charity, and one will find that they're raising funds by selling a very limited range of products. That's understandable, since most charities are in the business, primarily, of running their charities and meeting people's needs, not selling fundraising products, much less creating unique fundraising products which will have special appeal because they cannot be easily purchased elsewhere.
Also, the overall workflow plays an important role in in terms of influencing the variety of fundraising products which can be sold online by any given nonprofit or charity. If an organization decides to sell bags of fair trade coffee, for instance, it may order large quantities of several varieties of that coffee, and store it in boxes around the office, and ship the individual bags out themselves in response to specific orders. That may be feasible, but I suspect that it's often a bit of a pain to implement without hindering the overall operation of those nonprofit groups and their employees.
But it just isn't feasible to offer much in the way of variety when doing things that way; so consequently, such operations only rarely earn much money for the nonprofit groups which raise funds that way. (It only works with Girl Scout Cookies because that's such a large organization which makes up for the relative lack of variety in the product line by getting tons of unpaid labor from those cute little girl scouts. It also helps that the fundraising projects are of relatively limited duration, and they require pre-orders from many of their customers. Not to mention the willingness of all of those parents to store boxes of the not-yet-delivered cookies in their homes!)
Not every organization enjoys the benefits enjoyed by the Girl Scouts, however, so organizations sometimes work with third party companies which specialize in setting up things so that the web sites for those organizations can offer more products, and so that the actual work of storing and shipping products in response to orders can be done by those third party companies.
For an example of how one nonprofit group does this, visit this web page. As you can see, ChildFund International, formerly known as the Christian Children's Fund, has its own online store, which is operated by a company called SportsAwards.biz.
The benefit of doing things that way is that ChildFund International doesn't have to produce or ship the products. The drawback? They still don't offer a very wide variety of products, since the entire page of "all products" only shows 14 products as of this writing.
Even worse (in my admittedly subjective opinion): The products are stunningly boring, and would normally be of interest ONLY to a person who essentially wants to become a walking billboard for ChildFund International, or who at the bare minimum doesn't object to doing so. Therefore, it seems to me (without seeing their sales figures) that ChildFund International is unlikely to make very many sales from that online store. It's better than nothing, and at least it represents a small income opportunity (as opposed to a scenario where they actually give such products out for nothing), but it just isn't a very smart way to raise funds, in my opinion, at least in terms of the issue of variety in the overall product line. (Of course, their actual sales figures may say something entirely different, but if so, I suspect that it has a lot more to do with the unusual number of people who want to support that organization than with any actual desire on the part of the public to own the products themselves.)
Based on my brief online investigation, it appears that there are also varying opinions about the legitimacy of ChildFund International itself. I think that the original organization on which it's based (Christian Children's Fund) was legit, back in the 60s when my grandmother counted herself as a faithful supporter for many years, but I can't really speak to the issue of whether or not they are legit now. (And for all I know, Grandmother might have been scammed, although I don't think that was the case.) My point here is not to add my opinion to that discussion, one way or another, but simply to cite that organization as an example of a charity which could definitely improve its methods of raising funds via e-commerce product sales, insofar as the issue of variety is concerned.
In my opinion, there's a place for the sales of logo-based products, but normally only as part of a line of high quality products which people might wish to buy even if they didn't support the organizations being funded with the proceeds from those sales. Otherwise, the potential market for the products being sold is very small. (Of course, there are notable exceptions, such as products featuring the Nike logo, or products featuring the logos of sports teams, to which people often have fanatical loyalty; but overall, I think that people would rather buy products because of their intrinsic appeal, not because the products promote specific brands or organizations!)
That's why I'm choosing to focus on the sales of products which would be appealing to anyone who loves high quality art prints of various subjects. Those products can still feature organizational logos, if those organizations think that adding those logos would actually enhance salability, but that isn't a necessity.
In the short run, of course, the variety offered in connection with the Artistic Rescue Project is likely to be even smaller than what ChildFund International offers. But keep in mind that this is a brand new one-man operation, with nothing close to that organization's overall history. Right from the start, one of the objectives of this project will be to periodically add new (and artistically exciting!) images to the product line, in order to expand the fundraising options available to those charities and organizations with which I choose to work.
CONCLUSION
In this blog post, I've discussed the criteria of flexibility and variety, in relation to the manner in which the Artistic Rescue Project will operate. I'm kind of choosing the topics to discuss in this blog as they occur to me, so I'm not sure what the next topic will be. But stay tuned, as broadcasters used to say, because I'll do my best to make things interesting for you.
