Many organizations depend on fundraising to get the things they need. People fundraise to get a new swimming pool for their town, or to get special facilities for their school. Sometimes people fundraise to get money for people who need special health care or to help disabled or disadvantaged people. Fundraising is always for a good cause and helps people or organizations in their hour of need.

Once you take on the role of fundraiser, the first thing to do is set a specific goal. Whether it’s a large goal or a small one, it needs to be phrased in a way that people can relate to before they will get involved. Naturally the fundraising is to raise money, but what is the money actually for? Does the school need 10 new computers? How would this change the lives of the children attending that school?

The children won’t just learn how to play games on these computers, but they will learn skills that they will need all through their working lives. It will benefit them because they will be more employable if they are computer literate. They will learn to do things on their school computers that they would never learn just by having one at home.

Once people can see exactly how they – or their children – would benefit from these computers, they will get behind the project and offer help wherever possible. This goal will benefit teachers by making their work more interesting and easier. It will motivate the children to learn since most children love using a computer.

The next goal – or the sub-goal – will be to find out the amount of money that is needed to achieve our goal. To do this, we need to know how many computers are needed and what sort they will be. Will there be printers and scanners to go with them? Should they be networked? Who will install them and see that they are running properly? There may even need to be blinds installed to reduce the screen glare. The money raised will need to cover all costs, not just the purchase price of the computers. Each sub-goal should be itemized with an approximate cost.

Other questions that need to be addressed for your fundraising campaign are what specific activities you will use to will accomplish your goal, and when they will take place. A timeframe needs to be established, too. If there is no time frame, the fundraising could drag on until everyone is sick and tired of hearing about it. To have specific goal of raising a certain amount of money by a certain date gives people something to work towards and a sense of satisfaction when it is accomplished.

Learn more about building your profitable business model and get funding through grant fundraising at http://techoss.com/np_support

In Need of Free Blog Marketing Tips – then immediately go to http://techoss.com and get started atracting more customers today.

The following item was reported in a recent American Institute of Certified Public Accountants communication:

“The Exempt Organizations Division of the IRS had posted on the IRS web site a controversial document setting forth the Service’s view on what constitutes good governance practices for tax-exempt entities. Included in the document was the suggestion that audit firms be rotated on a regular basis, with five years as the suggested term. The Institute protested the inclusion of this item in face-to-face meetings and in writing. Last month, the IRS dropped the document from its website, explaining that the new Form 990 sets forth the IRS’ current position on good governance practices which do not include the five-year rotation suggestion. ”

This is another sad example of a professional organization placing the good of its members over the public interest. The Institute has a long history of this type of advocacy. Why would the IRS recommended a five year audit rotation as a good governance practice for non profit organizations?

Audit rotation is designed to overcome two problems that can occur if an organization hires the same audit firm year in and year out. The first problem is that there is a tendency for audit firms to get too cozy with the management of the organizations they are assigned to audit. Personal and professional ties can easily impede auditor independence. Secondly, audit rotation provides the opportunity for the organization to be examined with a fresh pair of eyes.

This second issue is subtle. Accountants are creatures of habit and checklists. Things are done the same way as they were last year and often in a very mechanical and non critical manner. Many audit procedures and tests are numbingly mechanical and clerical and it is very easy to not view the audit process from a sufficiently critical and analytical point of view. Sometimes the most glaring internal control weaknesses can be overlooked simply because the auditors were not looking at the big picture but only concentrating on the minutia. A change in auditors guarantees that the organization in its entirety will get a fresh look and glaring internal control problems that may have been overlooked by the prior auditor may get picked up by the new one.

Of course CPA firms with long standing engagements with non profit organizations do not want to give up them up for obvious financial reasons. So these firms use their professional association, the Institute, to advocate against the obvious good governance practice that is clearly in the public interest. Such cynicism is sadly the rule not the exception for most professional organizations.

The IRS also should share some of the blame for caving into the audit firms on this issue. But it probably was not the IRS staff that caved but the higher ups who were pressured from the Bush administration. Whenever there is a divergence between private sector interests and the public interest you can pretty much count on the Bush administration siding with the private interests.

In any event the IRS had the right idea to begin with. Non profits should rotate their audit firms on a regular basis.

Michael Sack Elmaleh is a Certified Public Accountant and Certified Valuation Analyst. His book, “Financial Accounting: A Mercifully Brief Introduction”, has received wide critical acclaim. He has nearly 30 years of accounting and teaching experience.

http://www.understand-accounting.net

As a leader or member of a Non Profit group you know that one of the main goals and responsibilities is to raise funds. As time consuming and unpleasant as this is there is no way of getting around it, your group can not perform its function if it lacks the necessary funding.

Setting up a successful fund raiser can be a difficult task and requires much planning and industry know how. If done incorrectly you will not raise enough funds and may doom your nonprofit group for good. Here are some simple things that you can do in order to guarantee that your fundraising efforts will be a huge success.

One critical thing that you can do is form a business partnership with anyone who is in sales of their own product on or off line. If you ask them to promote their products with a small portion of sales profits going towards your nonprofit group a mutually beneficial relationship can be formed.

The business owner will enjoy a boost in sales from charitable people who will be more tempted to buy their products knowing that a portion will be going to a good cause. Obviously you will benefit by having one additional stream of funding for your nonprofit group.

Another great idea for a successful fund raising event is a type of auction. The first goal is to find appealing items to auction of, this can be anything from appliances to vacation tickets. When looking for these items you can ask local business owners to donate or wealthy members of your community who are active philanthropists.

The other option to a standard auction would be to set up a mini market with business owners selling their wares in booths. Again, the proceeds will be going to funding for your nonprofit organization. There are many resources available online with companies who have specific products that they use for charity and fundraising events. The good thing is that they have been doing this for years so their selection is guaranteed to do well at an event.

If everything goes according to plan and your fundraising event turns out to be a huge success there several things that you can do to increase your cash flow. One form of residual income that can be established is if the vendors continue to sell related products to customers from your event. Your nonprofit can continue to receive proceeds long after the event had been held.

The other more obvious thing that you can do if your event was a success is to turn it into an annual event. The attendees can be invited back each year to support the work of your nonprofit organization.

Finally for long term success in selling fundraising products be sure to closely monitor the individual success of each product. As time goes on you need to swap out poor performing products for ones that better appeal to current trends. This way you can ensure that your fundraising events continue to pull in the same if not more amounts of contributors.

Steve Albright is the owner and chief editor of http://www.Reviewopedia.com, a home business opportunity review website.

The visibility, awareness and effectiveness of your organization’s brand directly impact your ability to recruit and retain members. If your organization isn’t the first thing member prospects think of when they turn to industry issues, there’s work to be done.

But where to start?

As popular wisdom has it, knowing and admitting you have a problem puts you half way to solving it. In this case, that means doing a little member research to determine how your members and prospective members view your organization through its brand. This can take one of several forms, including a quick poll on your website, a phone survey, an e-mail or electronic survey, or a paper/mail survey.

Regardless of the format, the recipient list should be equal parts members and prospects, to get both perspectives and spot any disconnects between those that know the organization from the inside versus what the brand alone presents to the outside world. The included questions should be formulated so that the responses returned are actionable, and give you some indication of their perceptions of the brand and the organization behind it, based on their actual experience with you, as customers, as members, as industry participants.

Reading the results in a timely fashion is important, as the cyclic nature of non-profit schedules creates peaks and valleys in the brand perception and awareness level, depending upon what time of the year it is, and how high the level of activity involving members is at the time you launch the survey. For organizations that have even more volatile years, it may be necessary to do two sets of surveys at different times of the year and compare the results to get a good reliable read on the level of awareness you can count on.

The results of your survey are one source of data, but there are other sources that while less formal or quantifiable, are just as valid in getting a read on your brand awareness and effectiveness. These include interviews with Board members, committee members, volunteers, chapter presidents or directors, vendors, other related professionals, including members of related associations, and members of ASAE.

Once all this data is collected, it needs to be interpreted accurately so that the actions you take drive your brand efforts in the most effective direction possible. Some items will be readily apparent if the surveys and interviews were constructed correctly.

One good tool you can use to read your results is to retrieve the set of brand characteristics from the marketing archives, and see how many of your responses line up with those characteristics. If your responses, including the open-ended comments, use some of the terms and attributes that make up your organization’s brand, then you’ve got a good solid start on reading your data correctly and rating a good score on your brand effectiveness.

Conversely, if very few or none of the responses include those attributes on the list, there’s a good chance there’s a disconnect between what you’re trying to convey with your brand, and how it’s being perceived by the various populations it’s designed to serve.

Now that you’ve got a read on how well you’re doing, how do you go about improving? The answer is, much as it’s been overused by too many of us in today’s litigious society – it depends. It depends upon what your data tells you, and every case is different. However there are some common scenarios and a few valuable remedies to match them.

Scenario #1 – Our brand registers very low on the surveys for memorability.
Typically this means that your customer base doesn’t remember your brand in response to a question designed to illicit a favorable response unprompted. Your organization isn’t top of mind for them as relates to your products or services, and someone else’s brand is. That could mean that your exposure frequency is too low, they don’t see enough from you to keep memorability high enough.

It could be that a competitor has captured some key emotional connection to the customer that you have not, despite an inferior product or service – they’re not as good, but customers remember them because they’re “out there” more. This can be remedied with some increase in exposure to key audiences – your top buyers should hear more from you in a positive light to reassure them that you offer the product or services that give the best value.

Putting your brand in front of them for positive reasons, like a price discount, a new offer that really saves money, rebate eligibility or other product or service related reason other than to sell them something should go a long way toward remedying this issue. It will boost memorability without seeming like you’re overselling them, a positive cognitive light that will cement the brand in the uppermost memory of the customer.

Scenario #2 – Our brand rates favorably and has high memory retention among customers, but neither do as well among prospects.

Usually, this indicates that your product or service has to be “seen to be believed” – it’s value is best seen at delivery or in the transaction, rather than prior to receiving it. This is a sticky problem that has to do as much with promotional direction and relevance as anything else. Your customers know you and have experienced your value, been satisfied with the product or service upon and after delivery and the reputation of the brand was reinforced positively.

Prospects, on the other hand, only know you by your “public” face – advertising, packaging, direct marketing, sponsorship associations. The brand unfortunately has little carriage by word of mouth, based on the fact that satisfied customers are not waving your flag and passing on the good word to prospects themselves. Prospects only get a read based on what you tell them.

Look to your research and find those key hot buttons of your best customers, and promote those attributes to prospects more heavily. Also, compare your reading on prospects versus customers in other areas of your brand – you may find another disconnect in their perceptions that could cause this effect, and you can remedy both with a shift in your promotional or creative approach to highlight those key elements more heavily. Align your creative with those highest ranking attributes of your best customers, and the prospects should get the best, most relevant perception of your product.

These are just two of the possible outcomes to this type of analysis. Suffice to say that if you’re brand is aligned with your message and your audience, you’ve got a strong package for success.

David Poulos, Chief Consultant at Granite Partners has been offering marketing guidance to firms for over 25 years. Specialties include non-profit marketing and full-scale strategic marketing campaigns. He can be reached at http://www.granite-part.com, or 410-472-4570.

Are you the executive director of a nonprofit organization spending nights worried about making your presentation to your nonprofit board and yet your printers and computers are failing? Have you spent the day fixing problems that are not part of your nonprofit job description? Are you feeling overwhelmed because somehow without you knowing it, you have become deemed technology support for your nonprofit organization?

If you are wondering how to start a nonprofit or you are running a nonprofit, at some point you look out at your internet, office, voice and client acquisition environment and wonder just how will you survive. The internet operation requires you to look at the website and all incoming connections. The office work involves the computers and all that borrowed or loaned nonprofit software on it. And of course it includes security against viruses. Then the voice network which means making sure the telephone network is secure and operating for the upcoming fundraising campaign. This means the main nonprofit mission of getting more clients, donors and additional fundraising special events gets put on the back burner.

When the resources of a nonprofit organization are scarce, money and true funding do not really exist to any major extent. This means an accidental techie situation is a reality. Your nonprofit job turns into you becoming an accidental techie because planning to handle technology was the last thing thought about when you were hired or during the starting of the nonprofit. This is especially true when you and the organization have the same name and the same business function, then that probably mean the organization is you.

When this reality sets in, you must review the whole situation and get a complete assessment of what you will need to do in order to meet your nonprofit goals. The last thing you want to do is try and embark upon a program to address all your office technology needs at once. Jump in to where there is an immediate need at the moment because if you try and do all the projects at once nothing will get done. Look at the immediate problem areas technically and start addressing those areas first. Take a systematic approach and go for a strong solution that you can demonstrate a strong return on the money you may be asking your board to spend money on. In other cases you need to get someone to help you. As a business system analyst from the corporate world, the objective is to get out of this no win situation by following a process as defined below.

You first need to get a comprehensive review of your nonprofits operating environment. Your opening move is to develop a picture of your current business operation. This includes your entire internet, out of office and in office technology needs. Second, look around and review your support staff, if you have a staff that is. Next establish how you presently make use of and purchase your technology and related computer equipment. Then launch a program to define how your nonprofit group is dealing with or the nonprofit board thinks of situations like system crashes, stolen property and more importantly unrecoverable s disaster recovery type situations. Finally do some reflection and define how are you managing your technology support role? Have you decided if what you do is effective or is it beyond providing real help to your group anymore?

Next we move on to another piece of building yourself, a get out of technology jail card. You are then required to put together executive board support for your technology initiative. This happens because when you started, the group probably had one PC and dialup. Then as the organization mission became clearer and more defined, technology needs grow by osmosis. They just multiply all by them selves. It is like an organic growth process. One day you go to work and there are needs for 10 people not one person.

When the organization you work for equates to a one for one situation, then you should evaluate what your time is worth. When you do this, you have a basis for making sound decisions. Are you spending time doing things that hamper your true mission? If you have a nonprofit board then as the default techie who is really the accidental techie, you have to confront the problem of educating and influencing your nonprofit boards’ policies and procedures. You may want to find out how to conduct a technology survey for nonprofits and present the results to your non profit management.

So what’s a person to do? You need to retain, not lose your common sense. You should look for a proven process, a strong strategy and technology approach with a real supporting person as guide. Get free information at http://www.techoss.com and visit the nonprofit center.

To fundraise successfully, your nonprofit organization needs to look worthy. How many times have you heard it really was not simply because it was for a worthy cause? If your nonprofit organization looks worthy, then people will support it; if it doesn’t they will not. It is that simple.

To get your nonprofit organization to look worthy in their eyes, you need to look at your internet, office, voice and client attraction strategies and technologies or as we term it it IOVC strategy and technology. Let us start with strategy which means it is about people so you first need to appeal to their emotions. This is done by understanding the client attraction strategy you will use in your marketing campaign and the communication vehicle. You can see this by taking note of campaigns for breast cancer awareness and others that are similar. Getting worthy involves perceived worthiness based on actions and people and then how your office works which can be helped by technology. But let’s address the strategy first.

Firstly, you need to believe in it yourself. If you are only half convinced in the worthiness of your nonprofit organization, then that will most certainly show in your manner and your communication. Most people can spot lack of sincerity a mile away and if you are not sincere or convinced of worthiness, you will not be able to convince anyone else.

If you can get the support of someone who has the trust of your community and who also has a high profile, then that will help in the quest for a worthy look. It may be a doctor, a businessman, the town mayor or a politician. It could be the dean of the local college or a well-respected figure with a wider, national profile such as a politician.

It need not be just an individual who will lend worthiness to your cause, but an organization. If you can claim that the local tennis club or Rotary or Lions Club supports you, then that will give you a needed worthy status as well.

If your nonprofit organization does not look worthy, then prospective donors will not be likely to donate. You must be professional at all times by making sure the paperwork is up-to-date and available should any one ask to see it. You need to have a person available to talk to anyone who should want information. If all they can get is an answering machine -though these have their place – then they will be put off.

If your fundraising is ongoing, then you need to publish an annual report and have it readily available. Donors need to know that their money is being used wisely, so communications with them is of prime importance. This does notmean that they want to be pestered on a daily basis, but they do need to know what their money was used for, and that you are really appreciative of their support. If they can be made to look good through their support, then you will have a happy donor who is willing to lend their status to your nonprofit organization.

Learn more at http://techoss.com/tp/howtofundraising.php

Gregory L. Burrus, Author of building a Profitable Business with IOVC Strategy and Technology teaches small nonprofit organizations how to remove technology obstacles and reach your nonprofit goals. http://www.iovc.com

In considering how to expand your business model’s delivery of offerings and benefits, you should be guided by what will be easily understandable and desirable by your stakeholders (those who are affected by what you offer) . . . and where the adjustments will provide more effectiveness for nonprofit organizations.

Business model innovation is something that many organizations struggle with. In this article, I’ve broken out the elements and added a nonprofit example to make innovative business model thinking and analysis easier to do. This article’s material will, however, be clearest to those who have already read about continuing business model innovation.

Expand What You Do Now

Unless you are providing a very small percentage of the needs of each customer or beneficiary, growing by 21-fold requires adding beneficiaries. Because so many organizations can expand to provide 21 times the number of beneficiaries, that’s a great place to begin. You should start by considering who you will serve as these added beneficiaries and where those benefits will be delivered to make the expansion more practical.

Who Is Served and Where

Let’s begin considering volume-expanding business models by looking at “who” is served. The lesson is to keep it simple. Change as little as possible while becoming more efficient and effective as an organization for your customers and beneficiaries. The simplest way to do this is to put more of the same kind of volume through an existing organizational structure without adding fixed costs or increasing the ratio of variable costs to benefits delivered.

In a nonprofit organization there’s a savings incentive to provide more of the same offerings to the same recipients. Let’s consider an organization that carries donated food by truck to distribution centers serving needy families. Most such distribution centers provide a small portion of a family’s total weekly needs — perhaps as little as one meal a week. The families may be visiting 10 to 30 different distribution centers weekly to fulfill all their needs. The trucks carrying the goods to a given distribution center are often owned and operated by that center, may be in use for only a few hours a week, and could be operated much more often.

Let’s assume that more volunteers can be found to load the food, and drive and unload the trucks. Both the nonprofit organization and the needy families will benefit economically if 21 meals weekly are delivered and distributed at one time to a distribution center.

See Example 1 for a quantification of this point.

Example 1: Adding Trip Volume for an Underutilized Truck to Increase Food Available to Needy Families for Each Pick Up

When a truck isn’t driven very much, its capital costs (depreciation of its value from the purchase price) exceed the operating costs. Put that truck into use more often and you are able to divide the capital costs over more miles. As a result, your cost per trip of the same distance will become much smaller.

Truck Beginning Point — 1 Truck Trip per Week: Annual truck capital costs $52,000 for 5,200 miles per year

Capital cost per trip $1,000

20 Times Truck Volume Increase — 21 Truck Trips per Week: Annual truck capital costs $109,200 for 109,200 miles per year

Capital cost per trip $100

Note: Annual capital cost is higher because service life is reduced by driving more miles a year.

Recipients’ automobile operating costs, by comparison, vary directly with use. Driving 21 times as much results in spending 21 times as much. If they can reduce their driving, however, their operating costs per week go down.

Automobile Operating Costs Beginning Point for Recipients — 21 Pickups per Week

Weekly gas, oil, and maintenance $21.00

Cost per pickup $1.00

Automobile Operating Cost — 1 Trip per Week

Weekly gas, oil, and maintenance $1.00

Cost per pickup $1.00

Donald Mitchell is an author of seven books including Adventures of an Optimist and The 2,000 Percent Squared Solution. Read about creating breakthroughs through 2,000 percent solutions and receive tips by e-mail by registering for free at

http://www.2000percentsolution.com .

Small non-profit organizations are very vulnerable to fraud.When I say small, I mean small: organizations that raise less than $100,000 per year and have only one paid staff person or no paid staff persons. I’m talking about neighborhood associations, sports and recreation leagues and all manner of civic, political and religious groups.

These small organizations are vulnerable to fraud for three reasons:

1.The person responsible for collecting and disbursing funds is also the individual who provides the financial reports.
2.Many small organizations raise much of their funds in cash. Cash is more easily misappropriated than checks.
3.Small non-profits are run by trusting and committed individuals. Sadly these individuals tend to be too trusting.

Here are some sadly typical fraud scenarios:

1.Cash collected at fund raising events is siphoned off by the organization’s treasurer or some other individual with access to cash collections.
2.The treasurer writes checks to themselves out of the organization’s checking account.
3.The treasurer makes unauthorized and inappropriate payments to vendors for products and services for their use rather than the organizations.

Example. Onandon is a non profit organization devoted to helping the children of parents who were excessive talkers. Appropriately enough their major fund raising events are silent auctions. Most of the donations at these auctions are made in cash and deposited in the organizations checking account. The long standing treasurer, Mal Feasance, has been skimming cash proceeds from these events to the tune of about $300 per auction. Plus he has been writing checks to himself in the amounts of about $2,000 per year for several years. Mal has complete control over the checking account and prepares all the financial statements.

Ounces of Prevention

There are three relatively inexpensive and effective ways to prevent and detect these common frauds;

1.Proper Control of Bank Statements
2.Requiring two signatures on every check
3.Preparation of Budgets

Bank Statements

If an organization has a treasurer who collects and disburses funds from a checking and/or savings account, the monthly bank statements should be sent directly to some other board member of the organization before it is passed on to the treasurer. The recipient of the bank should examine the canceled checks to see that disbursements have been made to only appropriate persons or vendors in reasonable amounts. Using this control would prevent Mal from writing checks to himself. Note: this ounce of prevention will not work unless the person receiving the statement actually opens the statement and examines the canceled checks. If the person receiving the statements just passes them along without opening the envelope, this sends absolutely the wrong message to the treasurer.

Two Signature Check Policy

Require that every check have two signatures. Barring collusion, this would prevent someone like Mal writing checks out to himself. The requirement of having two signers on a check definitely can slow things down and prove cumbersome. But loss of efficiency and convenience is a reasonable price to pay for protecting an organization’s scarce resources.

Budgets

Every organization should have an annual budget approved by the board of directors. The idea is to have a reasonable expectation of revenues and expenses. With a budget actual results can be compared with expected results. If actual expenses are greater than expected this could be an indication that inappropriate expenditures are being made. Similarly, if proceeds (particularly cash) are being deposited at less than expected levels this might indicate that skimming is taking place.

If the organization has cash fund raisers such as dinners, car washes, bingos and so on there ought to be budgets for each event. In the case of fund raisers such as car washes, bingo games and the like it is fairly easy to test for cash theft. Some person other than the person responsible for handling and depositing the cash ought to perform a count of the cars washed, bingo cards sold and apply this number to the unit price to compute the expected amount of cash raised.

Example. Suppose Onandon has a bingo game at which cards are sold for $15 apiece. If 200 cards are sold, the net cash deposit should be $3,000.

A Question of Trust

There is a trade-off involved in implementing the above fraud controls in small organizations. These controls assume that responsible individuals may not be fully honest. When people work closely together in small organizations it is natural for trust to build over time. But diligent observation of fraud controls requires people to maintain a certain degree of distrust. This means that small nonprofits have to be willing either to maintain a degree of mistrust to protect their assets or maintain trust and risk loss of their assets. This is usually not an easy trade-off to make.

The Responsibility of the Board of Directors

It is the responsibility of the board of directors to insure that adequate controls are in place to protect the organization’s assets. In small organizations it will be necessary for actual board members to be involved in the implementation of the controls discussed here. It is also important for board members to understand why these controls are necessary. If board members lose sight of the importance of these controls they are apt to become lax in their implementation and as a consequence the organization’s assets will be placed at risk.

Michael Sack Elmaleh is a Certified Public Accountant and Certified Valuation Analyst. His book, “Financial Accounting: A Mercifully Brief Introduction”, has received wide critical acclaim. He has nearly 30 years of accounting and 10 years of teaching experience.

http://understand-accounting.net

Is your Church planning a fund raiser? If so, there are many effective avenues you can pursue to help generate money for your Church. The following ideas are great ways to raise money for youth group programs, helping to fund missionaries, to pay for a short term trip for a Church group or for any other Church business.

One way to raise money is to start a mailing campaign. It us usually possible to generate approximately $2500 by sending out about 75 well written letters to family members and friends. Don’t hesitate to spread the net wide and not just contact family and friends but also local businesses. Be sure to send out thank you letters to all who give.

Rummage sales and bake sales also are helpful was to raise money. A small newspaper add and several families donating goods that they no longer use can bring in some real income. A bake sale can be done on its own, or at the same time as the rummage sale.

Another effective way to raise money for your Church is for a youth group to run a car wash. This is a fun way for the group to bond and raise money at the same time. It is also a good idea to sell car wash coupons ahead of time. Many will buy tickets just to support your cause and will not show up and others will show up from the world of mouth from those who prepaid for their car wash tickets.

Golf or mini-golf tournaments are a fun way to raise money and build a bond within your Churches congregation and the outside community. For the golf or mini-golf tournament, contact the course first as they should have a group discount and may even let your group come for free since you are with a non-profit organization. You can advertise your tournament inexpensively by hanging flyer’s and contacting your local newspaper to post the charity tournament as a press release.

There are many restaurants that sell discounted and often give away free meal tickets to Churches for fund raising. Simply buy or get these tickets for free and then you can sell these tickets and raise your money.

A way that is quickly becoming one of the most popular Church fund raising ideas is selling Christian t-shirts and apparel. There are online Christian clothing companies that can sell cool Christian children or adult T-shirts, long sleeve T-shirts and even hooded sweatshirts at a discounted price so that you can resell these at a profit. If you are going to buy these shirts for a Church group, free personalized text printing on the sleeve identifying your group is available. These Christian t-shirts are so affective because they evangelize with style and are popular with kids, teens and adults.

If you are planning to raise money for your Church, you can try the ideas listed above. Remember to make a plan, use official Church letterhead, and be well organized and professional when dealing with outside organizations. With a little preparation and possibly using a couple of the ideas above, you will have raised the needed money in no time.

The author is publisher of the Online Christian Shopper (http://www.onlinechristianshopper.com) Christian clothing and jewelry Web portal. To see the group discount rates for selling Christian apparel for your fundraiser visit http://www.onlinechristianshopper.com/grouporders.html

There are some terrific podcasts available on the subject of nonprofit organizations. They cover topics including:

* Starting a nonprofit organization
* Fundraising
* Leading and managing
* Using technology effectively

Listening to informative podcasts is a great way to learn.

You can listen to podcasts on your computer or with a portable mp3 player when you are away from your home or office.

I have turned my car into a classroom! Rather than listening to the radio, I listen to podcasts I have downloaded to my mp3 player. There are special accessories that allow you to play your mp3 player through your car radio.

If you have an interest in the nonprofit world, consider listening to the podcasts described below. They are the best I have found. I continue to learn from them and I know you will as well.

501c3Cast for Nonprofits

The 501c3Cast is an independent podcast that is all about helping nonprofit professionals, not-for-profit volunteers, and other “do-gooders” in the philanthropic world.

This podcast is my personal favorite. Listen to it and you will learn a tremendous amount of news and information on a variety of topics pertinent to your role in the nonprofit world.

Go to http://www.501c3cast.com to discover more about 501c3Cast for Nonprofits.

BoardStar: On Being Board

Would you like to learn what makes a nonprofit Board perform at it’s best? BoardStar will provide you a multitude of ideas that can be implemented to strengthen a nonprofit Board.

Go to http://www.smallpackageproductions.com/boardstar to discover more about BoardStar: On Being Board.

NetSquared: Remixing the Web for Social Change

If you want to learn about the very latest use of technology to support your passion to change the world, the NetSquared podcast is your answer. This is a great resource to learn how social networking, social bookmarking and virtual worlds (like SecondLife.com) can benefit your nonprofit organization.

Go to http://netsquared.libsyn.com to discover more about NetSquared: Remixing the Web for Social Change.

BusinessWeek – Top Givers

This BusinessWeek podcast is full of interviews by several people on their Top Givers list. Learn why and how some of the most generous philanthropists give back.

Go to http://www.businessweek.com/mediacenter/podcasts/philanthropy/current.html to discover more about BusinessWeek – Top Givers.

Craigslist Foundation’s Nonprofit Boot Camp

Do you want to know how to start and run a vibrant nonprofit organization? That is exactly the reason the Craigslist Foundation holds their annual Nonprofit Boot Camp. This podcast contains many of the keynote speeches, workshop sessions and interviews and is filled with useful information.

Go to http://www.siconversations.org/series/nonprofitbootcamp.html to discover more about Craigslist Foundation’s Nonprofit Boot Camp.

To learn more about ways to make a difference, go to http://www.everydaygiving.com and sign up the free special report “9 Questions to Consider Before Volunteering.” Roger Carr is the founder of Everyday Giving.