A: We offer idea feasibility, business strategy, startup, marketing, social media, and e-commerce courses as well as a growing suite of targeted initiatives as we develop our #next20 Strategic Vision.

A: The Edge charges a $25 application fee for new clients, and we offer subsidized consultation and training services and scholarships for women, veterans and individuals who are low income.

A:  Yes. We offer free services and scholarships for our programs for veterans.

A: We will assist first with a financial assessment and will explore options for resources for capital for your business.

A: We are not a lender. We have partnerships with different lending sources. We will assist with loan packaging and financial projections.

A: We do not actually write business plans, but we do guide our clients through the process–either utilizing skilled coaches or by offering a class on the subject.

A: We utilize skilled volunteers and business professionals that want to offer services to The Edge. We have an application and screening process that is facilitated by Edge program staff. The first step is to email our offices at info@theedgegeorgia.org.

A: We welcome support of strategic partners and new donors. We want to make sure that you feel that you are a part of the community and that your investment goes to support the programs and services you want to support. Please reach out directly to Executive Director, Rachel Davis at .

A: We offer virtual training and consultation as well as popup consulting and training with strategic partners throughout the city of Atlanta.

A: We serve men and women; however, through The Edge Women’s Business Center we provide programming specifically for women entrepreneurs.

A: We specialize in getting businesses launched and offering strategic services for scaling and redirection of established businesses.

The world you’re fundraising in has fundamentally shifted. Our hyper-connected world has bridged geographical and socio cultural divides to empower like-minded people to unite, connect, and rally around causes they deeply care about.

However, it has brought with it an exhaustive demand on your network’s attention. Reaching new donors with our message has become nearly impossible due to the constant noise, tweets, pings, and breaking news. And as budgets continue to get cut, we’re often left to wear many hats and manage an unrealistic workload.

So, what can we do? Business as usual is not an option. We’ve been there. And that’s exactly why we’ve developed a fundraising methodology that is designed to guide you in today’s connected world: People Fundraising.

The basic idea behind People Fundraising is that when we are asked to give—to care—by those we are connected with both online and in-person, we are more likely to do so. It’s simple. It’s this relationship between your supporters and his/her friends that promotes action.

And as a nonprofit, The Edge can tap into the power and influence of these natural connections and raise money for our organization at the same time by using People Fundraising.

CauseVox began in 2011 with idea of creating a platform that connected people with causes that matter. And today, it’s never been more clear that these social connections are what will shape fundraising into the future.

The world of nonprofit fundraising has changed, and our fundraising strategy must follow suit. Together we can grow The Edge into a stronger, more financially sound organization and make long-lasting relationships with supporters at the same time using People Fundraising. And we’re here to help you get started.

While online fundraising campaigns do have many things in common, CauseVox helped us see clearly that the type of campaign we run will greatly influence the way we set up and market our campaign site. It was exciting to get started building out our site, but we had to take a step back to think about what kind of campaign we wanted to run so that we could set the campaign up right.

We considered these two formats:

Basic Crowdfunding

Crowdfunding is the practice of funding a project or venture by raising many small amounts of money from a large number of people on one main campaign site. With CauseVox’s crowdfunding template, we are able to set up and design our own site easily.

Crowdfunding may be a good option in the following instances:

• New to online fundraising without an existing base of supporters
• Needs to raise a large amount of funds in a short amount of time
• Has a specific project you’re looking to fund
• Would like a basic donation page

Peer-to-Peer Fundraising

Peer-to-peer fundraising is a powerful type of crowdfunding that uses our current donors, volunteers, and other connections to fundraise for our nonprofit—and this is where People Fundraising comes into play.

Our supporters become personal fundraisers by creating personal or team pages under our campaign that drives their networks to give to The Edge, expanding our reach and helping us to acquire new donors in the process. Campaigns that use peer-to-peer fundraising tend to raise twice as much as those without.

We discovered that a peer-to-peer fundraising campaign is good when:

• We have enthusiastic supporters or a close network to engage to fundraise for us
• We need to raise a large amount of funds in a short amount of time
• We are looking to engage supporters in long term DIY fundraising efforts
• We have time to help guide and manage fundraisers

Aside from just a straightforward peer-to-peer fundraising site, CauseVox’s customization options allow us to use their peer-to-peer functionality for every crowdfunding use case listed above plus:

• Runs, Walks, and Activities
• Fundraising Events and Competitions
• GivingTuesday Campaigns
• Year-end campaigns

Peer-to-peer fundraising can be used to power any fundraising campaign we’re looking to do, and our supporters have the opportunity to engage with our organization on a whole new level!

Once we decided on our campaign structure, we were ready to start setting goals with the guide Goal Setting: Making Your Campaign SMART.

Goals aren’t just another thing you need to fill in while you setup your campaign, they’re vitally important in contributing to it’s success because ultimately you’re making it clear to yourself and your network who or what you’re fundraising for, how it can be accomplished, and why you’re fundraising in the first place. With this information, donors are provided what they need to make an informed decision not only about whether they’ll give, but also how much they’ll give.

Here are a few goals you may want to set for your campaign:

• Fundraising Goal
• Length of Time for Campaign (End Date)
• Impact the campaign will make (Impact Metric)
• Total number of donors + total number of new donors (for internal records)
• Number of personal fundraisers (for peer-to-peer campaigns)
• Average Personal Fundraiser Amount Raised (for peer-to-peer campaigns)

But how do you go about setting these goals? You may have heard that setting SMART goals work best. SMART is an acronym for the 5 key features that experts believe must be integrated into your goal in order to set yourself up for success:

S- Specific

M- Measurable

A- Attainable

R- Relevant

T – Time-Based

Let’s take a look at how you can set goals these goals through the lens of the SMART framework to set your Fundraising Goal, End Date, and Impact Goal.

Fundraising Goal

With fundraising goals, there are a few factors you need to take into consideration. To pinpoint your specific fundraising goal, ask yourself:

• What is the impact that I’d like to accomplish through this campaign?
• What is the budget needed to reach this goal?
• What needs to happen in order to reach the goal?

However, setting a specific goal can only do so much, since you’ll need to be sure it’s attainable for your efforts. Here are a few questions you can ask yourself to help you determine what fundraising goal is attainable for you:

• What have you raised in past events or online campaigns?
• What is your average size donation?
• How many people donated to your last campaign?
• What resources does your organization have to commit to the fundraising process (hours, money)?

End Date

Timing plays a huge role in our campaign success. For most types of campaigns, having a firm start and end date profoundly helps drive your campaign because it creates a sense of urgency. Shorter campaigns, especially those under 60 days, can actually make it easier on us as a fundraiser. Not only are these dates important for our organization’s budget, but they are also necessary to motivate both our team members and donors into action.

Here’s a few questions we asked ourselves while setting our end date (and the answers):

• What date are you looking to launch your campaign? September 10, 2018
• When do you need the funds by? January 2019
• Is there an important date that can tie in as the end date? The Edge 20^th Anniversary Celebration

As a tip, we recommend creating an outline of how much you would like to raise at different points in our campaign. Keep in mind, we (and you) can adjust your end date at anytime if you wish to make changes later based on the campaign’s momentum, but having a timeline from the get go can keep the team on track for success. If we’re close to the end of the campaign and the donations aren’t coming in, we’ll know to step up your game.

Impact Goal + Impact Metric

Setting an Impact goal starts by envisioning the amount of impact you’d like to create for your campaign. There are many #next20 initiatives you con fundraise for, but one of the keys to fundraising online is making sure we have a specific idea about how funds are being used and a way to measure it’s impact.

There are many different ways to measure impact including:

• How many people you’re looking to help
• How many items you’re hoping to provide
• How many sessions of a program you’d like to run

 The CauseVox Impact Metric allows us to directly tie dollars to impact, so that donors know specifically how their funds are being used and also allows them to take more ownership over the impact they helped your organization to achieve. For example, in World Bicycle Relief’s campaign is driven by the amount of impact they create, which looks like the number of bicycles given throughout the campaign.

For more tips, feel free to check out our Blog and our guides in our Learning Center.

Let’s explore how to create the content for your campaign to help it succeed.

Campaign Title

Your campaign title should be reflective of your use case and impact goals. Before just putting in your organization’s name, try and think of a title that’s compelling to your audience. Creating a unique fundraising campaign name can even create excitement around the campaign and encourage engagement.

Campaign Site URL

We have created the custom domain next20.theedgegeorgia.org to keep our branding consistent.

Design | Choose The Right Colors

We have taken the first step to make the CauseVox site look and feel in line with our branding by adding our brand colors.

• In keeping with our brand guidelines, we used a white background for the header.
• We used the brightest color (orange) for our buttons and progress bar so the eyes of our site visitors will be immediately attracted to them.
• We used the light teal color from our brand for our content headings and links.

The colors of our site will help our donors recognize our brand and even helps communicate our message.

Design | Logo

We have uploaded a #next20 banner that includes our temporary 20^th Anniversary Logo for the #next20 Campaign. However, whenever possible, it’s best to use The Edge logo with a transparent background (.png file).

Media

We have created a promotional video that shares the heart of our campaign.

Aside from the main media area embed, successful campaigns have more than just one photo or video. Add as many visuals as possible to help your campaign come alive to your donors!

Writing Your Fundraising Appeal

Arguably, your fundraising appeal is one of the most important parts of your nonprofit fundraising campaign. It’s the heart of your cause and the crucial part where you tell supporters what your goal is and why they should care.

A good fundraising appeal will explain to your audience:

• What you’re fundraising for
• Why you’re fundraising for it
• Who it will benefit
• How it will benefit them
• How much funds are needed
• How the funds are being used
• Why and how your audience should get involved

Yet, this information should be communicated in a way that immediately engages the reader, is simple to understand, and isn’t too long winded (About 200-400 words). Just like in your campaign video, the key is to tell your campaign’s story. Many fundraising appeals include the story they created for their video in their written content for the page.

Don’t try and fit all your campaign info and logistics in the about section-­that’s what the Sidebar is for! The Sidebar is the smaller content area to the right of the fundraising appeal. The Sidebar can be used to highlight event dates, have more info about your organization, reflect any perks you may have, or encourage supporters to sign up for a personal fundraising page. For more information on crafting a fundraising appeal, view our guide: “How To Write A Fundraising Appeal For Nonprofit Crowdfunding.”

So your campaign is all set up, but what’s the next step? Promotion, promotion, promotion. But that doesn’t just look like putting an ad up. Here’s a few ways you can promote your campaign so it reaches and engages your audience.

The Fundraiser Toolkit

Without any fundraising experience, it’s tough to fundraise. So, if you have agreed to be one of our fundraisers, the best thing we can do to help you be successful is to prepare you. Successful campaigns provide toolkits to empower fundraisers to reach their goals and after analyzing them, they had a lot of components in common.

Here’s what we included in our toolkit:

• Campaign Hashtag – They allow us to track who’s talking about our campaign. As you use them, instruct your network to use it whenever they promote our campaign on social media.
• Campaign One Pager – We have created a Campaign Overview and a One Sheet. Both are 2-sided documents that you can download.
• Short description of campaign
• Explanation of our strategy
• Highlights our relevant programs
• Examples of our impact
• Contact information for our organization
• Images and Logos – We have provided logos and social media graphics. (We’ll provide more as the campaign goes on.)
• Promotional materials
• Communication Templates – email, letter, and press release

How To Recruit Personal Fundraisers

Just setting up our site for personal and team fundraising won’t necessarily engage people to sign up to fundraise on our behalf, so we are reaching out to individuals who are our strongest supporters to encourage them to sign up for a personal fundraising page.

These are a few groups of people that are likely to raise funds on our behalf. These are the types of people we are inviting to create personal fundraising pages:

• Volunteers
• Board members
• Long-term donors
• Past clients
• People particularly engaged with your organization on social media

When creating the email asking them to create a personal fundraising page, we have added the following components:

• A thank you for their previous/ongoing support
• A brief introduction to the campaign
• Our campaign’s central story
• Call to action asking them to create their personal fundraising page, including the link to the campaign site

This email is being sent at the very beginning of your campaign, so we can kick off our campaign with a lot of activity on the site and drive momentum.

Social Media, Blog Posts, and Email Promotion

To best promote our campaign and your fundraising page, we recommend posting to social media and writing blog posts as frequently as possible, as well as consistently emailing your donors.

While frequency absolutely depends on the length of the campaign, we do recommend posting:

• At least one blog post a week
• Around 5 times on Twitter a week, and at least twice on Facebook and Linkedin (if possible)
• Emailing about once per week
• When we first launch the #next20 Campaign, we will kick it off with an email to all of our newsletter contacts, a few posts on social media, and a blog post with a kick off message.

Throughout our campaign, we will post four kinds of updates you can repost:

• Impact – Showing the impact our campaign is making (We will showcase a client that has been impacted by the initiative.)
• Plot – By using a plot, we can draw a reader into our campaign on an emotional level, more so than just presenting the problem and our solution.
• News & Progress – Sharing campaign updates about our progress, event info, announcements, and thank yous.
• Calls to action – A call to action is typically a request to share, donate, or fundraise. (Tip: The call to action will make up about 20% of what we post, while 80% will be impact, plot, and news.)

For more information on promoting your campaign on social media, view the CauseVox guide Social Media For Nonprofit Fundraising.

Board and Partner Engagement

One of the most important things that can help take our campaign to the next level is leveraging our board and partnerships to promote the campaign in front of our audiences.

Here’s how we are asking our board to get involved in our campaign:

• Ask if members would be able to commit to a matching gift up to a certain amount
• Request that they reach out to previous donors to see if they’ll give again
• Give them the option to create a personal fundraising page
• Provide them with our toolkit so they can promote it to their networks
• Asking them to identify a specific number of potential donors in their networks, and make the first contact
• Request they provide quotes we can share in blog posts on social media, or ask them to write a blog post about their experience with our organization to post to the campaign site.
• See if they’d be interested in thanking donors on behalf of the organization

But promotion won’t just stop at what our board can do. Our organization has partnerships we’ve worked long and hard to build, and a fundraising campaign is the perfect time to make use of those partnerships.

There are three types of partnerships we are using for our campaign:

• Monetary – We are asking our corporate partners to consider offering a matching sponsorship for the #next20 Campaign. Matching campaigns tend to increase the donor’s initial gift by 50%! We will also ask successful client and local businesses if they’d be willing to donate a portion or sales for a
• day to the campaign.
• Communications and Marketing Support – We will provide our Fundraiser Toolkit to business and other nonprofit partners to promote our campaign on their social media accounts or via email.
• Resources – Resource based partners can provide volunteers, event spaces, connections, advertising space…the opportunities are endless. We are thinking about what we need to move The Edge forward, and we are identifying partners that may be able to help supply resources.