1) Involve everyone in your network to help raise money and support for your organization. Share information, tools, and your excitement to empower others to help spread your message. Money follows a strong message, so market the opportunity for support. 2) Learn from past experiences and examples from others. Inspiration can come from many places. 3) Provide various ways for people to support your organization at different levels, from volunteering to major gifts, to allow everyone to participate in a meaningful way.

1. 1) Involve and empower everyone, both 1) Think fundraising and marketing
on staff and in your support network, are different things that should be
to raise love and money for you. Share separated. Money follows a message,
the information they need, the tools to and your chances of securing financial
keep spreading it, and your genuine support are directly linked to your
excitement and appreciation that they’re ability to market the opportunity for
doing so. providing it.
2) Learn from others. Many of the ideas 2) Go it alone. To make the opening
for opening weekend came from past as awesome as possible, Open Books
experience, other events, bookmarked found ways for its long-standing
sites, and saved articles. Inspiration is partners -- authors, programs, artists,
everywhere. etc. -- to get involved.
3) Find ways for people to support you 3) Confuse the medium with the
at every level. Some people volunteered message. All the update channels had
for one afternoon as painters. Others their place, but they only worked when
made major gifts to sponsor whole filled with appropriate content.
sections of the store. Having a range of
opportunities was key to making sure that 4) Be afraid of trying new things. In
everyone could participate. retrospect, it was insane to add a major
development campaign to an already-
5) Remember what worked and do it packed project schedule. But the spirit
again…but better. Open Books will never of experimentation it demonstrated
again have the chance for its first-ever appealed to several major donors, and
grand opening, but every event, program, many store sections got sponsored as
and campaign we’ve done since then has a result.
included lessons learned from the
experience. 5) Lose sight of why this matters or
why you have chosen to do this with
4) Know your organization’s your life. In the month leading up to
personality and do things accordingly. the Grand Opening, team members
Open Books is a colorful, creative, high- were regularly doing 80/100-hour work
energy place, and everything about the weeks. It would have been easy to get
grand opening reflected that, from the 23 overwhelmed or bitter, but the
paint colors on the walls and whimsical excitement of finally seeing the vision
illustration for the invitations through the come to life was an intense motivator –
Mad Libs and feather boas at the VIP and, for many, a validation of all the
party. For a different organization, a totally work to that point. People support
different feel would have been passion. Let yours show.
appropriate. Be true to yourself.