THE BIRTHDAY CLUB

My birthday is in March, and like a lot of people, I often use my birthday as a way to ask my friends and family to support a specific organization or their favorite charity.  It’s a simple peer-to-peer fundraising activity that can help to engage your board and other volunteers, increase your donor pool, and not so incidentally, bring in some money.  You can simply ask board members and others just to do this—or you can create a real program that will build upon itself and over time, provide a solid stream of revenue.  Let’s look at how you can do that.

The first step in developing a strong Birthday Club program is to line up people who will reach out to their circle of influence and ask them to celebrate their birthday by making a gift to Your Organization  

 It would fantastic if every board member agreed to participate. At a board meeting, tell them you are starting this Birthday Club and it is expected that all members will join.  Explain that around their birthday, they will be reminded to reach out to their friends, family and colleagues, asking them to celebrate this day with a gift to Your Organization in honor of their birthday.  Assure your board members that you will provide all the necessary materials for them to do this painlessly.

Build a larger pool of birthday celebrants by reaching out to your more loyal donors and ask them to become Birthday Club members. 

Develop your Birthday Club package.  Develop sample  letters/eblasts/postcards, your thank you notes-everything a member will need to successfully ask his or her friends to celebrate.

Gather a list of Birthday Club Members, sorted by their birthday month and each month, pull the list of those celebrating NEXT month and send them your package.

As gifts come in, make sure you send a thank you and let your birthday club member know about the gifts. This means that you are encouraging your celebrants to use your donation page and not Facebook’s!

A day or two after their actual birthday, remind your member to send out a “belated birthday” note—it’s not too late to celebrate!

Regardless of response, thank your Birthday Club Member for doing this, and ask them how you could help to make next year even better.

Gifts will start coming in, and great as this is, the reality is that most of those donors are supporting the people they know and NOT Your Organization.  Most of these, may NEVER support YOUR ORGANIZATION but may continue to support their friend or colleague.  Your job is to ensure that the latter continues and the former occurs as it can.

It can if you reach out to each and every person who gives a birthday gift and see if you can connect them to your organization.  Accept that only a small percentage will be interested, but that small percentage will be multiplied by every member of your birthday club.  

An annual Birthday Bash—in person or virtually—can bring together Birthday Club members as well as their donors, in one giant celebration.  It is also a great opportunity to tell everyone how much was raised this past year by the Birthday Club and what that has meant to your organization.  

Make it your mission to help your volunteers and donor make their birthday celebrations truly special.