How To Promote Yourself
The internet is the most powerful and cost efficient way to promote yourself and reach a global audience. Self-promotion is imperative to fundraising success, because if you don’t tell the world that you exist – how will people know about your cause? Here are a few ways you can promote yourself online:
Share your profile link
Your profile link is an important tool which can tremendously help you promote yourself and increase your profile’s visibility over the web. Your profile link is like your personal address on the internet where others can locate and find you. Make sure you include your MicroGiving profile link on every social networking site you frequent like Facebook, Myspace, Twitter and LinkedIn. It’s also a good idea to include your profile link in your email signature and any communication you have with others online. Remember, every time you share your profile link over the web you increase your exposure and essentially promote yourself that much more.
Be blatant, be bold
Get out there and tell people exactly who you are and what you’re fundraising for. Don’t be shy, be shamelessly apparent about your fundraising cause. I’ve never heard of anyone being successful at promoting themself and fundraising who didn’t proactively take the initiative to make themself known to the world.
Target people who care
Don’t waste your breath preaching to the dead, target the people who are likely to listen to you and your fundraising cause. First contact the people in your inner circle such as friends, family and neighbors. These prime prospects are perfect because they know you. Also consider charity blogs, forums and websites. Go where the charitable people go and network baby, network!!!
Have an elevator pitch
Having an elevator pitch is imperative, especially on the web! People are not going to read through a 5 paragraph essay all about you! Keep your speech short, sweet and simple; you are far more likely to catch someone’s interest without flooding them with an epilogue. Create a few key sentences that tell people 1) Who you are 2) Why you’re fundraising 3) How their support will help.
Start a blog
Here you can tell people more about your fundraising mission. A blog is a great way to promote yourself and tell the world about your fundraising cause. A blog is like your online journal that allows you to express yourself and share anything and everything about your life. The internet can be very impersonal, therefore blogs are a great way to show the world your personal side. There are a number of sites on the internet that allow you to create a personal profile and setup your own blog. The most popular blog sites as of now are WordPress and Blogger.
Successful people are proactive. Don’t think that having a mere fundraising profile will award you with overnight donations. Your profile is a fundraising tool that gives others the resource to donate to your cause, but in order to be successful you need to take initiative and spread awareness!
Hope you find these tips helpful! Thanks for reading…
Cheers,
April
We would love to hear from you…
- What are some ways that you promote yourself?
- What tips and advice would you share with people who are new to online fundraising?
Tags: Fundraising
24. July 2009 at 7:56 pm :
Thank you for the tips they will help a lot. I keep forgetting to add links to my facebook page.
24. July 2009 at 11:36 pm :
I agree totally with promoting yourself if you are a charity or business raising funds to help others, but I have to disagree with self promoting personal fund raisers.
When you have many smaller needs like running short on food, bank overdrafts, need gas, kid needs diapers, etc…or big needs like home repairs or car repairs if you promote your personal fund raiser you very quickly develop the reputation as an internet begger and other pick up your name as a begger and promote you as such.
In my whole life I have never been called such humiliating names as when I reached out online for help. In just over a year that I have been trying to raise funds for disability related needs and home repair/modification needs I have been called lazy, irresponsible, a bad mother, greedy, selfish, unwilling to work, a supporter of beggars and much more.
Asking for help on the web is humiliating enough, but when people give you the feedback such as: My taxes pay for you to have this or that…you just need to learn how to budget, you are disabled HA, you get everything for free while I struggle to eat…then they proceed to tell you all the programs you must be eligible for and that you are simply not trying hard enough to get on the welfare programs.
Charities and businesses have no problem promoting online, you are either raising money for someone else or earning money to support your own needs.
In my opinion the best way to handle this is to promote for others and ask that they promote for you. What you get then is something similar to a Charity fund raising for you. It means that someone recognized your need as legitimate not something born out of selfishness, greed, laziness or irresponsibility. Someone is on your side and when you have someone on your side, others tend to look at it differently and then cross over to join the team.
I personally urge MicroGiving Recipients and Donors to share MG profiles of people other than themselves and promote their causes heavily using all the networking media available. Promote your Ebay Stores, Bonanzle, Amazon etc through all these available tools too, but if you are looking for personal help I think you need a friend in your corner willing to heavily promote your cause through their networks and you should be doing the same for others.
For promoting your own needs though, I think you should have a photographic journal or a video journal and keep at it every day like it’s a job. Twitter is a good idea too as you can easily update from a cell like I’ve done when I had a flat tire while getting groceries, or when the tornado hit a few feet from where we where sheltered and less than 5 minutes from my house.
Tell the world what you are doing to help your own self, things you have tried, what has failed and why, how you have applied donations you have received and what you hope to do if more come in. When others promote for you, there should be public page for people to see what documentation you can provide, see your progress or your failures and study for themselves what kind of help they can and are willing to provide.
Might not be what MG wanted to hear as a comment, but it’s how I see it and I hope it will benefit someone else who is asking for personal help.
25. July 2009 at 12:15 am :
* What are some ways that you promote yourself? Through reading this article and through comments from friends, I have found numerous ways to promote my request. I’m great about promoting others, but always have a hard time promoting myself.
* What tips and advice would you share with people who are new to online fundraising? I am currently promoting my digital graphics on my Twitter, Blog, Myspace, Facebook, and Plumdrop. I have yet to start promoting my MG profile, but will be working on this soon.
Thank you for all the awesome tips for this.
Hugs, Lois
25. July 2009 at 3:31 am :
Since becoming a member of MicroGiving organization i have learn’t that the internet is the most economical and efficient way to obtain much success with charity fundraiser. Bare in mind that you must promote your charity foundation that you represent, I think donors pays close attention to both, that a huge factor to be successful with charity fundraiser.
Base on my opinion i don’t think Personal Charity Fundraiser is very eye catching to donors, due to the fact that donors are very skeptical and concern about making donation to reputable 501c. charity foundation.
Blog i another great tool for exposure, But you must make you request short breif and detail, and be very sincere when you are asking for a donation.
Because the reason is in most cases you are for a donation from people who don’t know you, So you must let a donor knows who you and your Organization is all about.
25. July 2009 at 6:02 am :
I really agree with you Jamel. I don’t think personal charity fund raising is seen in a very good light. I think it’s great to promote everywhere in the world if you are trying to raise funds to help someone else, but when you are trying to raise your own donations…it’s seen as begging.
Registered non-profits don’t beg..they fund raise. Personal people are just not seen in the same category as those who seek to raise money for a cause or for someone else.
Bottom line, it’s as Jamel said, we personal people are not trusted like a recognized charity is.
25. July 2009 at 10:03 pm :
I consider myself fairly new and still learning about charity fundraiser, every day i try to learn more how to be very successful in any project i choose to challenge. By exploring different charity foundations to gain all the knowledge and skills to take both myself and the entire Microgiving foundation to exeptional level one day in the future. (Much thanks to MicroGiving for the head start great experience)
I think donors pay close attention to the foundation you repsesent, just the same way they look at your profile, With that said all promotions for example blog, social portals and internet should involved your foundation. Bear in mind MicroGiving is more important than your profile, they are the source for all recipients.
And last but not least, all these things takes time for you to see your rewards.
26. July 2009 at 2:07 am :
These are wonderful ideas and glad to read all of the feed back. Wishing all the recipients all the best and pray that many request are met. Thank you Microgiving for the good ideas.
26. July 2009 at 1:34 pm :
Thanks for the direction re: fundraising…..and the notes from other members too. It is all useful advise!
28. July 2009 at 4:24 pm :
I have to agree with Jamal when you promote a need for yourself people tend to say things like “sell your washer and dryer”. Not only is that hurtful its mean and rude. Then you have the fact that if you were to do that if would cost you more trying to go to the laudry mat to wash your clothes. Now my step daughter has moved in and that would be 5 people I had to do that for. It would cost me so much money to go to the laundry mat that I would never be able to raise the money. I tried the whole self promoting thing and have gotten slapped in the face so many times. If its a cause people are all for it and they should be, but if its personal they take offense to you promoting and call it begging. So its a damned if you do and a damned if you don’t situation.
29. July 2009 at 12:22 am :
I couldn’t agree more Michie, I have heard over and over…why not sell your computer and get rid of internet. LOL…my computer and net are furnished by the non-profit organization I volunteer for, more or less this is my payment. Other than that I literally do not own anything except a 95 ranger and 91 lumina. We don’t have furniture, we don’t own a TV or a stereo. None of us has more than 2-3 pairs of pants, one pair of shoes and a few tees that we all swap around between us. Many of you have seen my photo albums…note the clothes I always wear and then pay attention to times when Amy is wearing the same clothes, you will see pics of my kids wearing the same clothes I have worn.
The only appliances I own were donated by Greedy or Needy they are counter top cooking appliances because I don’t even own a stove. I had to wait till income tax came in to buy a used chest freezer because my fridge blew and I was living out of a cooler…again donated. That’s what I own…everything. So when someone says, have a yard sale, sell things on Ebay…Sell what??
Then I hear you should be able to get a job…Ok….doing what? I tried Voc. Rehab already. All the skills I have are useless nobody pays for someone to build, Administrate or Moderate their website when you can have a MySpace page free and it’s so easy a kid can do it. These are skills I once learned because I could make an income…that died out when out of the box websites were born so I have a ton of useless skills.
These are the things you hear when you try to promote a self fundraiser. You are really slapped in the face, ridiculed, degraded and in some places literally run off the site. People are threatened with forwarded posts/emails and calls to their county APS, CPS or code enforcement and if you are not put into hiding that way, your name is trashed on the internet and you have no hope of finding any help.
Honestly….it’s called begging if you try to raise your own funds, but yeah…if you are out there trying to raise for a cause it gets all kinds of support.
29. July 2009 at 5:19 pm :
Hum … maybe call it asking for help rather than self promotion … when you think about it, asking for help from others who you do not know, takes courage. So, in a way those who are asking for help maybe increasing their courage … always a good thing.
As part of a non profit that is just starting up, it takes courage for me to ask for donations even though we have our 501c3 corporation! It is quite the challenge because we are in start up which means everything we are doing is very basic, we have no programs yet and our research has just begun.
I am still navigating this site and learning how it works plus learning everything I need to know to help promote our non profit.
We, The Asceni are dedicated to helping others decrease the amount of stress in their lives and one way in which we have found that helps to reduce stress, is to look for what you are learning in any situation. We are learning courage by asking for help to promote our nonprofit. I found microgiving by asking for help. What a gift!
Thank you to those who have listed ways to promote our charity, I will be checking out the blogging sites!
30. July 2009 at 12:54 am :
I did not recieve such bad feedback when I decided to raise donations from my bed. A lot of people supported the idea, but many of my friends couldn’t donate because they were bad off themselves. So I needed help, thats why I came to microgiving. I have put my story out there, and will continue to put my story out there. It’s a good idea to do the work, the more you put into your fundraising the better outcome you will get.
I posted a blog post about microgiving on my blog. I hope it gets me some more profile views. I will also post about microgiving on my facebook page. There really are endless ideas to continue to work on your fundraising, and I’m excited about utilizing all those ideas to help me reach my goal.
30. July 2009 at 3:18 am :
Christine, I do believe you will find great success in promoting your charity especially the ways outlined in this blog. Though it does take courage and learning, you are asking for help so you can help others and your charity will not be seen in the same light as personal recipients. Though you are new and just starting, your 501 status tells people that you must operate within strict guidelines, you must show accountability, a paper trail for all funds received. You will not be distrusted almost automatically when you present yourself to the world.
You are hearing from me and someone else who has had very bad feedback while trying to ask for the world to help us with a personal need. I have never had negative feedback while fund raising on behalf of another organization or or another person though. I really think if you use the tools you will get your cause out there and will find the donors.