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Happy belated New Year!!<\/p>\n
When talking about resolutions and goals, most of the attention goes to fitness and health, or habits and hobbies.<\/p>\n
But resolving to be bigger and better goes beyond our personal lives \u2013 as a nonprofit, your resolutions are to increase fundraising, reach more supporters, and tell better stories. And yet, the path to achieving those goals isn\u2019t all that different from what we do outside of the office.<\/p>\n
Here are three tips to keep in mind when making your 2014 resolutions \u2013 and reaching them:<\/p>\n
Making Habits, Breaking Habits<\/em>\u00a0shares results from research studies on habit formation and maintenance.<\/p>\n According to author Jeremy Dean, it usually takes far more than the oft-quoted, yet little-supported claim that it takes 21 days to make a habit.<\/p>\n Whether it\u2019s health-related or not, study participants generally needed anywhere from 50 to 66 days<\/strong>, or even more, to create a fully ingrained habit. Habits require more than just willpower, and your intentions behind them can make all the difference.<\/p>\n So what\u2019s the takeaway for crowdfunding?<\/strong><\/p>\n Whether you have resolved to thank donors more quickly, add fresh content to your website regularly, or send out consistent donor reports, remember that you likely won\u2019t be on autopilot in less than a month.<\/p>\n Think about why you\u2019re doing certain actions, and put more effort into doing it well<\/strong>, and what you want the outcome to be, more than about doing it every day just to check off a list.<\/p>\n It\u2019s easy to get ahead of ourselves and make a long list of 10 or more things we want to do and achieve in a year. And as we know in our personal lives, training for a marathon while learning to play guitar and Italian and cutting out sweets is a lot to work toward at once.<\/p>\n But cutting sweets and marathon training by June is reasonable, and summer guitar lessons leading to Rosetta Stone in the fall is also doable.<\/p>\n So what\u2019s the takeaway for\u00a0<\/strong>crowdfunding?<\/strong><\/p>\n It\u2019s much easier to achieve success rather than set yourself up for failure by establishing reasonable goals<\/a>.<\/p>\n For instance: strive to get 25 new donors in two months for a short fundraising campaign in the spring, plan to grow your Facebook community by 200 people over the summer, and work towards bringing on a big partner for a longer campaign to raise $25,000 by year\u2019s end.<\/p>\n Doing all of that in Q1? Nuts.<\/p>\n Our resolutions tend to be deeply personal \u2013 they are our mini measures of success, our way of taking generic, common goals, and applying them in a unique way.<\/p>\n We know that nonprofits and social good projects are challenging themselves more than ever to come up with creative and resonant marketing and personal calls to action<\/a>.<\/p>\n2. Don\u2019t try to do too much at one time<\/h2>\n
3. Make it personal<\/h2>\n