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Fundraising Help on the Way: ACB Affiliate Fundraising Network

by Dodge Fielding

FundFlow LLC, the Washington, D.C.-based company working with ACB's leaders and staff to develop strategic fundraising initiatives, is about to launch the ACB Affiliate Fundraising Network (AFN).

AFN is a membership-based electronic network linking affiliates to support and strengthen their fundraising programs on an individual and collective basis. The goal is to provide an accessible forum for ideas, an educational platform for best practices, a showcase for successful projects and a clearinghouse for opportunities and resources. AFN is an online workshop available to AFN members 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

The Affiliate Fundraising Survey conducted and distributed by FundFlow at February's mid-year meeting in Pittsburgh elicited participation from 86 percent of the state affiliates and 95 percent of the special-interest affiliates. When asked to identify their major challenges in implementing their fundraising programs, affiliates cited the following:

  1. Lack of knowledge, experience and training in fundraising.
  2. Lack of ideas.
  3. Lack of resources, and
  4. Lack of visibility and recognition of ACB at the state and local levels.

When asked how ACB's national office could most effectively support their current fundraising initiatives, affiliates' most frequent responses were:

  1. Share information and training about fundraising in the form of accessible toolkits and other material.
  2. Establish an on-line support service with how-to information that is relevant to the situation of each affiliate.
  3. Create and manage a way to identify and track potential donors with a centralized database, with each affiliate's entries kept separately and confidentially.
  4. Establish or support regional conferences to share fundraising knowledge, training, resources and experience, and
  5. Ensure that the ACB national office complements but does not compete with any of the affiliates' current programs (such as the vehicle donation program). In other words, promote collaboration and enhance communication between the national office and the affiliates.

The Affiliate Fundraising Network offers the following benefits to its members:

  1. A fundraising audit of each member, complete with six- month and 12-month recommendations
  2. A monthly report of fundraising news-you-can-use, best practices, how-to feature of the month, announcements and Ask AFN Q & A's
  3. Biweekly group conference calls, open to all AFN members for open discussions and about topics of interest
  4. A toll-free fundraising hotline with voice mail, and
  5.  
  6. Preferred consulting rates from FundFlow, reduced as much as 40 percent.

Initially, AFN's reports will be available through a closed listserv on the ACB web site. A members-only toll-free telephone line will be set up as part of AFN's service, attended to by the fundraising professionals at FundFlow, as will be the biweekly conference calls open to all members.

AFN fundraising audits and other correspondence will also be generated from FundFlow's office. On request (for a nominal charge), reports and other documents can be produced in braille and floppy-disk formats.

Membership in the Affiliate Fundraising Network is for six months, renewable every six months. There is a one-time setup fee and a monthly subscription charge, both of which will be driven by the number of affiliates that choose to participate in the network. The minimum number of affiliates needed to launch AFN is 10.

Affiliates with well-established fundraising programs that are already financially strong can join AFN and choose to sponsor the AFN membership of sister affiliates as a form of fundraising mentorship. Under that circumstance, the sponsoring affiliate would join AFN and receive a "mentor discount" on the membership fees of the affiliate(s) it is sponsoring.

For further information, call FundFlow at (202) 223-3503, or contact Dodge Fielding at [email protected].