Fundraising Friday: Struggling to Grow Impact? Try Shrinking Your Problem
“If people truly understood how big this crisis is, they’d have to help.”
Have you ever caught yourself saying this or something similar about your cause?
It’s a common belief in fundraising.
And it’s dead wrong.
Every day, well-meaning fundraisers overwhelm potential donors with staggering statistics.
Millions of children in poverty, thousands of homeless individuals, entire communities without clean water.
They believe bigger numbers will create bigger impact.
But here’s the surprising truth.
When it comes to inspiring action, magnitude often murders motivation.
Think about it.
How do you tackle overwhelming challenges in your own life? What inspires you to act?
When faced with a thousand unread emails, you don’t contemplate the enormity of your inbox. You open one message and respond.
When dealing with a house that needs cleaning, you don’t stand paralyzed by the total task. You start with one room.
This same principle is critical in fundraising.
People are more likely to act when they see a clear, direct line between their contribution and its impact.
This is why a story of one child who needs surgery often generates more response than statistics about childhood illness affecting millions.
It’s not that people don’t care about the larger problem. They do. But … they also need to see how their single gift matters.
This principle is called “the power of one,” and it always works in fundraising.
Why?
Because when you shrink the problem you almost always grow the solution.
Instead of asking people to tackle global hunger, invite them to provide meals for one family for a month … or a day!
Instead of presenting the entire challenge of homelessness, show someone how a gift can provide safe shelter for one person for a week or even one night.
I can already hear some of you asking, “Doesn’t shrinking the problem diminish the scope of our mission?”
Absolutely not.
Shrinking your problem does nothing to diminish the scope of your mission.
Your problem needs to be tackled in bite size chunks precisely BECAUSE it’s so big.
Shrinking your problem takes the giant impact you’re trying to have and makes it tangible and personal.
When you help people see themselves as capable of making a real difference, you transform big weighty abstract problems into actionable solutions.
And when you do that, you’re actually empowering people to become part of a larger story, one manageable piece at a time.
Remember … every ginormous global change or movement begins the same way.
With one person taking a single step.
That’s how you grow a movement or solve an enormous problem.
One person at a time. One step at a time.
When you help people see how their one step can make a difference one person, one family, or one community at a time, you’re not just making the problem feel more manageable.
You’re making the solution possible.
And if you do that often enough, you might just change the world.
Happy Friday Friends!
-Michael