[Foundation-l] Fundraising Promotion and Job Opening

[Robert Rohde]

On Thu, Sep 17, 2009 at 3:22 PM, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> 2009/9/17 Michael Peel <email at mikepeel.net>:
>
>> This doesn't seem quite right to me. "average" donors may financially
>> be worth less in each donation, but remember that there's a lot more
>> of them, and they're more likely to give repeat donations. Also,
>> there's more to "worth" than just financial, e.g. in good will /
>> spreading the word.
>
>
> It's generally a sort of power-law graph, like so many things are.
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_law
>
> They're all worth chasing at all levels.

In Wikimedia's past public fund raising campaigns (i.e. the things
with banner messages shown to the public) one usually sees about 80%
of the total income come in amounts of $100 or less.   On the other
hand, most of WMF's really large grants and donors have come from
direct solicitations that are not part of the public campaigns.

I would assume that Rand et al. see the $500 to $10k bracket as a
target of opportunity precisely because it has been undercultivated in
the past.  It is a large enough number that such donations are rarely
made during the public campaigns (and make up only a small fraction of
the campaign totals), and yet at the same time it is too small to have
gotten the same level of attention that might go into soliciting a
major foundation for $100k+ grant.

-Robert Rohde