Thriftiness and Fundraising

This summer I'm advising some some start-up social enterprises through 4.0 schools, particularly in the area of fundraising.

While ScriptEd has been very successful at fundraising, we weren't at first.  We had been around for about a year and a half before we got any significant amounts of money.

When we started, we had no money. We ran our whole program the first year basically for free.  We had an idea that we wanted to bring computer science education to students, and we were forced to be pretty thrifty in the way we solved the problem.  We volunteered our time and got others to help us.  We used the resources available in schools.  We worked from home and coffee shops. We relied on donations for printing, and found pro bono legal assistance.  We had a friend make our first website.

Developing these thrifty habits early on forced us to create an inexpensive program model.  Keeping our costs low ended up helping a lot with fundraising - our donors and funders know that their money is going a long way when they contribute to ScriptEd.  We eventually came to a point where we knew we needed to hire people full-time to really expand the program, and that's when we worked hard on fundraising.

If I were to give any advice on fundraising to companies that haven't launched, I would advise to do whatever they could with as little money as possible to show the idea actually works.  I would also recommend applying for as many start-up and business plan competitions as possible and to do a ton of media outreach. The awards ScriptEd won during its first year and the news stories on us helped lend us a lot of credibility. This was really helpful when we started asking grant makers and donors for money.  Finally, I would tell companies to measure everything they can to make sure they're tracking success.

Once you know your idea has legs, and other people believe it has legs, fundraising becomes a lot easier.