Best church fundraising ever

It’s a single sheet of paper, included in the church newsletter. Headline: Your Help Is Needed for our Greek Festival.

It invites parishioners to help underwrite the up-front expenses for the Festival, then goes on to list those expenses, most of them food.

The list ranges from expensive (500 gallons of olive oil for $5,500) to affordable (10,000 plastic spoons for $70). It has some incredibly huge quantities (3,000 pounds of sugar for $1,200; 1,600 pounds of kalamari for $3,200), and a whole array of just plain mouth-watering: 1,000 pounds of feta cheese for $2,290, 840 pounds of kalamata olives for $2,800, 10 lambs for $2,000. I get hungry every time I look at the list.

This is powerful fundraising because of the specificity. It’s not asking people to stand with the idea of the festival. It’s not trying to make the philosophical case for the festival. It’s not working to put the festival into a larger context.

It’s just giving people a chance to do something specific.

Give $300 and you can walk around the festival thinking, That tzatziki on your gyros? I supplied that!

This isn’t the work of a fundraising expert. Just someone close to the cause who knows what the festival requires and needs to get the job done.

If more fundraising were built around specific realities like that, we’d be raising a lot more money.

Can you find ways to connect your donors so directly and specifically to your cause? Give it a shot.

And if you’re in or near Seattle, don’t even consider missing the Saint Demetrios Greek Festival, September 16-18.