This is a how-to book. Its goal is to provide organizations with budgets of less than $2,500,000 (which describes the vast majority of nonprofits) with the information they need to establish, maintain, and expand a successful fundraising program that is based on individual donors. A large number of individual donors who support the important work of an organization year in and year out give organizations maximum freedom to pursue their mission. This book will be particularly helpful to nonprofits with one or two staff people and a large number of active volunteers.

As with all the writing I have done on fundraising, this book is based on experience and observation. I wrote the first, second, and third editions of this book because there was almost no written information about fundraising for small organizations working for social change. Most of my writing has been an effort to teach organizations how to translate more traditional fundraising strategies practiced by large, mainstream organizations to their own settings. But in my lived experience as a development director, executive director, then as a trainer and consultant, I could see that activist organizations had a lot of important information to share but didn’t have the time to write it down. The fourth and fifth editions of Fundraising for Social Change had the advantage of other literature and research to draw on, and, of course, I had much more experience myself.

In the sixth edition of the book—and particularly now in the seventh—knowledge is no longer in short supply. Anyone can type a question about fundraising (or anything else, for that matter) into a computer search engine and find dozens of websites, articles, videos, examples, and opinions. In this edition, then, I decided to focus on the question of added value: What does a book do that the Internet—the greatest source of how-to information that can be imagined—cannot? In this edition I have focused on consolidating information that would take hours of searching to put together, describing strategies in simple and easy-to-use language, and vetting information so that everything in the book I know to be true. That is, I know that what I say here works for small to medium-sized social change organizations (and all kinds of other nonprofits). That doesn’t mean the strategies described here will always work in every circumstance, and it doesn’t mean I have described every possible way to raise money, but I have given a framework that will allow you to explore what works for your organization and your issue, and that will help you know how to think about new fundraising ideas as they come down the pike.

At the end of several chapters, you will see references to “Online Content.” These are additional, free resources that augment the information in those chapters. There is also a “Resource Section” in the Online Content, which I will be updating and adding to from time to time. For teachers or trainers using the book as a textbook, there is a free Instructor’s Manual online. Directions for how to download the Online Content and the Instructor’s Manual from Wiley precede this Introduction. These resources can also be found on the website of my consulting firm: www.kleinandroth.com. I encourage you to contact me through that website or at [email protected] with questions, comments, disagreements, and additions to the resources I have listed.

If you find this book helpful, I encourage you to buy all my books and other fundraising books in the Kim Klein series at www.Wiley.com and to subscribe to the Grassroots Fundraising Journal, a bi-monthly publication that will help you keep up with fundraising strategies and developments in the field.

But ultimately, after you have read about how to raise money and gone to workshops on how to do it and hired consultants to help you, the only thing left is to actually do it. As with being a player on a sports team, all the theory and explanation will not help you until you go out into the field and practice with your teammates. With focus, practice, and strategy, your team will win. Likewise, putting your energy into creating a fundraising program that everyone in the organization is a part of will enable your organization to raise the money it needs.

Few people give money without being asked. Make this your motto: “Today somebody has to ask somebody for money.”