Dear Non Profit Fundraiser for the March of Dimes,
You may think you have come up with a brilliant
new way to do fundraising for your organization. By calling all the parents of
sick children and young adults you can find; then asking the family members to
send out fundraising letters for you. This is to save your organization the
expense of postage. You also failed to mention that your donor list is drying
up and that you do not want to pay for more names that may not pay off. After
all who is going to say no to a parent of a sick kid raising funds to help
other sick kids and fund research into birth defects and how to prevent them?
Let me start debunking your brilliant
idea. First you say it is to save you postage. We are among the lucky few who
are not figuring out how to pay Peter without robbing Paul. Most families I
know with very sick kids live on a very tight budget. So just sending out 30
postcards at 34 cents a postcard is $10.20 that has to come from somewhere in a
budget that does not allow for extras. Also if your budget does not allow
for fundraising postage costs, you really need to rework your budget or
consider shutting down for lack of relevance.
We will give you a month to send them out.
It's only Tuesday and I have already had one 20 hour work day this week. You
see unlike your job in which you are limited to 8 hours a day without overtime
pay, parents can work with a sick child for up to 24 hours straight in one day.
You have not stepped up to take care of my son so that I can sleep. So If I
have a choice, I choose sleep over just a few hours of volunteer time. I am
also quite sure that doing the mounds of laundry the average sick child makes,
buying groceries or cleaning house would also come before your project. You
might check with my other family members to see if they agree on this
one.
You have never offered my son any services
or help to my family; yet you ask me to raise funds for you, to use my name as
an endorsement of your non-profit. What's up with that? Do you think I owe your
organization my time and money just because I have a sick kid? I am more inclined
to raise money for groups that help my son.
Once we have a diagnosis most families I know raise funds to find
a cure for the disease that affects their child. What disease research are you
currently funding? Does it include the variation of ML4 that my son has?
You really need to go back to the drawing
board on this one. I like most parents are too tired for your guilt trip. You
might want to go after the 98% who have healthy kids. I assume that they get
sleep and have a bit more free time to fill out a bunch of silly
postcards.
If you currently are a donor to the March of Dimes and believe in
their work by all means continue to do so. After all they helped fund a cure
for Polio and have taken care of people who got Polio. They have also made other breakthroughs to help children. If you believe
in their cause volunteer to send out some postcards to your friends. Do a fundraiser for them. I just am over extended and did not like
fundraising call I received this morning. I do not owe any non-profit my time or
money. It is not my responsibility to keep The March of Dimes afloat.
