Flag Fundraiser: Fill & Download for Free

It was a rather brilliant publicity stunt by a gay YouTuber.The actual name of the town is Hell. It’s in Michigan, and it does fundraisers where you can pay to become “mayor” for a day.A popular YouTuber named Elijah Daniel paid to become “mayor” for Pride and as his first official act, he “renamed” the town Gay Hell. As he put it:Ahead of pride month Trump's administration put a ban on embassy's flying pride flags. So as of today, I am now the owner of Hell, Michigan. I bought the whole town. And my first act as owner, I have renamed my town to Gay Hell, MI. The only flags allowed to fly are pride. […] Growing up, I was always told that homosexuals would go to Hell. Now the heterosexuals are trying to take this from us too.By the way, since his term as “mayor” has now expired, you too can be mayor of Hell if you want. It costs $100 to be “mayor” for a day.

Nonprofit organizations typically utilize Peer-to-peer Fundraising platforms, which is a specific type of Crowdfunding and has its own unique attributes.The term “Crowdfunding” simply describes a collective effort to pool money together for some sort of initiative. At Classiness, we talk about “Crowdfunding” in two-categories: Single-Tier Crowdfunding, and Multi-Tier Crowdfunding.Crowdfunding sites like Kickstarter are “Single-Tier” because the user sets up a single campaign page and then reaches out to friends and family for contributions. Peer-to-peer fundraising is “Multi-Tier” because after the user sets up a campaign page, other individuals can set up their own personal fundraising pages underneath it to share with friends and family (hence “peer-to-peer”). Because of this second tier of participation, p2p fundraising campaigns can have hundreds or even thousands of people fundraising simultaneously for a single initiative.So, back to your question. Assuming we're talking p2p fundraising platforms, here are ten things to look for when doing your due diligence:1. Supporters should be able to easily create fundraising pages on your behalf by filling out a short registration form or by using Facebook Connect.2. Supporters should be able to personalize their page by adding a message, videos and pictures.3. Supporters should easily be able to share their page via social media and email. When emailing, they should be able to import their address books.4. When someone makes a donation to a fundraising page, the page should get credited, the donor should automatically get an e-receipt, and the fundraiser and organization should receive a notification so they can send a thank-you.5. The platform should allow for team fundraising.6. The platform should allow you to control branding so that your campaign and fundraising pages look like a natural extension of your organization’s brand… not the brand of the fundraising platform. Proceed with caution if the platform does not allow you to remove their own logo or asks your donors for a “tip” when they are processing their donation.7. It should be easy to export or import supporter data into the platform.8. The fundraising platform should not store your donor/fundraiser email addresses in order to market to them directly. This is a huge red flag.9. Can you plug merchant/gateway solutions into the fundraising platform? If so, which ones?10. Does the platform currently work with organizations that are larger than your organization? Do you feel comfortable that you can grow into the platform as your organization gets larger?And, here are a few top p2p that you could start with:ClassinessCrowdriseFirstGivingFundlyRazoo*****In the interest of full disclosure, I am the co-founder and CEO of Classy (www.classy.org), an online fundraising platform for nonprofits. For more information about online fundraising and managing your nonprofit, feel free to check out our blog: www.classy.org/blog

As a VC, I consider it a yellow flag — actually, almost a red flag — if the person pitching is not the CEO.4 reasons why the CEO should be the one presenting:The CEO is the key person that the VC will be working with over time, so evaluating alignment and chemistry is important.Fundraising is an incredibly high leverage activity, and being willing to outsource that is sign of poor decision-making. It’s like saying that your company’s key strength is its IP, but then outsourcing IP development to a 3rd party. That’s not a great move.More than any person in the organization, the CEO is going to spend most of their time engaging in various forms of selling: selling to customers, pitching to the press, closing candidates, fundraising, etc. A CEO’s ability to fundraise (or lack thereof) is a good indicator of how good they will be at things like recruiting and sales. If the CEO is not the one presenting, I’ll start assuming that they’re probably not great at selling in general.Because the CEO is the leader of the company, they will have the clearest, deepest, strongest vision of what the company is trying to build. Delegating the pitch usually leads to inferior presentations and inferior answers to investors’ questions.