December 10, 2009 | Read Time: 2 minutes
Hiring a fund raiser is never cheap — unless you can find a few dozen donors to take on the task without pay.
The Grameen Foundation, a Washington group that makes small loans to needy entrepreneurs, is sponsoring a contest for supporters to come up with the most creative and effective fund-raising pitch benefiting Grameen.
The reward is a free trip overseas to see the charity’s work in action.
Supporters can go to Grameen’s Web site to create personal Web pages that benefit the charity.
But Alex Counts, Grameen Foundation’s president, says the charity is open to any new effort that raises money for Grameen — such as an e-mail campaign that brings in a significant number of new donors, or the brokering of a relationship with a for-profit company that donates a percentage of sales to Grameen.
“My guess is that the most innovative, results-producing ideas may be outside of the architecture that we’ve set up on our site,” Mr. Counts say. “We really just want people to go be creative and bring others into the fold.”
The charity hopes the effort will increase its online fund raising by about $1-million, to $1.6-million — more than twice the $600,000 it raised online in 2008, Mr. Counts says.
A similar contest was held last month to benefit Heifer International, a charity in Little Rock, Ark., that gives livestock to poor people in developing countries. Mensa Process, a consulting firm that works with members of Mensa International, tapped that network of intellectuals for ideas about how to raise $1-billion per year to help end poverty and hunger. Some 1,000 ideas were submitted, and the top proposals will be announced in December.
One leading contender is the “rounding up” concept — similiar to Bank of America’s “Keep the Change” promotion — in which a bank or other entity would round up all purchases by customers to the nearest dollar, and the difference would go into a fund to fight poverty.
