Capture Holiday Season Donor Dollars

Take advantage of this time of year – when many people feel an urge to make charitable donations to nonprofit and community organizations:

1. Ask your supporters to save those unwanted holiday gifts and donate them to your organization. Their unwanted gifts may be perfect as your annual benefit's auction items, raffle prizes, or program/office supplies.

2. Let supporters know what you could use. You will be surprised by what people will donate. Here are examples of things that have been successfully requested: 

• copying services, 
• computers, 
• digital cameras, 
• temporary use of a theater marquis, 
• a performance by a dance troupe, 
• use of a professional kitchen, 
• office supplies.

3. Encourage donors making cash donations to find out if their employers have a matching gifts program and, if so, how to have their gifts matched.

4. Make your holiday wish list widely available. Get the word out using tools like:

• Newsletters (if already printed, use inserts),
• Websites,
• Blogs,
• Flyers,
• Mailings (if mailing materials are already printed, use inserts),
• Meetings and other events.

5. Finally, thank everyone who makes a contribution. (This means you have to get and store donors’ contact information.) Prompt, written acknowledgments help you cultivate solid, long-term relationships with donors who will support your work not only this year, but for years to come.

Health Care Before Hair Care!

How is it that members of Congress can consider (again) cuts to Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security - when so many of them have no idea how we in the real world live? I asked this in a letter to the editor  that appeared in the "Seattle Times." Check it out...

The "Grand Bargain" Is Neither

Apparently a bipartisan group of House members is urging the Super Committee to put “everything” “on the table” in order to reach its elusive “grand bargain.” For most people, the “bargain” isn’t going to be so grand if everything, including cuts to Medicare and Medicaid, is “on the table.”  Do lawmakers not realize that “grand bargain” is an unfortunate choice of words to describe their hoped-for deal?

You know how living in a polluted city makes it hard to recognize how putrid the air around you is …that, to recognize how much it reeks, you have to get out of town? Congress operates in a world gated community that reeks of privilege and entitlement. And I’m  starting to think that maybe some members of Congress are a bit out of touch. Their gated community world is too far-removed from the real world. For example:

Gated Community: Within the U.S. Treasury is a pot of money (and I’m not making this up) called "The Senate Hair Care Revolving Fund," dedicated to the care of senate members’ hair. The amount of money in the fund: over $261,000.

Real World: There is no money available to maintain current levels of funding for Medicare and Medicaid, according to members of Congress who want to “reform” these two programs.  

Gated Community: During the last six months of FY 2009, House members and their staffs spent over $400,000 on bottled water.

Real World: Many people drink tap water, which they filter at home and transport in water bottles that you can buy and re-use. People whose water has been contaminated by fracking are up a radioactive creek.

Gated Community: During the last half of FY 2009, the House spent $640,000 for “habitation expenses,” which, per its Statement of Disbursements (SOD), refer to “minor, minimal expenses incurred for decorating offices (pictures and welcome mats).”

Real World: $640,000…that’s a lot of welcome mats.

OK, a couple hundred thousand dollars here and there don’t constitute a big part of the federal budget. But it’s hard to trust that lawmakers who spend so much on things like coiffures and office tchotchkes understand just how much the rest of us depend on programs like Medicare and Medicaid.