Hi! I’m Nicole and for the past 8 years, I’ve run a variety of nonprofit fundraising campaigns. Social media and email blasts will certainly give you a bump in donations, but volunteers who make those person-to-person contacts are critical in raising the big bucks. Getting them in the door is easy when they’re dedicated to your cause. But making them feel like their time and effort is actually making a difference is another story…

I’ve run many fundraising drives where my rock star volunteers spent hours dialing wrong or disconnected numbers, and at the end of the night - when they hadn’t raised much money - they were discouraged. And they didn’t always come back.