Blog

A Fundraising Catalyst

As we have worked with many organizations and churches to talk through various challenges (and remember, we are passionate about partnering with you to tackle these challenges).  One of these challenges that comes up often is helping trip participants raise funds and know about the tools they have available for raising funds.  The team at ServiceReef has created a tool to help you... or to help your participants now.  Trip participants will receive an email helping guide them to their fundraising tools, primarily the use of their personal fundraising page.  

Six Tips for Effective Short Term Trip Recruiting

1. Alumni - Reach out to alumni who have served with your organization before or have specifically been to this location or worked with this partner.
2. Clarify the Win - Quickly state the purpose of the trip and who you are looking to recruit as a team member.  The more clearly you clarify from the beginning, the better chance you have of finding a great match.
3. Call to Action - Don’t miss the opportunity to create a clear call to action in each of your communications.  This can be easy to forget, but remember to provide opportunities to sign up, learn more, attend an informational meeting, read stories of others who have served, or anything else that might allow them to take some small action step.  
4. Internal & External - Consider a balance in your team of those who are familiar with your organization and who may have served before, with those who may be on their first serving experience.  This should start now, with how and where you do your recruiting.  
5. Exhibit - Exhibiting at an event is a great way to share about your short term trip opportunities.  Place yourself in the shoes of someone you’re speaking with and ask what questions they might be asking.  They are probably wanting to know what you have that would match their interest and skills.  Be prepared with upcoming opportunity lists.  You may also ask if they are interested in a specific opportunity and if you could follow up with them on that.  
6. Follow Up - No matter what your first engagement point is with an individual, make certain you follow up with them!  This is the impression you are leaving with an individual.  Treat them with respect and honor their desire to serve. 

You are a steward of their missional journey.  

1. Friends - Ask people and alumni to share with their friends.  Give them some triggers for thinking of names.  Some examples might be family, small group members, friends, roommates, colleagues, etc.
2. Social Media - It’s good to leverage things like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.  Be intentional with your messaging and create clear calls to action in each of your postings. Create links for people to follow so that they can act right then. 
3. Drip Campaigns - There are many preparation steps that lead up to an event and often requires your team to respond back and forth with potential candidates.  Drip campaigns are a series of communications to your team to alert them of key dates, key needs, and other updates.  Organizations using ServiceReef have a basic template for drip campaigns that is automated in each event, plus the ability to use the email sender to send group emails at any time and to schedule them for specific dates.  
4. Work Back Calendar - It’s easy to forget all the communications, reminders, meetings, and other logistics of an event.  We recommend building a work back calendar.  The event date is the starting point and then you begin capturing key communication points leading up to the event and how many days/weeks before the event that you need to send that communication.  These are extremely helpful tools to manage your communication and keep you team informed.  
5. Integration with MedicalMissions.com - Remember that you can post your short term opportunities directly into various environments of MedicalMissions.com through an integrated tool.  We encourage you to check out the variety of tools available to administrate your short term trips; ServiceReef has partnered with MedicalMissions.com to build this specific integration for short term trips for this community.  

EFFECTIVE PREPARATION

Clarify Expectations

Clarify expectations with your team.  Consider outlining expectations for different groups involved and the different stages of the event.  You might outline expectations for the team members, the team leader, the field partner, and the sending organization.  You may also outline expectations leading up to the event, the event, and post event.  

 

Provide Resources

Create an experience that’s going to be a success for your team members; provide them with resources like fundraising tools, ways to connect with other team members, educational resources, information about the partner, and any other resource you feel important.

 

Educate about Tools

For organizations who are using ServiceReef, each participant has their own personal fundraising page where they can share their stories, post a personalized message and video, and provide a means for donors to help support them… make sure they know about this.  You may have a number of tools that you have created for short term trip participants; make sure your participants know about them!  

 

Encouragement

This may be a first experience for many of your participants, so be sure to help encourage their journey as a trip participant, in their fundraising, and how they share about their story.

 

Share Stories

Encourage your participants to share their stories, and these start long before the actual event. For organizations using ServiceReef, your participants can share stories at any point in their journey and these stories aggregate together for the entire team to create a team blog.  This is a great way to share the bigger vision for missions in your organization.  

 

You are a steward of their missional journey.  

The Right Person

It really does start with the right person and this is often best known by watching people as they experience serving opportunities and how they handle smaller responsibilities.  You are looking for a person with the right character, the right temperament, the right social skills, and the right administrative skills.  Know what you are looking for and keep lists of potential team leaders. 

Defined Responsibilities

We can’t stress this enough: it’s so important to define the responsibilities of your team leader… what do you expect of them, what can their team expect of them, and what should they expect from themselves?  You may also clarify what’s not expected of them. 

Leader in Training

Never miss the opportunity to be looking for future leaders and training one or two people on every trip.  You can make this as formal as you'd like, but also be training new leaders in the environment of known and trusted team leaders.  Give these leaders in training an opportunity to lead and to fail.  It’s much better to provide these micro leadership experiences before you allow them to lead their own trip.

Prepare Them Well

Don’t expect your team leaders to just magically appear.  This is a skill and it takes training.  Consider a team leader training program where you help equip them, clarify expectations, help them navigate team preparation and team conflict resolution, and equip them with the tools to lead well.  Ask former team leaders what makes it a success and what tools or training they wish they would have had.