112 – How to Raise More Funds with Sara Hoshooley

Episode Transcription

David Pisarek: In this episode, we’re going to be talking about fundraising and non-profit strategies with Sara Hoshooley. Sara is a fundraising consultant who loves helping small teams create big plans to raise more money. As a former leader of a small charity, she knows the ups and the downs of these organizations and what they face, and she’s here to talk about her project, Connect for Good.

Sara, thank you so much for joining on the episode today. How’s your day going so far?

Sara Hoshooley: Great. Thanks for having me. How’s your day?

David Pisarek: So far, so good.

Been looking forward to our conversation. I know we’re connected in a couple different ways, and I always love the conversations that we have. And it’s a pleasure and an honor to have you here on the show with us.

Sara Hoshooley: Great. Happy to be here.

David Pisarek: Yeah. So I guess let’s talk a little bit of, like, basic background type stuff.

How did you get started working with non-profits, and what motivated you?

Sara Hoshooley: Yes, such a great question.

My initial time in non-profit actually started in 2009.

I was working in the finance industry. I was doing recruitment. And in 2008, obviously, there was a big recession. So by early 2009, I left that industry and decided to kind of do a bit of travel, a bit of volunteering. So I ended up in a really small town in the country of Belize in Central America. And initially my job was to do volunteer recruitment. So I was working to find volunteers from around the world to come to our organization. It was a grassroots organization supporting the local community. And so my job was really to recruit people, get them to come to the organization and do some volunteering.

While I was there, we had a truck that was delivering meals every day to people who lived in remote communities, along with a lot of people living with HIV and AIDS and a lot of people who weren’t actually able to leave their homes. So it was really an important thing that we were able to get this food to them. The truck that we had broke down, so we were doing bake sales, talent shows, and all these little things. It was raising like $5 here, $10 here. Then, I had this idea that the organization has been running for years, and it runs on volunteers who come to Belize, do their volunteering, and then go back home. And for us, $20 is nothing. So I thought: what if I just ask all of our past volunteers to give 20 or 50 dollars?

This is in 2009. So this was long before crowdfunding or peer-to-peer campaigns were really a thing. It was just kind of getting started anyway, so I did that, and we ended up raising more than we needed for the truck. And I was like, oh, I think I like this fundraising thing. So came back to Canada, and I’ve been fundraising ever since. So that’s almost 16 years now.

David Pisarek: That’s amazing. It’s an inspiring story.

You had a problem: How can we resolve this? What do we need to do to be able to bring in the funds to fix this truck? Pretty basic problem. There are probably lots of other organizations that have had issues like that, big and small, trying to do that. Interesting.

All right, so you left there, and you came back to Canada. Is there anything that you feel is missing in the non-profit world?

Sara Hoshooley: You could take that question in so many different ways.

You know, I’m sure lots of people have talked about this before, but I think the scarcity mindset of being afraid to try new things or feel, act in such a way that, well, you know, we have to do this because what if we, you know, lose this funder? We have to do this because it’s the way that we’ve always done things. And I think that in the non-profit sector, we are almost always faced with a limited number of resources. So I think, in one way, it makes us all super creative to say, okay, we’ve got a little bit of money, we don’t have that much staffing, and we have to do all these incredible things. The demands keep increasing, and still we make things work.

So I do think that there’s kind of this, which I really love, like, there’s the scrappiness to the non-profit sector of, like, we can do this anyway, like, funding got cut, and we lost our staffing? We can still make it happen. And we do make it happen. However, that comes at an expense of burnout, not being able to fulfill, you know, or to service all of the needs of all the people that need our services or whatever it happens to be.

So I think that’s something that we’re always up against. Even when times are really good, even when we’ve got, you know, a lot of really great staff, things are working well. There’s always kind of in the back of your mind, yeah, but if we lost this funder or yeah, but if we lost this executive director, board member, whatever it happens to be, there’s always a bit of a risk that’s just kind of like lurking beneath the surface even when things are good.

David Pisarek: I love that you talked about the scarcity mindset.

I’m a firm believer of the abundance mindset. There’s more than enough out there for all of the organizations to fulfill whatever it is that they need. But you have to be in the right mindset for that to actually, I want to say manifest, but that’s a little bit woo-woo for some people. But really, I mean, if you go into a situation where like we can handle this, we’ve got no problem. Setting the tone for your belief system will make things more possible for you to actually achieve because you’ve come in with a positive mindset into a brainstorming session, to go: How can we solve this problem? Whatever the problem happens to be.

I love that you talked about that, and you talked about risk. So, I want to dive into that just for a moment or two. I think a lot of organizations are very risk-averse. They don’t want to put time and effort into something because, to your point, they’ve done it this way for the last 5 years, 10 years, 50 years. So why change? We’ve had, from time to time, some vendors on the show talking about their platforms, whether it’s Dropbox, GiveCloud, or whoever it happens to be; there are other systems out there that can help save you time and money.

The issue, though, is you’re so busy, to your point, how can you find time to actually look into these other options? To go: Is this a viable solution for us, or isn’t this a viable solution for us?

Sara Hoshooley: Yeah, so quite a few things came up as you were saying that one of the things I think is the reality of not having the time and space and luxury of trying new things or setting aside a bit of budget to try something new.

For a lot of organizations, especially the smaller ones, and I work only with small fundraising teams, sometimes organizations are a little bit larger, but I work a lot with small ones as well. A lot of times, the funding is very restricted. So, if you have funding that is given to you for this particular outcome, you’re going to need to find not only time but also money to take the time to do these other things. If you’re trying something brand new, or trying to do something in a different way, or building an innovation, you have to have money and time for that. And that’s not always easy to do. I think that’s difficult. And I will also say, I think the way that we have, in a way, sort of conditioned our donors is that we talk to donors about how much goes to overhead versus how much goes directly to the non-profit.

And I think if you compare that to any business, there’s no business out there that isn’t doing research and development. Every business is exploring what’s new, what’s different, and how do we do this better? They’ve set aside a specific amount of their budget and their time to improve and do things better. We’re in a space where we’re not funding for that. And so because of that, we’re not actually doing it. And I will say also there is, I think, a real nervousness of, well, what if we try something new and it doesn’t bring us the results that the old thing brought us and what if we can’t go back? That’s a valid reason not to want to move forward. And then, I think also just in terms of the time for training, I know some organizations where they might have had the same staff person doing the same role for the last 15 years and to take the time to get that person to go to professional development, learn a new process or product or whatever it happens to be, that’s a lot of time. It’s also a lot of stress for the employee.

And so I think the default sometimes is just, well, it’s not perfect, but we’ll stick with what we’ve got.

David Pisarek: Let’s talk about the email thing for a bit, because a lot of organizations do email. So what do you think is a good frequency? What is a good customer journey? That’s what we call one in the business world, right? The customer journey might be called a donor journey in the non-profit world. So what do you think?

Sara Hoshooley: So I will say so. Before I started consulting, I was an executive director at a small charity, and we had one staff member. Her job was to collect content for our newsletter, which was released once a month. So we would have a document on a shared drive, and every time something happened, we would stick it in there. Then, once a month, she would send out this email that had like 12 topics and like 10 calls-to-action, like, give to our bottle drive, sign up for our Instagram account, and come to our gala and like all of these, right? Nobody reads that much content. When you go to your email inbox and you open something and it’s a wall of text, most people either delete it or they close it and think, I’ll read it later, and it never gets read later. So I think sending too many emails. It’s this self-fulfilling prophecy, right?

We send bad emails, and people don’t take the action we’re hoping they take. Then, we say, well, email doesn’t work. I’ll say the organization that I work with, which has the absolute best results when it comes to fundraising through email, sends content once a week.

It is one story; it is one call-to-action. If the person has donated recently, we’re not asking them to donate. If they’ve given recently, we are reflecting on here’s, you know, we want to tell you this story about something that your donation helped make happen. If the person’s a monthly donor, we’re saying: thanks to your monthly generosity, here’s something that’s happened recently. I would say we almost never ask for them to do more than one thing. Those emails have well above industry average open rates, click-through rates, and donations from both existing donors and brand new donors.

So it’s really just that one key call-to-action of just asking people to do one thing. And I would say also keeping it under a hundred words is always ideal as well.

David Pisarek: Yeah. I love the idea of the one action. You can have some link text in there, you can have a button. Everything goes to the one place, whatever that happens to be. And as we were talking about that, I imagine Gordon Ramsay in my head where he goes into a restaurant.

Sara Hoshooley: Yes.

David Pisarek: And he’s looking at the menu, and there are 400 things on the menu. He’s like, how could you possibly do anything great when you’ve got 400 things? Make it three, five, a dozen, whatever, simplify it, pair it back. It’ll be easier for people to make a decision. It’ll be easier for people to take action. It’ll be easier on the chefs, whatever. Right. So when thinking about an email, think about it through that lens. Giving somebody three, four, or five different calls to action is a little overwhelming.

Sara Hoshooley: Yeah. And I would also say it’s probably not tailored as well. Most people are interacting with an organization in a particular way.

So I’ll give an example: an organization I worked with that was providing after-school childcare, and I donated to them. I was on their email list, and I don’t have kids. And I was getting emails from them all the time about like, don’t forget to sign up, here’s the deadline for childcare. I’m like, I’m a donor. So I’m happy to hear that your programs are going, but this is not for me. And so I ended up just unsubscribing because I’m like, when I open it, I’m thinking, oh yeah, I gave them my monthly gift, I wonder what they’re up to. And instead I open it and it’s all this stuff that makes me feel, and I know it’s because of the, you know, segmentation and that sort of thing, but it just makes me feel like this is a waste of my time to open it because it’s telling me irrelevant things. And we’re not always going to get everything targeted. But the more that we can customize content for people, even just a quick tech, you know, this is someone who’s been part of a program before, or this is a non-program person, or this is a person who’s been a volunteer.

This is a person who’s been donating for 10-plus years. Like there’s, you know, in every single email service provider, there’s a way to tag people so that you’re getting closer and closer to providing them with the customized content that they’re going to be excited to read about.

David Pisarek: Cool. So in the intro at the beginning of the episode, I mentioned Connect for Good. We haven’t talked about Connect for Good really at all. So let’s do that. Tell us what is Connect for Good?

Sara Hoshooley: Yeah, sounds great.

It is a one-stop shop for Canadian non-profits to find resources, tools, templates and non-profit serving businesses. And it has been around for about a year and a half. The reason that I created it is that I’ve worked with organizations all across Canada, and I noticed that, depending on where organizations are, either geographically, how long they’ve been around, or even really how well connected their staff and their leadership are, there’s such a discrepancy between the information that some organizations have versus others.

So, I was finding that I would talk to an organization in the Yukon or in the Interior, in B.C., and the information they had was so different than what people in Calgary, Vancouver, or Toronto would have. And so I wanted to have a place where organizations could go to get resources and just information that is free. I wanted it tailored to the Canadian non-profit sector for a couple of reasons: Number one, for anything to do with donations or financial content, things are very different in Canada than in any other country. And so what I was finding when I was working with small non-profit organizations, they might look for a new CRM, or they might look for, you know, a different product, and they’d get really excited about it.

They would go down the path of starting to, you know, implement it and then realize, oh, they don’t do tax receiving that’s compliant with CRA or in terms of language, especially for national organizations or of course, any organization operating in a French language majority region, everything needs to be bilingual. And there, unless it is a Canadian product, most things are not bilingual.

Finally: payment. Many people don’t realize that our payment systems in Canada are completely unique from those of any other organization. I’ve myself hired contractors from the US, and I’m partnering with a US consultant right now to deliver a product to our Canadian non-profit. Our banking systems do not speak to each other. So when we talk about Canada, we have, you know, e-Transfer, and we’ve got our check system, which is different in other countries. And so I wanted to have something that, even though some of the content on Connect for Good might be coming from other countries or it might be from companies that service different countries, everything that’s on there is specifically for the Canadian non-profit sector. And so it’s grown and evolved.

And now that we’re in 2025, I’m looking at, okay, how do I evolve it even further to be as valuable as possible?

I want to make sure that for Canadian non-profits, it’s a place that they can go to, that’s easy, and that they can kind of keep coming back to it. It is free for Canadian non-profits. There’s no membership or sign-up or anything like that. And that’s intentional. It’ll always stay that. Cause I want people to find what they need to find.

And I think about when I was an executive director and I needed to hire an event management company or a direct mail company, and I would just go; I don’t know. I guess I’ll Google or ask around. I had no idea. And so I thought there’s gotta be a better option for organizations. So yeah, that’s what I created, and I do what’s called a: Connect for Good Conversation. They’re almost weekly on Wednesdays at 1 Eastern, 10 Pacific. And each week I bring on a different non-profit expert and we talk about whatever the topic happens to be that that they are experts in.

And it’s like an interactive conversation so people can come and ask their questions. I always learn so much. And it’s great to be able to bring on like lots of different Areas of expertise.

David Pisarek: Awesome. Are there any particular resources on Connect for Good that you think are really popular and get a lot of traction?

Sara Hoshooley: Yeah, I would say anything to do with fundraising because I do think fundraising is one of those things. I mean, realistically, no one’s saying, oh, we have too much money. You know, there’s always more that you can do, and you can do anything that’s really tangible. So I have a few resources on there where it’s like a click-to-download guide template, that sort of thing. Those are really popular, and I think CRMs are as well. People are always curious to know about CRMs, specifically ones within Canada and ones where the data is stored in Canada. For some non-profits, that’s really, really important. And there are not that many, I believe, that store data within Canada. So, a lot of times, people come to look for that information.

David Pisarek: How can people get to Connect for Good?

Sara Hoshooley: Yeah, so it’s connectforgood.ca; if you go there, you will be able to take a look at all of our past Connect for Good Conversations. They’re all video recorded. You can also sign up for our weekly newsletter. So, in the weekly newsletter, you’ll get up-to-date resources. Each week, I highlight a few different resources that are new to Connect for Good and then also promote the Connect for Good conversation that’s coming up. If it’s something that you’re interested in, you can register for free. Yeah, so connectforgood.ca, just go there, and then you can sign up for our weekly newsletter there.

David Pisarek: So, incoming bad pun alert. Sara, you’re connected pretty well with many organizations, companies, software platforms and things like that they’ve got in the resource directory. Where do you think small or startup non-profits should start when they’re looking to grow?

Sara Hoshooley: Great question. So in terms of if they’re looking to grow their fundraising or they’re looking to get more information or

David Pisarek: Let’s go with fundraising, they need more money because they want to expand. They need a second employee in the non-profit – kind of thing.

Sara Hoshooley: Yeah, I think on Connect for Good, there are a lot of different directions that people could kind of head in. All of the content is categorized by topic areas.

There is a whole section on fundraising that includes a lot of different things. So, for example, one of the grant writing consultants who’s on there, she publishes a monthly list of all of the upcoming grants in Canada. She lists it by province and also the federal ones. That would be one to look for myself.

I also create fundraising plans for small fundraising teams. So that’s listed there for organizations that want to take a holistic look at what’s working and what’s not. And then, I put together a 12-month comprehensive plan for them, as well. If they’re looking for someone to implement the plan for them, I find them an experienced fundraiser to do that as well.

Yeah, I would say there’s a lot of different content on there. And I think what’s nice about it is that we also have a link to connect with the person who’s actually posted it on all of the resources. So if somebody sees something and thinks, well, that’s interesting, but I don’t really get it. There’s always something that you can do to get a little bit more information.

David Pisarek: Amazing. Sara, fantastic thoughts that you’ve had. I like to put all my guests on edge, like right at the end of the episode.

If you were to issue a challenge to people listening to this episode or watching it, we’ve got a YouTube channel for anybody who hasn’t checked it out. Go check it out. Subscribe, please. That’ll be awesome. It’ll help us spread the word about everything that we’re doing with the podcast.

So what challenge would you issue to anybody to do within the next one to two days after checking out this episode?

Sara Hoshooley: So, I would put a challenge out to small fundraising teams. I love doing this exercise because it gets people to think in an abundance mindset.

And that is, I want you to think about or have this discussion with your team. As a quick discussion: if a hundred thousand dollars landed in our laps tomorrow, or a million, you know, depending on the size of your organization, what would we do with it? And I think it’s so exciting to get people to start thinking about that because it does unlock this idea of do we need to grow a program, do we need to hire more staff, do we need to better invest in the people that we have? And yes, it can be a little bit disappointing to have all these beautiful dreams and then, you know, potentially they don’t come true. But it gets you thinking forward.

And I will also say, for one of the small organizations that I work with, she actually met with a major donor. Didn’t know what direction the conversation was going to head in. She knew the person had the capacity to give a lot of money, and they actually said to her, I don’t know the amount that they said, but it was, you know, if you had X number of thousands of dollars, what would you do with it?

And she was ready to answer that question. Because we had done this exercise before, and she said, you know, we haven’t worked out the details, but this is what we would do with, you know, $300,000, which is 50% of their budget. And so just having that in the back of her mind allowed it to be. Instead of, oh, you know, let me go back to my team and let me figure it out, it was just like, boom, this is what we would do. And so it really puts you in a different position when you hopefully get into those conversations. So yeah, that would be my challenge. Think about what you would do with a huge windfall at your organization.

David Pisarek: Love that idea. I’m going to take that to some of the organizations that we work with as well and have some conversations, or at least kind of plant the seed for them to have those conversations internally.

That’s awesome, Sara. So amazing insights around fundraising strategies. We talked a little bit about email marketing and stuff and obviously the Connect for Good system that you’ve put together. I hope the people who have been listening to this episode walk away with at least one thing that they’re going to do, implement, and look into. And I hope that they check out connectforgood.ca if anybody wants to get in touch with you, what do they need to do?

Sara Hoshooley: Yeah, I’m quite active on LinkedIn, so feel free to message me there or connectforgood.ca; I’m there as well. I always love to hear from people, so please get in touch.

David Pisarek: Awesome. Thanks again so much for joining in, Sara. It’s been great having you here on the Non-profit Digital Success podcast.

Everybody listening. If you want any of the links or resources, the link to Sara’s LinkedIn profile, Connect for Good etc, etc, please visit our podcast page nonprofitdigitalsuccess.com. Click on this episode for all the details. Go and subscribe to us on your favorite podcasting platform, YouTube. Whatever it happens to be, leave a comment on one of the episodes as well. That’s gonna help us rank higher, and we’ll spread the word even more, and until next time, keep on being successful.