The Everything Fundraising Book: Create a Strategy, Plan Events, Increase Visibility, and Raise the Money You Need [Paperback]

Not a bad book. But nothing to brag about, either. This book has a lot of content relevant to and related to fundraising and fundraisers, and that's why I gave it a 4-star rating. Usually I kill a book that lacks good organization supporting a central theme. In this case, I just finished reading the book and I find myself in a charitable mood. Pun intended.

The book has the following 20 chapters:

1. Fundraising basics
2. Selecting the fundraiser for you
3. Getting started
4. Where and when? The details for your fundraiser
5. Organizing the troops
6. The big bucks
7. Honing your skills for effective fundraising
8. A lesson in ethics
9. Communications tools and practices
10. Spreading the word!
11. Corporate fundraising
12. Community fundraising
13. Grassroots fundraising
14. Fundraising with kids and teens
15. Political fundraising
16. Odds and ends
17. All about grants
18. Grant writing 101
19. Taxes and accounting
20. Measuring success

Books I've read in the past on fundraising tend to limit their scope to fundraising for NPOs, religious institutions, or political groups. And the books on NPOs tend to focus on either annual campaigns, special events, grants, major gift programs, endowment campaigns, or capital campaigns. This book doesn't limit its scope at all. It touches on just about everything I have just mentioned. As a result, a novice to fundraising will get lost reading it. The book sounds good, but I don't think it will ultimately be helpful if the reader is going to be responsible for some sort of fundraising program or project. The content is certainly there, but the message isn't clear.

I got the feeling that each chapter started out as a newspaper article and the author simply beefed it up in order to include it in this book. As a result, topics like leadership, meetings, and consultants were found in multiple chapters. In my humble opinion these topics should have been covered once and only once so the book could have been easily digested by the reader.

I also would have liked the book much better if I didn't have to feel like I was switching back and forth between discussions on fundraisers (projects) and fundraising (programs). The book would have been much more straighforward for me if it had started out talking about programs and the basics of any fundraising effort. And then moved on to describing some projects, i.e., special events, endowment campaigns, and capital campaigns. And the book should have avoided covering all three charity types: NPOs, religious orgs, and politics. Pick one and stick with it. They each are so different. 4 stars!

› Go to Amazon.com to see the review  4.0 out of 5 stars