Before You Begin

I strongly recommend taking a little time to do some brainstorming and text writing before you actually open up Facebook. Create a document for yourself and answer the following questions to determine and refine the thing you are fundraising for and why. It will make putting together the campaign itself much easier if you have a bank of text to draw from.
  • Is there a particular Monkeyhouse program you are interested in raising money for? (For example, the Choreography Mentorship Program, Musings, Administrative Costs or Developing New Works.) You can also just raise money for the organization as a whole. That’s totally up to you. Choose something that you have a personal connection to.
  • What is your relationship with Monkeyhouse?
  • Why is this organization/program important to you?
  • What are a couple of short stories about your relationship with this program?
  • Who is Monkeyhouse? What is the program you’re raising money for? Where does the money go?
Speaking of banks of text... You can find Monkeyhouse’s description of ourselves and some of our projects here:

Thinking About Money

This can be the least awesome part of putting together a campaign. How much money do you ask for? If you ask for too much people might get overwhelmed and not feel that their donation is worth it. But if you don’t ask for enough people may stop donating once you’ve reached your goal...

You want to create 3 goal numbers.
  1. ​Your initial goal. This should be something that you think you can definitely reach, so you can be conservative.
  2. Your reach goal. This is the number you throw around once people have passed your initial goal. It should be a decent jump from your initial goal but still somewhere in this universe. There’s no science to this, but I would say it should add somewhere between 50-75% of your initial goal, unless you started at thousands to begin with, in which case you are my hero.
  3. The dream goal. This is the reach for the stars number. You probably won’t reach it, but that’s okay. It’s important for people to know that their donations are helpful but also that we always are striving for bigger and better projects.

Here are a few things to think about in picking your numbers:
  • How many people do you think will donate?
  • What is the income bracket of your Facebook community?
  • An average donation is usually between $10-25.
  • If you think you can get ten people to donate, $200 might be a good place to start. If you are primarily asking college students, think $5-10/donation instead.
  • Get creative with what you ask for and how you ask for it. People like concrete numbers. For example, it costs $100 for Monkeyhouse to host a Spork. You can either ask for donations in increments of $100 or say that for every five $20 donations we can host one Spork. Monkeyhouse dancers get paid $75 for each performance. Let the world know that they can directly contribute to YOU getting paid. Three $25 donations will cover your next performance!
  • If you have questions about the program you have chosen and the numbers breakdown, let me know!

Head to Facebook

It’s time to open that browser and put together all of your big ideas! Don’t worry, I’ll walk you through it.
  1. Login to Facebook and visit https://www.facebook.com/fundraisers/
  2. Click “Raise Money”
  3. Select “Nonprofit”
  4. Type “Monkeyhouse” in the search bar. It will show up at Monkey House Inc. That’s us!
5. Choose an image! You can find Monkeyhouse generated images here as soon as I finish them.
6. Time to put all that text together! There is some auto generated text (including a description of Monkeyhouse) that you can include but the things you came up with earlier are the real important things. A few tips:
  • People tend not to read more than the first three sentences unless it’s your mother or you are REALLY compelling in those first few sentences. So think about how you arrange your text.
  • Even your mother doesn’t want to read an entire novel on Facebook. You want to give enough information for people to understand what you are asking and why, but not so long that they get bored before making a donation.
  • Make it personal!
  • Don’t use up all your material here. Keep it short and sweet. You can use the remaining material in your updates. More on that in a minute.
7. ​Once you’ve entered the initial goal you just need to decide how long you want to run your fundraiser. This is up to you. The maintenance of a campaign is time consuming, so don’t pick a length of time that you can’t commit to. A one week campaign that is regularly updated and promoted is much more successful than a month long campaign that you forget about!
8. The final step in the creation process is to scroll back up and tap “Create”! Then your campaign will be live!

Promoting Your Campaign

This is where the real work starts. Creating a beautiful campaign is only the beginning. Now people need to SEE it, fall in love with it and give us all their money.
A few “rules”
  • ​Post about your campaign at least once a day.
  • Never post without including text.
  • Do not repost the same text every day.
  • Actually “invite” people to the fundraiser. It can be time consuming but that is what will make the campaign pop up in people’s feeds and notifications.​
​A few other things about posts
  • ​Everyone loves an image! Just like you, the average Facebook user is more drawn in by an image than by text. We have provided a number of images you can use. You can also use photos of your time with Monkeyhouse to…
  • Keep things personal! All of the questions we talked about in creating the text for your fundraiser apply here too. Every time you post the link to your fundraiser add a new short fact about the organization, your relationship with it or why you are raising money.
  • Share often. Facebook is inundated with posts every minute of every day. Don’t get yours get lost in the shuffle! The more you post the more it will be seen.
  • Cross promote. Are you also on Twitter or Instagram? Use those platforms to send people to your Facebook fundraiser. Send an email to friends and family encouraging them to visit your fundraiser.
  • Talk up your upcoming fundraiser before it begins and throughout the duration. Talk to family, friends, coworkers, people on the street... You never know who will be moved to donate. Let them know that this organization is important to you!
  • Use the power of social media! Don’t forget to tag @MonkeyhouseLovesMe on Facebook and Instagram and @m0nkeyhouse on Twitter. Does your text mention someone else in the company or another artist we’ve worked with? Tag them too!
  • This is a word of mouth campaign. Encourage people to spread the word, even if they aren’t able to make a donation.

Asking People for Money Sucks

Asking people for money is HARD. It’s uncomfortable and awkward and generally unpleasant. I promise, I feel the same way. However, we are only able to exist because of personal donations.

​A few thoughts:
  • ​Practice your “elevator pitch”. Just two or three sentences about where the money is going and why it’s important. Unless you are Karen, this isn’t going to just come to you off the cuff. It requires some amount of pre planning. Asking for money doesn’t get easy but it can be less painful with practice.
  • If you don’t want to ask for you, ask for someone else. Several times Margaret (board member) has asked our former students to donate as a way to support me to great success. It’s WAY easier to say that you are raising money for X person than it is to ask for money for yourself. You’ll be surprised how many people who don’t even know the person you’re raising money to support will donate because they see that it’s important to you.
  • Don’t assume that you know who will or won’t donate. I think the biggest thing that keeps people from reaching their goal is that they start out saying “oh, so and so won’t donate so I’m not going to ask them” which immediately means that you’re only asking your grandparents for money because once there’s one person on the “they won’t donate” list everyone is on that list. In my last campaign a woman who I met in Europe who I haven’t seen since 2016 and likely will never see again donated. We have had campaigns in the past where the majority of the donors were high school and college students and the average donation was only $5-10. But they wanted to support the organization in whatever way they could.
  • Did I mention that personal touches help? People want to support YOU. What you are raising money for is secondary. So the more personal you make it the more people are going to want to be part of what we are doing.

Gratitude and Follow Up

  • Be Thankful! Please make sure you thank each donor individually. Community building is a huge part of what we do and it is very important to us that each of our donors is personally appreciated.
  • Encourage donors to spread the word about your campaign. Ask them to share one of the I support local artists! images.
  • Facebook does not provide a list of donors so it is up to you to help us keep track of who is supporting the company. The button below will take you to a spreadsheet template. Please duplicate the template and then share it with Nicole so Monkeyhouse can thank people, too!