On Idealists in Action, we love to tackle your biggest obstacles to doing good. One we hear a lot is, “I don’t have the skills or knowledge to start something.” This week, we’re taking that behemoth down.

Another way you can defeat the obstacles in your path is by joining the Idealist Network—a new online and on-the-ground platform we’re designing to help people everywhere connect and take action on any issue that concerns them, locally or globally. Sign up to attend our online launch on March 11 and see what it’s all about.

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Raising money for a personal project is seldom a walk in the park. But with corporate social responsibility in vogue and the Internet leveling the communications playing field, there’s never been a better time to give funding your passion project a shot. Here are four solid ways to approach the task:

Go for a grant

Grants and contests are opportunities to raise money for your project, but also to gain recognition and make more impressions.

Cora from Berkeley, California, builds community gardens where local kids can joyously plant, grow, and harvest food. Danielle from Lewiston, Maine, custom-paints canvas shoes and creates wearable artwork that can be appreciated every day. In Peoria, Illinois, Mark documents the strength, confidence, and empowerment women gain from roller derby.

All of them were winners of the 2013 American Express #PassionProject, a contest that gave away a total of $20,000 a month to ten “makers, creators and mold breakers who dream, dare and do.”

If you’re thinking of entering a contest or applying for a grant, Scholastic.com offers these tips for writing winning pitches:

• Research winning proposals first to use as models
• Identify and delineate the needs of your project
• Carefully read each funder’s goals and follow their guidelines (you’d be surprised how many people don’t do this!)
• Clearly state your long-term goals and objectives
• Be passionate!

Use these tips to harvest more funders for your passion project.
(image via Flickr user Scott SM)

Make your virtual home

Your fundraiser needs somewhere to live—an informative home where donors can go to learn about your story, your ambitions, and, of course, to make donations. Although you can build your own fundraising website or blog, you can also join an existing online fundraising platform and benefit from the site’s built-in features.

CrowdRise raises money for charities by providing an online fundraising page that users can personalize with photos and videos. FundRazr will engage your supporters by sharing your campaign on social networking sites, blogs, and email. Explore more online fundraising opportunities with Razoo, Fundly, CauseVox, and Fundraise.com.

Get social

Instagram and Facebook can turn friends and family into dedicated supporters and give your campaign a voice.

But before you bluntly ask for money on a post, think about your sales technique: how will you express your project’s goals in a compelling way? Does your campaign speak emotionally? Can you share an impactful story that relates to your cause? You’ll do well to power your cause with content that authentically captures people’s attention and interest, so take the time to develop thought-provoking angles that inspire and encourage responses.

Need some inspiration to get started?

• The Humane Society uses Vine to give orphaned dogs and cats a voice. Becca Meyers, Communications Manager at The Humane Society of New York posted a Vine of adorable cat Parker sauntering toward the camera. Because the sweet video made an emotional connection with an animal lover, the cat found a permanent home.

• For-profit, cause-based business People Water also tells stories through captivating Instagram videos and photos with messages like, ” ‘Action may not always bring happiness, but there is no happiness without action’ —Benjamin Disraeli.” One Instagram video shared clips of happy kids in Cambodia to showcase how People Water’s philanthropic efforts benefit global youth.

In summary, use Instagram for its visual appeal and Vine to deliver a video message in a snappy and creative way. Then cross-promote your social media campaigns on different sites and include hashtags to thread them together with relevant, trending conversations.

Even if your project doesn’t involve a cat in a box, you can generate buzz by expressing it in eye-catching images.
(image via Flickr user admiller)

Go mobile

Offering simplicity and convenience can really drive your fundraising initiative, especially when it comes to collecting donations.

Since many people today rarely carry their checkbooks (or even cash), being limited by the types of payment you accept can prevent donors from contributing to your project. The variety of mobile payment solutions now available can provide supporters with numerous ways to make donations—whether you greet them at a fundraising event or run into each other at the movies.

Razoo recommends the mobile payment option from Intuit GoPayment and touts that its mobile credit card processing solution helped Girl Scouts of North East Ohio increase their cookie sales by 13 percent. By opening up to on-the-spot credit card transactions, the Scouts were able to sell about 20 more boxes of cookies each. By engaging a device like GoPayment or Square, you’ll never have to turn down an opportunity for someone to contribute to your cause, no matter where you are or what you’re doing.

That should get you started. Happy fundraising!

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Kaitlin McGlynn lives in Arizona, where she works for a nonprofit organization and volunteers at a local dog shelter. She blogs about animal rights, fundraising, and volunteering.

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Have you successfully raised funds for your passion project—or not? Tell us what worked for you (or didn’t) in the comments.

Happy holidays! While our writers take a couple of days to savor the season, we thought you might enjoy this classic post (which originally appeared here).

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It’s December, which means you’ve probably started getting requests for donations from worthy causes. Here in the U.S., the income tax rules and the holiday spirit both nudge in the same direction: give what you can, before January 1.

Here are three tips for making gifts that matter. (And matter they do, no matter the size!)

From Flickr user Alexandra Campo

Tip #1: Understand the tax rules.

If you choose to itemize deductions on your income tax return and you want to include your charitable contributions in the mix, then it’s important to follow the guidelines that the law, and the IRS, have established:

• the organization must be eligible (usually it will say so in the materials);
• you’ll need a receipt or some other documentation of the amount;
• and the gift must be made before the 1st of January to go on this year’s tax return.

There are other, more complicated, rules about larger gifts and in-kind donations. And if you don’t itemize deductions, you still get some credit in the standard deduction. These are calculated using the giving habits of all non-itemizing households. Check the IRS site if there’s anything unusual about what you’re planning to do.

Tip #2: Choose wisely.

Maybe you’re getting a lot of requests, more than you can afford to give. How do you get through the thicket of year-end appeals that tug at your generosity? If you don’t have a personal philanthropy plan, you can make a simple one:

• Decide on an amount you’re willing, and able, to give. The average household donates about 2 percent of disposable income each year.
• Consider the organizations you already know, and know you want to support, so you can decide how much to give to each of them.  Then you’ll know how much you might have left over to respond to new requests.
• If you’re thinking of giving to a new organization, ask yourself “What does this organization do?” and “Do I admire how they do it?” With nearly 2 million nonprofits at work in the U.S., there are lots to choose from.  Looking at websites, reading fundraising appeals, and searching online to see what others have said about the group are good ways to see how strongly the goals, and the methods, appeal to you.

Tip #3: Maximize.

Financial data—the sort of information many charity “watchdogs” focus in on—can only take you so far.  Some causes are hard to administer, others are hard to raise money for.  Spending less than counterpart organizations doesn’t necessarily mean greater efficiency, it may just mean a different approach to the problem.

There are some things donors can do to help put the maximum resources to work, though:

• Respond quickly to requests, especially to renewal notices.  It costs money to prepare mailings so a quick response, even if it’s a “not this year,” is doing the organization a favor.
• Consider making fewer, larger gifts. That will focus your support on program work, not processing costs.
• Positive you won’t ever support Organization X? Ask them to take you off the mailing list so they won’t waste their money on appeals addressed to you.

Finding the money to build stronger, healthier, more lively communities is hard work. With a little preparation and some thought, your year-end gifts can support that work and make an important difference for causes and organizations you care about.

The beer-loving trivia nerds at Geeks Who Drink have a standing offer to help nonprofits and organizations raise money and reach out to new audiences by tapping into their collective benevolent geekiness.

It’s called Quiz for a Cause and for the price of free, organizations can partner with Geeks Who Drink to collect a small entry fee from participants who come out to their regularly scheduled quiz events.

The featured organization usually raises between $200-$400 per event, and even better, they get a few minutes on the microphone to talk up their mission and get in good with a whole new group of potential donors.

Quiz for a Cause event organizer and self-identified dork Eric Kohen says this opportunity to tap into the highly-coveted late-20s and early-30s young professional crowd is really the big payoff for nonprofits who participate in QFAC events.

“You can make a little bit of money from the door, but the greater good comes from getting your message out to a whole other demographic that you might not otherwise reach,” he says.

Quiz for a Cause is available in 27 states and has raised money for all kinds of nonprofits and community organizations.

“From animals to stolen people to gay lacrosse teams, it’s cool we can help out so many different causes.”

Want to generate some extra cash and buzz for your cause? Email Eric at info@geekswhodrink.com.

Stuck? Feeling hopeless? Unsure of your next step? For the almost two decades Idealist has been around, we’ve been asking you—our community—to tell us about the obstacles you face when trying to turn your good intentions into action. We’ve compiled a short list of the top-reported obstacles, and now we’re blogging about them one by one.

This week we present: money.

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Growing up, maybe you were the 4th grader who sold lemonade for 25¢ a glass to help feed hungry kids. Or maybe more recently, you’ve been rocked by the correlation between global warming and the natural disasters that hit developing nations the hardest.

Whether you’re a born do-gooder or had a life-changing experience somewhere along the way, crowdfunding can help you scale your social impact.

Here are a few tips to get started with crowdfunding your social good project.

Create a point of view

You want to do some good. Great! Now what good, exactly?

You know what distinguishes vivid, memorable dreams from the vague, forgettable ones?

Details.

It’s not enough to want to make the world a better place, you need to tell the world how you plan to do that:

●      What particular problem are you trying to solve?

Is there a lack you want to fill? A mistake you seek to correct? Or even something good you want to make even better?

●      What’s your strategy for solving the problem?

What tools are at your disposal?

●      Who are you helping by solving this problem?

By trying to help all seven billion people in the world, you’ll hardly accomplish anything. Instead, start with seven and slowly but surely, you’ll start to reach more.

But you must have a point of view on how you’re going to change the world. Follow our guide on how to form a point of view before you start crowdfunding.

Identify your story

Your story is your most important asset in a crowdfunding campaign. It’ll drive people to take action for you, whether they share your story with friends or feel moved donate to your project themselves.

Specifically, your story is important to crowdfunding for a couple reasons:

1. It’s an invitation

The fact that 27 million people are enslaved throughout the world ought to be convincing enough for anyone to get involved, right?

Ideally, yes; the reality, however, is that most people are more intimidated than moved to action by such statistics.

We’re more easily won over by the emotion and imagery that stories evoke than by plain numbers. Narratives bridge the gap we perceive between the helpers and the helped.

Learn how to use storytelling for your nonprofit or project.

2. It’s your own motivation, too

Spoiler alert: At some point during your crowdfunding campaign, you will hit a wall. What’s gonna keep your nose to the grindstone?

Your memory of the sight of faces, the smells in the air, the sounds, the tastes, the textures.

Your story will remind you that it’s not about hitting certain numbers, that people’s lives are at stake. Your story will keep you motivated, encouraged, and inspired through your crowdfunding campaign.

Create your tribe

Your tribe consists not only of the people you hope to serve, but those who will serve alongside you.

Social enterprise is a team sport; your people—prospective staff, board members, supporters, clientele—will help you work smarter, and not unnecessarily harder. Any successful crowdfunding campaign takes the time to create a community of believers that will help amplify the marketing and funding of that campaign.

It’ll be helpful to consider other like-minded social enterprises and projects not as your competitors but your teammates, as though you were all members of a relay team. Then, figure out which leg of the race you’re running: are you starting off? the anchor? in-between?

Create a crowdfunding campaign

Now that you’ve sketched the fundamentals of your social enterprise or social good project, you can create a fundraising site to start crowdfunding. An effective crowdfunding campaign has the following elements:

Visual storytelling

That a picture conveys a thousands words is cliche for a reason. It takes less time for someone to get your vision by watching a two-minute video than by reading a 600-word article. Rest assured that putting the time in to tell your story through a well-made video is worth the effort.

Impact metrics

You’ll need to show the crowd the power of their collective dollars.

For example, members of the Mocha Club donate $9 a month toward the organization’s project areas (clean water, orphan care, health care, etc.). By forgoing three coffee shop drinks every month, you could: give clean water to nine Africans for a year, save one child from malaria, or extend the life expectancy of one person living with HIV/AIDS.

Number-crunching that highlights the potential progress your enterprise could make instead of harping on the severity of the problem are what will compel the crowd to join your cause.

Seamless branding

Hopefully, you’ve invested time and thought into branding your social good project or social enterprise. Branding is more than just picking colors and creating a logo—it’s about the impression you make.

Your brand presents your identity to the public. A branded fundraising page is like a lighthouse that helps guide boats to harbor.

Studies have shown that branded donation pages get more donations than generic, unbranded pages!

Leverage social media

I’ve intentionally saved this step for the end, since you need to be grounded before your grow!

Most, if not all, of your crowdfunding efforts will take place online, and social media will play an important role. In fact, social media is a key tool. But no amount of social media savvy and strategy will make up for a lack of substance.

But by now, you have established a solid foundation: you’ve clearly defined your identity and point of view and story. Now you’re ready to broadcast your presence! This is where social media steps in.

Here’s one simple, obvious-yet-easy-to-forget strategy in using social media: Keep it social.

This is about connecting with people.

In your effort to quantify and measure and be results-oriented, remember that all of this is ultimately supposed to be people-oriented. Make sure your numbers and statistics represent people with unique stories and gifts. You’re starting a social enterprise, after all.

Wrapping up

Crowdfunding to launch your social enterprise is about more than raising money—it’s a means of building relationships. Your tribe, your clients, and your supporters are part of the momentum that will sustain the movement you’re starting.

Taking this holistic approach to starting your own social enterprise or social good project will set you up for success, not just survival.

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Sara Choe is a crowdfunding expert at CauseVox, a fundraising platform focused on crowdfunding for nonprofits and social good projects. They’ve helped thousands of people raise millions of dollars via crowdfunding.

When you first hear from an organization that’s asking for money to fight poverty, how do you respond? If you’re like me, it’s usually with a healthy dose of skepticism: how would my money be used?

Would it go to financing the nonprofit’s advertising costs, or administrative costs, or maybe even… to financing staff birthday parties?

The fact that there’s been some buzz recently about GiveDirectly—an organization that distributes donors’ cash gifts directly to people in need—is evidence that these questions have indeed been on a lot of people’s minds.

GiveDirectly’s answer is unusual: just give the money to people in need, and trust them to do something worthwhile with it.

A Kenyan recipient of a GiveDirectly donation
(photo via GiveDirectly.org)

To be fair, the idea isn’t really new—governments and NGOs have been distributing money directly for years. What is new is that the development of phone-based banking has made it possible to send money from anywhere instantly and with fewer middlemen—a concept that could be attractive to donors who dislike the overhead of more traditional organizations.

GiveDirectly, founded in 2008 and recently featured on NPR, finds people living in extreme poverty in Kenya, and sends them the equivalent of up to 1,000 USD by phone. The recipients can spend the money however they like—no prescriptions, no strings attached.

How is this laissez-faire approach going over in the new era of accountability? First of all, it’s not quite as hands-off as it sounds. GiveDirectly has conducted follow-up interviews with some of its donation recipients to find out how they used the money.

Many said they used it for one-time items that would contribute to their future economic well-being, like money-saving home improvements or business startup costs. So there is some continuing relationship, and some results are being measured.

But effectiveness is as important to donors as accountability, if not more. GiveDirectly’s website cites nearly thirty academic studies on the effectiveness of direct giving which help to dash a common suspicion about the model: namely, that people will spend the cash on frivolous or even harmful things like alcohol or drugs.

These studies found no evidence of that.

Even so, not everyone is sold. Aside from potential misuse of the money, some fear that giving cash introduces a risk of dependency that doesn’t exist with other kinds of development assistance, like infrastructure improvements.

However, proponents of direct giving could argue in return that giving money is at least better than giving material goods, as the local economy is stimulated when people have more cash to spend (when goods are given, local merchants don’t stand to profit).

There’s another, less obvious benefit to going the direct-giving route: discovering how people choose to help themselves, given the resources, can provide great data to help NGOs better understand how to meet their community’s unique needs—instead of imposing what they or their or donors might think is needed—and to refocus their efforts in that direction.

For example, GiveDirectly’s data show that a vast majority of recipients spent the money they received on a new, durable metal roof to replace their old grass roof. They’ll save on maintenance costs for years, allowing them to put more money toward educating their families, starting or growing businesses, and general well-being.

Larger NGOs could now enter the picture to help many more people by replacing many more roofs. It’s possible to arrive at the same conclusion through surveys, analysis, or other means, but there’s an attractive elegance to inviting people to literally show potential supporters what kind of help they could really use.

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What do you think of GiveDirectly’s approach? Do you believe the direct giving model could—or should—work on a larger scale? Share your thoughts in the comments.

An ongoing experiment: can our community’s collective brainpower help an idea become reality?

Meet Samuel

After a service trip to a Guatemalan school during his junior year of college, Samuel McPherson knew he wanted to do something more to improve education worldwide.

“Going to the school with a group of 25 people and seeing the amount of change and impact we could have changed my perception of what was possible,” he says.

The 23-year-old Gainesville, Florida native is obsessed with all things social entrepreneurship. As an undergraduate Samuel studied entrepreneurship at Pace University, then got his Master’s at University of Florida. Everything he does is seen through this lens. Whether it’s interning for UNICEF or working in sales for an educational research company, Samuel views each experience as a learning opportunity for his new venture, Reciprocity.

The intention

The idea for Reciprocity is inspired by the one-to-one model made famous by TOMS shoes. When you buy a USA-made canvas bag, an international school of your choice receives a custom bundle of educational supplies. Bags because Samuel noticed on that on college campuses it was the one thing students all had in common, and education because he believes it’s essential for freedom of choice.

“Education is the bottomline of everything,” he says. “I strongly believe people should be able to make their own decisions about how their life plays out and the opportunities they take. That becomes very difficult without an education.”

Samuel is still figuring it out, but right now roughly 50% of the bag proceeds will go to the schools, who will keep the consumer update about how the supplies are positively impacting the students. Consumers who have contributed to the same school will also be connected to one another.

Obstacles

The concept of Reciprocity has gone through many iterations, and so far Samuel has a website and one of three bag designs ready to go. Currently in Washington, D.C., he is working on refining his idea and turning Reciprocity into an organization, seeking partners, and encouraging schools to participate.

“I’ve learned everything I can learn and now it’s time to put the feet to the ground,” he says.

Here are the challenges he is currently facing:

1. For Reciprocity to work, Samuel needs to find schools worldwide to provide context about their institution, communicate with the consumer, and be the point person for the delivery of supplies. Schools say they are interested, but fail to follow through.
2. Currently Samuel is solo, but would love a team of people who could give advice and mentorship about creating organizational structure and guidance, as well as working with youth and/or educational institutions.
3. Since the company will have different bag styles, the development and production of the product can be expensive, the cost of which Samuel is currently self-financing. From investors to crowdfunding to grants, any potential avenues of funding would be beneficial.

How you can help

School in Quetzaltenango, Guatemala where Samuel volunteered at. (Photo via Samuel McPherson.)

• Do you know of any schools Reciprocity might be able to help support?
• Samuel is considering moving toward a more project-based approach i.e. 150 individuals purchase bags and proceeds go to installing a well in a school/village as opposed to providing finite supplies that will run out. What do you think?
• How can Reciprocity stay away from creating a dependency and instead have a lasting impact on the students?
• How can schools can best keep in touch with consumers given tech limitations and time constraints?
• Samuel is planning on launching a Kickstarter campaign. If you’ve done one before, do you have any advice on launching a successful one, especially when it comes to video creation?
• Marketing folks: Recommendations on how to best spread the word?
• Do you have any general feedback about the business model or website itself?
• Do you know of any organizations that might want to develop a strategic partnership?
• Are you interested in collaborating, mentoring, or giving any of your time to Reciprocity?

Leave a comment below or send him a message through Idealist and if the project progresses, we’ll keep you posted!
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Do you have an idea that’s just starting to brew? If you’d like us to consider posting it as part of this series, email celeste [at] idealist [dot] org.