By Widad EL HANAFI, E-Mediat Morocco Country Director

To develop a fundraising plan for your NGO requires that you follow some basic steps. As you finish preparing your plan and get into the implementation phase, you need to integrate some social media tools to boost your plan and adopt an ongoing evaluation process.

Below are some basic steps that shape the preparation of a fundraising plan:

Implementation phase: 

When you finalise your plan, you’ll need to start implementing your action plan according to your fundraising calendar. Bear in mind that on this phase, you need to keep your fundraising objective in front of you. During this phase, you can adjust and improve your plan according to the actual context and this is importance of follow up and evaluation. Evaluation need to be an on going process within your plan.

Integrating social media tools into your plan:
Now that we have briefly overviewed some basic steps to develop a fundraising plan, we will move to focus on integrating social media tools into your NGO fundraising plan. There are several social media tools that allow and help  NGOs achieve their fundraising purposes. Some are simple and for free, others are more advanced and requires payment. Bear in mind that integrating social media tools into your plan will not be doing the whole job for you. It will help spread the word and promote your campaign but you still need to work into implementing your action plan and fundraising calendar, engaging your network, and evaluating your work.
I always recommend to NGOs to start with the basic tools and once they get some practice, they can them move to more advance tools if they can afford that.
I will be focusing on simple fundraising methods that NGOs can adopt to support their organisations and communities.
Fundraising through your blog:
When you decide to launch a fundrasing campaign, write a blog post to explain your fundraising objective and mission and insert a form within your blog post to help your audience reach out with you. Google Docs allow the possibility to insert a form into your blog just by embedding the form code into your text message.
The steps are as follow:
1- Draft your fundraising campaign article. Think about adding and inserting photos and videos that are related to your article.
2- create a online form using google Docs for example

3- Embed your form code into your article and publish your post.
A good example of this is illustrated through an initiative  by Nermeen Obeidat, a friend and colleague from Jordan who launched the 20JD= Taxi  campaign  on April 21 to support a family in Amman.

Nermeen Obeidat  explains “when I started this campaign, I was targeting my network of 750 friends on facebook. On the first day, I only got the attention of 31 of my friends and by day 6 of the campaign, many networks got involved, free agents, social and communication  professionals and the level of engagement got increased. Today (April 26) we reached 3500 JD and the campaign will continue to reach its objective.
Nermeen describes the campaign’s achievements and challenges in the following way:

• Some of those who donated extended the effort into their networks,
• The campaign was creative in drawing attention to a humanitarian issue but in a simple, modern and positive manner,
• The objective is SMART as everyone can skip 20 JD which = shisha and a drink in Jordan,
• Not mentioning how people can donate created some confusion but at the same time offered some flexibility for people to chip in in different ways,
  The first thing that draw my attention to this initiative was the name of the campaign. I saw 20JD=Taxi on a flyer on Nermeen’s facebook profile and I was eager to know what was this about. The name of the campaign was inspired from its mission and objective. Also, Nermeen has also sent a clear call to action to her network which has helped encourage influencers within her network to contribute to the success of the campaign. She also kept updating her network until the end of the campaign: