Fundraising Day 1

Get ready, dear readers, for new adventures in footbridges this week.

Call it Phase 3, call it begging on our knees, call it delusions of grandeur. When it’s all said and done, I can only hope we meet our minimum budget. I’ll be posting reflections on this process, updates, and a sample letter for those interested in learning from our mistakes (!) or reading over our shoulders as we venture out into the wild world of the F word:

F-U-N-D-R-A-I-S-I-N-G.

To start, Shane and I learned this week that 3 major donors who expressed bucket loads of enthusiasm for our project, with near promises to find funding, all failed to come through. In short, this means we have an exhibit in September 2009 that will cost us between $1,250-$2,500 to put on (with little to no return) and not a penny to do it.

We divided a list of 30 people, businesses, and organizations and made Monday our calling day. Initial phone calls serve two purposes: 1) To ask permission to email the potential donor a fundraising letter on Thursday. 2) To confirm the correct email address. This might sound like an unnecessary step, but our rationale is that people don’t want to be put on the spot on the phone – but they also don’t want to receive an email or letter out of nowhere. Placing initial calls is our way of politely giving folks a head’s up. So far, initial responses have been positive.

Tomorrow? I’ll draft the fundraising letter and follow up on a few more calls. By the end of the week, we’ll go live with a new webpage that features preview photos of the project, and excerpts from the text for potential donors to peruse. Of course, the link will be posted here for loyal readers as well.

More to come….keep your collective fingers crossed for us!

Questions? We now have an email address: footbridges@gmail.com. Fire away!