How to Fundraise

How to Fundraise.

There's no question that charities, nonprofits, PTAs, clubs and many other groups need to raise funds. The question is, how to do it effectively. This article introduces several ways that your group can raise funds for its projects.

Method 1 Preparing to Fundraise.
1. Define your needs. This is the most important first step in fundraising. To effectively raise money, you have to know what you're fundraising for in the first place. Take the time to figure out your group's needs and budget the costs to meet them.
2. Develop the language. Now that you have identified your needs, you need to articulate them. Develop some language describing what you need, why you need it, how it will help the community you serve, and how much it will cost. You may not need all of this written language for every fundraising effort, but you'll appreciate having it on hand when it's required.
3. Develop a method to track donations and donor information. For legal, accounting and internal tracking purposes, you will need the capacity to record and track donations and donor information. Your method can be a simple spreadsheet, or a complex, custom database, but you must have a usable tool.
4. Get staff or volunteers to do the work. Fundraising is work, no doubt about it. You will need capable, reliable people to manage records, staff events, stuff envelopes, solicit donations, write emails, update websites and more. Your board should definitely be involved in fundraising. You can also recruit volunteers from your constituency, from local service organizations, colleges and universities, or from online services like Volunteer Match.

Method 2 Legal Issues.
The intricate legal issues surrounding fundraising are governed by the IRS code and individual state laws. Here is an overview of the most critical issues.
1. Understand tax deductibility. Many donations to charity are tax deductible, but not all are. In order to do so you must be a 501 c 3 or have the right to use another group's 501 c 3 to process your donations.
2. Disclose whether goods or services were provided in exchange for the donation. If your organization provided anything in exchange for the donation, you must say that in your acknowledgement letter. This is called a quid pro quo contribution. An example of a quid pro quo contribution would be if you made a donation of $100 and got a cookbook valued at $30 in exchange. Only $70 of this contribution is deductible.
You usually need not worry about very small items like a refrigerator magnet or a pen.
For quid pro quo contributions, you must provide an acknowledgement if the cash donation is $75 or greater, even if the deductible part is less than $75.
3. Provide acknowledgement letters. Acknowledgement letters are important for a few reasons. They are the right thing to do, of course, but they also provide the donor with a record of their donation for tax purposes. The IRS requires that an acknowledgement letter be provided for any gift of $250 or more.
Acknowledgements must be written, but can be electronic or printed.
Although the threshold is $250, it's good practice to acknowledge every gift you receive, even if it's $5.
4. Register your charity (optional). 40 states in the U.S. require charities to register with a state agency in order to solicit donations from residents of those states. Solicitation can include any type of request, whether by mail, online or by phone. Check online to see whether you are required to register.
5. Talk to a professional. The best way to understand the legal issues in fundraising is to get professional advice. Check with your financial staff, an attorney or an accountant who specializes in nonprofit finance if you have any questions at all about the law.

Method 3 Fundraising Events.
1. Understand the method. A fundraising event is a party or gathering intended to raise money for an organization, ranging from formal NGOs to informal clubs. Typically, revenue comes in through ticket sales, and in some cases, corporate sponsorships. Although events are notorious for being expensive, time consuming and not terribly cost effective, they don't have to be that way. Here are some ideas for simple fundraising events that don't require a lot of money or energy.
2. Hold a house party. House parties are a tried and true method of fundraising. A house party is a small event hosted at the home of someone close to your organization. The host invites friends and contacts whom he or she believes might be interested in donating to your program. After mingling and refreshments, the president or director of your organization makes a short presentation about your group. Guests have an opportunity to ask questions, then, the host invites them make a donation. Some tips on house parties.
A house party does not have to be fancy. It can be a dinner party or a cocktail party. It can have 20 guests or 6. Refreshments can be catered, or as simple as coffee and cake.
Make sure that the host of the party directly asks guests to donate.
Have staff and board members on hand to mingle and answer questions.
If appropriate, consider asking a program participant to attend. It can be very powerful and compelling for donors to meet and speak with someone who has received your organization's services.
3. Make a booth. If you go to the manager of a store, like Walmart, the you can ask to make a booth in front of the store. This can be very successful.
4. Hold a restaurant fundraiser. Many restaurants have established fundraising programs whereby nonprofits can receive a percentage of sales on a designated day. These programs are very common among big chain restaurants, but smaller establishments offer them too. Search online to find out what restaurants in your area offer this fundraising tool. Once you've identified a restaurant, follow these tips.
Understand the terms. Restaurants have different guidelines and rules for fundraisers. Some donate a percentage of the entire bill; some exclude alcohol sales. Some require that customers present a coupon or other document for your group to receive a donation, others don't. Make sure you are clear on what's expected so you can take full advantage of the event.
Get the word out. Make sure your constituents and everyone in your group knows about your event. Encourage them to invite their friends too.
Provide materials. Set out brochures, postcards or other items to let diners know that their purchases are supporting your organization.
5. Hold a dessert party. A dessert party is a fun, simple and inexpensive event. Hold the party at the home of a board member or other friend of your organization. Ask volunteers to make desserts in single serving sizes. Provide coffee, tea and soft drinks. Sell tickets at a modest price. Enjoy the sweets!
6. Hold a craft fair. A craft fair is an easy and very inexpensive fundraising event. Your organization rents table space to vendors to display and sell their products. If you like, you can also ask vendors to donate a percentage of their sales to your group. If you have a facility you'd like to show off, a craft fair is a great way to get the community to visit.
Add to the fun and interest of the event by scheduling performances, speakers or other entertainment throughout the day.
Make sure there are opportunities for customers and visitors to learn about and make a donation to your organization during the event.
Consider holding a raffle as an additional way to generate revenue at the craft fair.
7. Sell your passion. If you want a fun and passionate fundraiser that doesn't take a lot of planning, consider using LoveMyHeart.org. It's simple, fun, and everyone loves the Love My Heart shirts you sell! Not to mention there are no out of pocket costs like the other events listed here!

Method 4 Fundraising Online.
1. Understand the method. In some ways, fundraising online is not much different than fundraising in the physical world. You still need to be able to effectively communicate your needs, tell stories that illustrate your work, and motivate people to make a donation to your cause. The difference is that while in the physical world you may have time to build a relationship with a potential donor, that isn't always the case online. They may only come across your website once, so you may only have one shot at convincing them to give. Therefore, it's even more important to communicate your message in a compelling way. Here are some ways to do it.
2. Set up a web page. The most basic way to raise funds online is to set up a webpage for donations, then let people know to go to that page to make a contribution. Include the link in written and electronic communications you send to your members or constituents. Make sure it's accessible from your home page, and other pages of your website. Keep these tips in mind.
Most donations made online are done by credit card transaction. If you are not already set up to accept credit cards, there are a number of companies that provide credit card donation processing services for a fee.
Offer the option of recurring donations. Recurring donations can benefit your organization in a few ways. Many donors find it easier to make a larger donation if its split up into quarterly or monthly payments; some very committed donors may want to make an annual donation to you. Make this as easy as possible by setting up recurring payments. Ask your online donation processing service how to offer this to your donors.
Some organizations opt to accept online donations through PayPal. Visit PayPal's website to learn more.
3. Sign up with an affiliate program. Fundraising with an affiliate program is a lot like making commissions off sales. An online merchant or shopping portal provides the charity with a unique affiliate link. Shoppers use the link to access the merchant, make purchases, and the charity receives a percentage of the sales. Here are some tips for affiliate fundraising.
There are dozens of merchants and portals that offer this fundraising tool. You can sign up for more than one to maximize your potential donations.
Consider your constituents. When you select a merchant, consider where your constituents are likely to shop online. It might be a good idea to do a survey or ask a few key players to make sure you're choosing well.
Get the word out. Most affiliate programs offer widgets or banners that are easy to drop into your website. Include these on your website and in electronic communications to let your supporters know how they can help.
4. Consider crowdfunding. Crowdfunding combines online fundraising with social media to help individuals and organizations raise funds. it's a way for many individuals to pool their resources and donations to get projects funded. Donors can typically contribute as little as $1.00, making it easy for lots of people to participate. There are several websites set up for crowdfunding. Funds-seekers create a campaign page describing their project or organization, and explain how the funds will be used and what, if any, benefit donors will receive for participating. Here are some tips on fundraising using crowdfunding.
Crowdfunding is particularly well suited for funding discrete projects. Rather than launch a campaign asking for all the money you need to operate a program, consider how you can break it up a bit. For example, a school music program could launch a campaign to purchase 10 instruments for low income students.
Articulate your needs and your project clearly. The clearer you can be about why you need the money and how you will use it, the better.
Get creative. Add media to your campaign page to increase readers' interest. Videos, images and success stories are great for telling your story, so use them to your advantage.

Community Q&A.

Question : How old do I have to be to start a fundraiser?
Community Answer : You can do a lot of these fundraising activities at any age, but you'll probably want an adult around to help you manage the money and make sure it goes where it is supposed to. The crowdfunding websites may require you to be 18.
Question : What other types of fundraising are there?
Community Answer : Bottle drives, bake sales, car washes, donation jars at local stores, yard sales, an action of donated goods from local stores, etc.
Question : My church has to gather funds (about 9-10 thousand) to be able to pay for a youth mission trip. They rely mostly on donations, and other methods may be wrong. Do you have any suggestions for this situation?
Community Answer : You can always advertise your fundraising idea as a way to create fellowship and bring new members into the church. Have a community potluck where your church members bring in dishes to feed a large group and outsiders make donations to eat.
Question : How do I fundraise in an apartment?
Community Answer : You can ask your landlord or super if you can use some space in the lobby. You can also organize a fundraiser outside or at a nearby park or other facility.

Tips

There are many ways to raise funds, but some ways are far better than others. If you want a quick, free fundraiser that doesn't take a lot of planning, your options are limited.
You can host a sports match between two teams and charge an entrance fee. That way you can ask for donations from the guests.

May 07, 2020

How to Read a Financial Report

How to Read a Financial Report.

Financial reports, also called financial statements, demonstrate a company's financial position over a specific period of time. Most businesses and organizations provide financial reports to their Boards of Directors, shareholders and investors on a monthly, quarterly or annual basis. They are reviewed to identify trends, successes and problems within a company's finances. These reports are often prepared by accountants or financial teams, but they are not complicated to read. Read a financial report by paying attention to the balance sheet, income and cash flow.

Steps.
1. Identify the time period covered by the financial report. Usually, the top of the report or statement lists the time period.
2. Look at the balance sheet. The balance sheet lists the assets and liabilities of the company.
Take a look at how the balance sheet is set up. In some reports the assets will be listed on the right, and the liabilities on the left on other reports the assets will be listed first and on top, and the liabilities below after the assets.
Read the assets. Assets include cash, investments, property and other things owned by the company that have value. The assets are listed in order of liquidity. The most liquid assets, such as cash, are presented first.
Review the liabilities. Liabilities are debts or obligations that the company owes to others. These include rent, payroll, taxes, loan payments and money owed to other vendors or contractors.The liabilities and equity section are combined to produce a balance with the asset component. The equity section gives a break down of the value of money invested and re-invested in the business.
Notice the difference between current liabilities and long term liabilities. Current liabilities are things that need to be paid off within a year. Long term liabilities will take more than a year.
A balance sheet must always balance that is, the sum of assets must be equal to the sum of liabilities and equities. If that is not the case, it is usually the first sign of a badly reported financial Statement.
3. Look at the income statement. This will show you how much money the company earned over the specified period of time. Any money that was spent in earning that income will also be reflected.
Read the top line, which should say "sales" or "gross revenue." This reflects the amount of money the company made by providing its products or services, before any expenses are deducted.
Look at the cost of goods sold. This is the negative figure directly below the revenue/ sales figure. This figure represents the direct expenses incurred by the business in making the revenue/ sales figure.
The Gross profit which is the difference between the sales/revenue figure and the cost of goods sold represents the profit made by the business before operational expenses are deducted. This figure is always a positive number, if it is negative, it means the business is not viable.
Review the operating expenses. These include the costs of doing business, such as salaries, advertising, salaries and miscellaneous expenses.
Notice the depreciation line. This reflects the cost of an asset over the amount of time it can be used by the company.
Check the operating profit, which is the amount of money the company made after the operating expenses are deducted, the operating profit is the Gross profit figure less the total operating expenses figure.
Look at the amount of interest that was earned and paid. These are called Finance costs if interests are paid or Finance income if interests are earned. A business inures finance costs when it has borrowed money at an interest like wise a business earns Finance/ Interest income when it has lent money at an interest or invested in money market securities. .
Check the amount of income tax that was subtracted.
Read the last line of the income statement. This reflects the net profit or loss.
4. Look at the cash flow statement. This will tell you how much cash the company has available. It will also track the money coming in and out of the company during the specified time.
Read about the operating activities first. This section analyzes how the company's cash was used in order to reach its net profit or loss.
Check the investment activities. This part of the cash flow statement shows any income from investments or assets that were sold.
Look at the financing activities. This tracks what the company did to pay back or acquire things such as bank loans.
5. Review any narratives. Accounting professionals will often provide a paragraph that provides an overview of the financial report.
6. Look through supporting documentation if you have questions. There are usually back-up or supporting documents available, such as receipts and invoices, that help explain transactions.

Tips,

Remember that all of your financial reports will be included in audits and tax preparations. Ask your accountants if you have any questions or feel unsure about what you are reading.
Schedule an independent audit at least 1 time per year in order to make sure your financial reports and statements are consistent and accurate.

April 26, 2020

US news college rankings over the years

US news college rankings over the years

Where can I find historical trend data for the USNews WorldReport University College Rankings?

TOP 25 TIPS TO BECOME A PRO DATA SCIENTIST3!

Hi friends, I have worked in a head huntiing company since 2014, main field in data science, AI, deep learning…. Let me share amazing tips to become a pro d,ata scientiist as below. I hope that you love it. (ref from kdnuggets).

1. Leverage external datta sources: tweets about your company or your competitors, or datta from your vendors (for instance, customizable newsletter eBlast statistics available via vendor dashboards, or via submitting a ticket)

2. Nuclear physicists, mechanical engineers, and bioinformatics experts can make great datta scientists.

3. State your problem correctly, and use sound metrics to measure yield (over baseline) provided by datta science initiatives.

4. Use the right KPIs (key metrics) and the right datta from the beginning, in any project. Changes due to bad foundations are very costly. This requires careful analysis of your daata to create useful daatabases.

5. Ref this resourrce: 74 secrets to become a pro data scientiist

6. With big daata, strong signals (extremes) will usually be noise. Here’s a solution.

7. Big dat,a has less value than useful dat,a.

8. Use big dat,a from third-party vendors, for competitive intelligence.

9. You can build cheap, great, scalable, robust tools pretty fast, without using old-fashioned statistical science. Think about model-free techniques.

10. Big dat,a is easier and less costly than you think. Get the right tools! Here’s how to get started.

11. Correlation is not causation. This article might help you with this issue. Read also this blog and this book.

12. You don’t have to store all your dat,a permanently. Use smart compression techniques, and keep statistical summaries only, for old dat,a.

13. Don’t forget to adjust your metrics when your da,ta changes, to keep consistency for trending purposes.

14. A lot can be done without da,tabases, especially for big da,ta.

15. Always include EDA and DOE (exploratory analysis/design of experiment) early on in any da,ta science projects. Always create a da,ta dictionary. And follow the traditional life cycle of any da,ta science project.

16. Da,ta can be used for many purposes:

– quality assurance

– to find actionable patterns (stock trading, fraud detection)

– for resale to your business clients

– to optimize decisions and processes (operations research)

– for investigation and discovery (IRS, litigation, fraud detection, root cause analysis)

– machine-to-machine communication (automated bidding systems, automated driving)

– predictions (sales forecasts, growth, and financial predictions, weather)

17. Don’t dump Excel. Embrace light analytics. Da,ta + models + gut feelings + intuition is the perfect mix. Don’t remove any of these ingredients in your decision process.

18. Leverage the power of compound metrics: KPIs derived from da,tabase fields, that have a far better predictive power than the original d,atabase metrics. For instance, your da,tabase might include a single keyword field but does not discriminate between the user query and search category (sometimes because d,ata comes from various sources and is blended together). Detect the issue, and create a new metric called keyword type – or d,ata source. Another example is IP address category, a fundamental metric that should be created and added to all digital analytics projects.

19. When do you need true real-time processing? When fraud detection is critical, or when processing sensitive transactional d,ata (credit card fraud detection, 911 calls). Other than that, delayed analytics (with a latency of a few seconds to 24 hours) is good enough.

20. Make sure your sensitive d,ata is well protected. Make sure your algorithms cannot be tampered by criminal hackers or business hackers (spying on your business and stealing everything they can, legally or illegally, and jeopardizing your algorithms – which translates in severe revenue loss). An example of business hacking can be found in section 3 in this article.

21. Blend multiple models together to detect many types of patterns. Average these models. Here’s a simple example of model blending.

22. Ask the right questions before purchasing software.

23. Run Monte-Carlo simulations before choosing between two scenarios.

24. Use multiple sources for the same d,ata: your internal source, and d,ata from one or two vendors. Understand the discrepancies between these various sources, to have a better idea about what the real numbers should be. Sometimes big discrepancies occur when a metric definition is changed by one of the vendors or changed internally, or data has changed (some fields no longer tracked). A classic example is web traffic data: use internal log files, Google Analytics and another vendor (say Accenture) to track this data.

25. Fast delivery is better than extreme accuracy. All data sets are dirty anyway. Find the perfect compromise between perfection and fast return.

(William Beeman, Professor and Chair, University of Minnesota)

This list includes USNews, PrincetonReview & WSJournal -

https://www.usnews.com/best-coll...

Best 382 Colleges, 2018 Edition

Journal Reports: College Rankings: The Top U.S. Colleges

An interesting article is the Average U.S. News Rankings for 123 Universities: 2012-2019 that gives a historical prospective.

If you want to find other sources, you would google "US New and Report historical national university rankings".

FIND MORE US news college rankings over the years

May 27, 2019