'09 Goal Met, Thanks to Our Friends, and Their Friends...

First, the simple good news flash--we reached our year-end fundraising goal!  We wrote here on 12/30 that we still needed $1365 to reach our calendar year-end fundraising goal, and we surpassed that total by mid-morning on New Year's Eve.  Thanks to all who made a contribution to help us reach that goal!  As noted in the earlier post, this means that we will be able to maintain our current budget & program levels as we start the new year rather than needing to implement additional budget cuts.  We'll be able to keep having the kind of impact we've had over the past year.  

Hitting this goal seems to warrant a bit of reflection as we start the new year.  In many ways, there have been few years we as a country have been as eager to ring out as is the case for 2009.  Certainly the economic downturn has posed a double challenge for the nonprofit sector--demand for services have increased rapidly as philanthropic and government funding for those services has shrunk.  We've been hearing from foundations that they are seeing the volume of requests increase by as much as 70%, thus has not bee a surprise to have heard more "no thanks" than we have in the past on grant requests.

But challenging times also push us to clarify what things are most important.  And 2009 has among other things reinforced a central premise of SCI's work--that relationships matter.  In fact, they matter even more in these difficult times.  We see this in our communities, where people in need our most likely to get help from nearby family, friends and neighbors.  Those that have built up a supply of social capital in better times are able to draw upon these relationships to overcome hardships.  That's why we work hard every day to create and strengthen the local bonds that help people meet important needs.

Just as individuals need relationships to sustain themselves through challenges, the same is true for organizations. We at SCI, like other organizations, have seen loyal supporters stick with us through this downturn, and are very appreciative for that. Despite the down economy, we were also able to more than double the number of individual donors to SCI, which is a big reason we were still able to make our year-end goal in this climate.  And again, it was by leveraging our relationships that we were able to bring in new donors.  

Recognizing we needed new sources of funds, we asked those in our "organizational family" to reach out to their networks.  AmeriCorps alumni brought in their friends and family, board members reached out to their professional contacts.  We had a few new donors come in who'd learned about us on the web or other such research, but that the vast majority can be clearly linked to a relationship they have from someone within SCI.

That relationships matter for fundraising is, of course, not a news flash.   Really the most important point for us at SCI is that while our mission entails creating new relationships among people in our communities, cultivating relationships also must continue to be at the core of how we do business and meet organizational goals such as fundraising and recruiting.  Maintaining close alignment between our external mission and our internal processes was key to our success in 2009, and we must be sure to keep this in mind in 2010.

So, thanks to all of you who helped us reach our goals for 2009, and we look forward to building our relationships with you in 2010!