What a lack of awareness (or a lot of awareness) means to your funding and how to fix it.

We begin each Board Experience by asking each participant to share what he or she perceives to be the biggest funding obstacle. We also ask each person to single out the greatest asset we have to leverage or opportunity to transform funding.

Quite often someone will bring up ‘awareness’ as a challenge.

One person might say, “I think we don’t have enough awareness in the community.. This is our problem. I think we should build awareness?”

Another person might say, “We’re so visible and successful that everything things we don’t need any help. How do we change that?” (Note: I received two of these emails this am.)

Awareness translates into awareness. Not sustained revenue from relationships. We’ve had several clients that have been on Oprah –which, as you might know, equals some awareness. They get a BIG HIT, though this usually comes more in the form of traffic that crashes a website than funding revenues. We’ve also worked with some of the biggest social/nonprofit brands you can think of.

The real (funding) challenge is not awareness. It’s that we’re not making any visits. The jump in revenue comes from making 1:1 visits, sharing your story and presenting the opportunity (read: ASKING around the impact) for someone to make an investment that will change lives, save lives or impact lives.

Lack awareness? Find and visit with the best 10, 20, 30 prospects to share your story (making them aware of the incredible things you’re doing) and presenting the opportunity to help.

Have a lot of awareness? Find and visit with your best 10, 20, 30 prospects to share your story (making them aware of how much more you COULD be doing) and then presenting the opportunity to help.