On Saturday I went to a fund-raising in Cradles to Crayons’ parking lot south of Boston. Ipswitch has hosted a fund-raising event for the past two years to raise money for Cradles and other non-profits, and I wanted to see what their approach was like. I came away impressed.

First, a bit about Cradles to Crayons’ model. They collect donations for kids – clothes, books and toys, and distribute them to social workers and other agencies for delivery to the kids.

To efficiently take in donations, Cradles leaves large containers in neighborhoods. When they fill up, they bring the containers to their warehouse, where volunteers sort them into bins by category, size and age group. For each of the kids they work with, social workers enter a custom request on Cradles’ web site. A separate set of volunteers takes each order for each individual kid and prepares a package just for them. Then social workers stop off at the warehouse to pick up their orders when it’s convenient for them.

Cradles’ model works because they focus on one thing – receiving and processing inventory. Delivery is distributed because the social workers come to them. Cradles doesn’t need a fleet of trucks and the headaches of managing logistics for many small deliveries. Each year, Cradles refines their warehouse operations, taking advance of the manufacturing process expertise of their network of contacts.

Overall, I think the non-profit fund-raising model is broken – for it to scale to meet society’s needs (especially while the government is pulling away from providing social services) we need to find a model that engages more donors. What’s typical is an organization has an annual dinner gala at a nice hotel, or sponsors an ‘athon’ (walkathon, runathon, etc.) where participants each raise money from their friends, family and co-workers. The problem is that there is a glut of these events, and donors get fatigued from all of the invitations. Rather than more ‘athons’, what we need are stronger ties between more donors and fewer non-profits per donor. The current model tends to limit the total number of donors and overwhelm them with events to attend.

So what does Cradles do for a fund-raiser? They are on to something with their event model, and it has the potential to be scalable. The idea is to create a way for donors’ kids to learn about philanthropy by spending four hours sorting donations and making packages for kids. They set up a big tent in their parking lot, fill it with donations, and set the kids to work. It’s a fun day for the kids and the parents, who get to do something together and with other families. The kids see a tangible result. And the parents get more satisfaction from their donation, because they and their kids understand better what their money is going towards. It’s this kind of experience that will engage kids and make them more likely to donate themselves when they grow up. And in the process Cradles raised an impressive amount, all for the cost of setting up a tent in their parking lot. That’s the kind of efficiency that should please donors, because most of their money goes directly to helping kids.

We’re in the process of planning our fundraising event in the spring. We’ll benefit from seeing how Cradles to Crayons ran theirs.

Posted by Roger Greene
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