This past week I attended Fundraising Day in Toronto. It was fantastic meeting people, some who I have worked with but have not met face to face, some completely new, some old friends…
I always enjoy these conferences because there always tend to be these nuggets of inspiration scattered throughout the day.
The first session of the day was by Kimberley MacKenzie called “One Stop Shopping For: Ideas, Learning, Benchmarking and Best Practices” and was centered around a fantastic site called SOFII. Some of you have heard about this ‘Showcase of Fundraising Innovation and Inspiration’ which has been built and managed by Ken Burnett.
I wrote about SOFII some time ago and had a few people throw their two cents in about it, including Ken.
Most of the people in the room had never heard of SOFII, which is a shame because most of those people were junior fundraisers who could really utilize some of the fantastic resources that exist, for FREE, to make the job they are doing better. And the bottom line is SOFII requires the contributions of all types of charities, big and small to be successful.
But here’s a downside to SOFII. It is incredibly hard to find stuff.
Earlier this year, I had my ear to the ground and had heard that Ken and Co. were thinking of a SOFII overhaul so I reached out and offered to help in the restructuring and redesign knowing how important it was to the industry and of course, to have my company name attached to such a high profile site was a bit of a no brainer.
So where am I going with all of this?
1) You should register at SOFII.org. It’s free and you’ll be one of the first to know when the new site has been relaunched.
2) SOFII does not exist so people can steal other people’s ideas. It exists to inspire and hopefully lead to new innovation.
3) You should tell every single fundraiser you know about SOFII because there is nothing else like it out there. Nothing.
At the end of Kimberley’s session, she asked for some possible features some of these fundraisers would like from SOFII now that they knew it existed. I personally like the idea of adding a forum where people can post questions, share horror stories and victories and we can help each other get better at what we do.
There is a lot of sharing in our industry but we all know there can be more.
I hope you take a second, right now and go over to SOFII, register and check it out. Once we get it relaunched we will be looking to all users to make it better.