DoW Grassroots Fundraising Strategy

Drop of Water (DoW) is a youth-led nonprofit working to expand access to safe drinking water, sanitation, and hygiene in underserved rural communities in Ethiopia. As our organization grows, we want to build a stronger and more sustainable base of individual and community supporters in the United States.

To date, our fundraising has relied significantly on institutional grants and foundation partnerships. These partnerships are essential to our growth, but we also want to develop a broader community of people who personally connect with our mission and can support, participate in, and advocate for our work.

We have several promising ideas and early initiatives—including our Walk for Water 5K, birthday fundraising, online campaigns, peer-to-peer fundraising, monthly giving, church and university engagement, corporate employee giving, and our emerging “Add a Drop” concept. However, we have not yet developed a clear strategy for determining which approaches should be our priorities or how they should work together.

We are seeking a fundraising strategist to help us step back from these individual ideas and identify the 2–3 fundraising channels with the strongest near-term potential for DoW based on our mission, current capacity, audience, and existing opportunities.

We also need to understand how someone moves from being introduced to DoW to becoming a first-time donor, repeat donor, monthly supporter, fundraiser, advocate, or long-term member of the DoW community.

This project will help us establish a focused foundation before investing time and resources into developing individual campaigns and fundraising systems.