Personal Fund Drive Blog

We know that trying out and getting started with a new program can be a bit daunting.  Plus, who wants to buy a car they can’t test drive?  That’s why we’ve made it even easier to create a Fund Drive by making it free to create a basic fund drive.  The free fund drive allows you to get your fund drive set up, see what it looks like, and get a feel for how it can help your organization raise money using without requiring any obligation.  The free fund drive allows you to raise up to $250 and will be active for 15 days.  If you like it and want to continue using it you can upgrade your drive to one of our other plans easily.   So, go ahead and test drive the car and see what you think and, as always, feel free to let us know your ideas or suggestions for making PFD even better.

Welcome to the Personal Fund Drive blog! We’ll be posting here with tips on how to use PFD, when new features are released, and about the non-profit fundraising world in general. For this first post, though, I thought I would give you a little overview of how this program got started and the people behind it.

The idea of Personal Fund Drive came from Andy Bardwell, a statistician who is involved in several non-profit groups in his Denver area. He saw how the advent of an online network of people connected by email could be leveraged as a way to help non-profits reach their fund raising goals. It’s the old idea of garnering support from “someone who knows someone.” While a small non-profit may only 50 members, if each of those 50 members is able to connect with just 5 of their friends or associates you all of a sudden have 250 potential contributors. The idea of fund drives (or pledge drives) has been around for a while, but they have always involved collecting pledges by hand which can be both intimidating and time-intensive.

Andy envisioned bringing the whole concept of the fund drive into the online world by allowing members of a non-profit to create their own personalized page and fundraising goal for a specific campaign. The next step would be to allow these members to send this page to their network of friends and family. Finally, those friends and family would be able to easily support them by contributing online. And all of this should be offered at a low enough cost that even the smallest non-profits could use it without breaking their bank.

That’s where I (Jason) came in. I partnered with Andy to implement the above idea as an actual website. To make it both easy to use and affordable we made the whole process completely self-serve so that even a novice in the web world could have a Personal Fund Drive campaign set up within minutes. After a year of development we’re excited to see it launch and hope to see it help many non-profits leverage the power of the social network for achieving their goals. As always, if you are a user of PFD or are interested in using it we’re interested in hearing your feedback.