Solano nonprofits coordinate for ‘Live Solano Give Solano’ day of fundraising

SOLANO COUNTY – Hundreds of nonprofits across Solano County have joined together for this year’s Live Solano Give Solano philanthropic fundraiser, a day of giving which promotes donations by the local community to nonprofit organizations rooted in Solano. 

Now in its second year, the effort is organized by the Solano Community Foundation and this year’s giving day will be held on Oct. 7. Early giving starts this week.

Solano Community Foundation Chief Development Officer Mike Ioakimedes said that Live Solano Give Solano is an outgrowth of an initiative that the foundation calls “Building Community Muscle.”

“It’s an attempt by the foundation to build the nonprofit ecosystem within Solano County, and it hopes to energize the local donor base,” Ioakimedes said.

Last year 170 nonprofit organizations participated in the Live Solano Give Solano campaign. The foundation was happy with the result, which included over 1,000 individual donors and raised over $100,000 for local nonprofits.

This year 250 local nonprofits have enrolled in the campaign.

Ioakimedes said many small nonprofits don’t have the resources to focus on fundraising. They dedicate all their time and resources to their mission. 

Participants in this program get a fully-fledged online fundraising framework, training, and strategy created by the Solano Community Foundation. The website stays up all year and Ioakemedes said nonprofits can use it as a blueprint for strategic year-round fundraising.

The giving day initiative exists all over the country but it’s especially important in Solano County because this area doesn’t get many philanthropic dollars from large funders. 

Ioakimedes explained that typically large institutional funders don’t like to donate to nonprofits with budgets below $250,000, because it usually means they don’t have paid staff — and the majority of Solano County nonprofits are micro nonprofits with smaller budgets.

“If you don’t have paid staff, the odds to see completed the work they want to fund drop dramatically,” he said. “So in a sense there is a disconnect between the mission that people want to do and their ability to attract funders.”

A successful giving day, however, could end up attracting large donors in the future. “Once the dollars are flowing into the community, even the smaller nonprofits start to get exposed to large funders,” he said.

To make sure that Live Solano Give Solano becomes more successful every year, Ioakimedes studied giving day initiatives across the country. 

“I was speaking to some folks in Maryland about their giving day and they said, ‘How close are you to Sacramento?’ And I said, ‘Less than an hour away. Why?’ They said, ‘Why aren’t you talking to Sacramento? They’ve got one of the best in the country.’”

Ioakimedes called the Sacramento Region Community Foundation, which was very supportive. They allowed the Solano Community Foundation to model all their giving day systems, processes and strategies on what they had used successfully for years. 

The Sacramento Region Community Foundation encompasses four counties and has had a giving day for about 15 years. Last year, their giving day raised $15.4 million. 

“What was very encouraging is that about 50% of the contributions they receive are $50 or less, so it’s real grassroots,” Ioakimedes said. 

He added that about $10 million came from Sacramento County, but the rest came from the other three — Yolo, El Dorado and Placerville — which are similar or smaller in size and household income to some of the cities in Solano County.

“So we think that the $100,000 that we raised last year is probably only 5% to 7% of what our potential should be based on that,” Ioakimedes said. 

All the foundations he talked to agreed that it takes three to five years to build a successful giving day, as the public becomes aware of what it means, and gets accustomed to the idea of donating locally during a specific time period. 

“There are three different learning curves,” Ioakimedes said. “The supporting organization, in our case, our foundation, has its own learning curve. What are we doing? How are we doing it? Your nonprofit community needs to learn how to activate all the resources we’re making available for them. And the community as a whole needs to recognize this is an event and get behind it.”

Participating nonprofits pay $75, which covers the Solano Community Foundation costs, from creating and supporting the online platform, to educational resources and employees’ hours. Last year more than 1,100 staff hours were dedicated to the giving day. 

But it’s essential that the nonprofits take advantage of the resources the foundation provides, including the online platform with fundraising templates, a fully developed profile, which includes five components, as well as following a marketing framework that includes direct emails, social media activations and more.

The Solano Community Foundation also markets the event heavily. “Last year we sent out 97,000 emails during the event, both to participants and to the general public,” Ioakimedes said. “We rented billboard space throughout the county, we advertised in local publications and we ran ads in KUIC.”

Some nonprofits didn’t raise any money and were disappointed, but Ioakimedes said that when he reviewed individual pages he saw that at least 35 organizations hadn’t even finished setting up their profile and had not sent any emails. 

”The ones that were very successful were the ones that had the highest level of what we call participation, and activated their own networks,” he said.

Individual donors can choose the nonprofit they want to support and donate directly through the Live Solano Give Solano page.

They can also access the Live Solano Give Solano toolkit for donors and create a fundraising campaign: a customized page with images, a fundraising goal, and a message about why they support a specific organization. They can then promote their fundraising page to their networks through social media, using some of the templates the foundation provides for inspiration.

Businesses can follow a similar framework to sponsor a local nonprofit and maximize their giving by engaging their employees around a common giving goal. 

Investing in local nonprofits typically produces more effective solutions to local challenges and builds valuable community connections and networks. 

Ioakimedes said that in the last couple of years the gap between government provided services and the needs of the community has widened significantly.

“The giving day is an opportunity not only to support a local nonprofit but to support their community,” he added. “And especially now, with the challenges that everybody is facing, the work of the nonprofit community has become more and more important.”

Editor’s note: The Vallejo Sun is one of the 250 organizations participating in Live Solano Give Solano this year.