A brainstorming tool to help you raise money

This article is dedicated to you: a passionate fundraiser fighting every day to support a great cause.

We sympathise with your struggles, we know that often you feel like you’re trying to fill a leaking bucket: donors come, donors go, and donors themselves see their budget shrink. You only grow if you gain faster than you are losing, it's hard.

Sure, you want to grow, but you're increasingly frustrated that you can’t, with a floor-low acquisition and retention budget and strong competition - there are over 160,000 registered charities in the UK only!

So you try to keep up by using your brain to find new cost-effective ideas to meet your fundraising target. I am sure many of you will have participated in brainstorming sessions to develop improved strategies to approach new prospect donors, novel ways to make your message stand out in the crowd and make people really care about it, and build better bonds of trust with already acquired donors.

These sessions can often be difficult, time and energy consuming and can make you feel drained afterwards. There are however better and smarter ways to do team creativity and problem solving sessions.

Neonce: a better way to brainstorm

And here’s where we, the Mindiply team, kick in, a London-based start-up. Our first product is called Neonce, a web application for doing better brainstorming sessions online. Neonce has been carefully designed to get both the best and the most popular ideas from any group of people, and is backed by psychological research. With Neonce, you can forget the loud person who kills the mood, the embarrassment of voicing ideas you are unsure of or having to vote for the idea your boss likes.

Moreover, your team doesn’t have to work in the same place or at the same time: with Neonce you can run remote brainstorming sessions that can span over multiple days, so your colleagues working around the world can join the session painlessly.

This allows you to save a lot of time that you would otherwise spend in long, unproductive meetings, and save the money of having to transport people around to work together - yay, every penny you save is a penny more for your charitable activities!

Oh, and I forgot to say that Neonce is free!

‘But wait’, I hear you say, ‘I know that there is no such thing as a free lunch, so where’s the trick? Where’s your profit in this?’. True, we have to pay bills and salaries, so sooner or later we will likely move to a ‘freemium’ model: we hope that people will pay to use an advanced version of Neonce, but the basic one will be always available for free.

Why charities?

So, you might be surprised, but the main reason we are writing this article precisely for you, dear passionate fundraiser, is because we care. We have great respect and gratitude for your work.

We have seen how hard it is, because our loved ones work in charities and non-profit organisations. Your work can make a difference for millions of people around the world. Mindiply just develops software, but we hope that it could make some parts of your work smarter and easier.

Also, as a young start-up, we are facing some similar challenges to you, trying to find the best ways of letting people know that they can brainstorm better with Neonce and start acquiring users. You can read here about our own experience in following the bullseye framework using Neonce for identifying the best traction channels and strategies to reach potential users.

We’ve also recently seen charities using Neonce to seek ideas for their Christmas appeal campaign! So we believe that charities and non-profit organisations could really benefit from Neonce.

Why don’t you give Neonce a try when you are planning your next appeal, special event or developing your new fundraising strategy? We also provide workshop facilitation, and do it pro-bono for charities. Please get in touch with us if you have any questions on Neonce or would like to book a free facilitation session.

We also welcome your feedback to improve the tool, only with your comments and suggestions we can make it great and even more useful! So please drop us a line at hello@mindiply.com or call us on at +44 203 409 5596.

We look forward to hearing from you!

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