The Fundraising Thermometer Will Help You Accomplish Your Goals Sooner
When you're fundraising for a worthy cause, a fundraising thermometer just might help you meet your goal. In the vein of a picture's worth a thousand words, the thermometer provides that important graphic reminder of where you are, where you're going, and how long before you arrive.
Most of us have seen them. Alongside the road in a community trying to save up to pay for the annual Fourth of July fireworks show. Or at a high school showing how close the football team is to getting new uniforms. Some people create them to measure an individual goal. How much more until I have enough money to pay for my senior trip? ... To buy Grandma's Christmas present? ... For my annual donation to the charity I care about?
The basic psychology of the thermometer goes back to lessons we learned as kids. Mom or Dad would respond to our want for something - new clothes, a special toy, a car - by encouraging us to save our money. By saving up, we'd appreciate what we got in the end, and would be more and more motivated as we got closer and closer to that goal.
Well, that motivation our parents taught us also works for our adult individual or group goals. By looking up and seeing our steps toward achieving a goal, we see that our efforts get us nearer to to our goal. And making advancement to that goal pushes us - we need to finish, to achieve, and to raise the money.
This urge to meet our goals increases as we make that progress. The closer we get to the goal, the more we want to reach it.
It's actually pretty simple to produce one. It's a simple arts and crafts project that needs some very low-level drawing skills. With a large poster paper (or that nice paper butchers use), you draw a rectangle with one of the small ends rounded off. The opposite small end is a large bulb. The rectangular part at the center just gets a number of equally spaced hash marks to delineate progress on the way to your goal. Now that you have the basic template, you just use a colored marker (red is best) to color in your progress as you bring in money. If you reach your goal, the whole thermometer will be red (and maybe spurting out the top if you've raised more cash than you planned).
There are even companies offering pre-made fundraising thermometers making it that much easier to get started. Whether on your own hand-drawn poster, or coloring in one that's professionally made, you'll quickly be on your way to raising money for an important cause.
Most of us have seen them. Alongside the road in a community trying to save up to pay for the annual Fourth of July fireworks show. Or at a high school showing how close the football team is to getting new uniforms. Some people create them to measure an individual goal. How much more until I have enough money to pay for my senior trip? ... To buy Grandma's Christmas present? ... For my annual donation to the charity I care about?
The basic psychology of the thermometer goes back to lessons we learned as kids. Mom or Dad would respond to our want for something - new clothes, a special toy, a car - by encouraging us to save our money. By saving up, we'd appreciate what we got in the end, and would be more and more motivated as we got closer and closer to that goal.
Well, that motivation our parents taught us also works for our adult individual or group goals. By looking up and seeing our steps toward achieving a goal, we see that our efforts get us nearer to to our goal. And making advancement to that goal pushes us - we need to finish, to achieve, and to raise the money.
This urge to meet our goals increases as we make that progress. The closer we get to the goal, the more we want to reach it.
It's actually pretty simple to produce one. It's a simple arts and crafts project that needs some very low-level drawing skills. With a large poster paper (or that nice paper butchers use), you draw a rectangle with one of the small ends rounded off. The opposite small end is a large bulb. The rectangular part at the center just gets a number of equally spaced hash marks to delineate progress on the way to your goal. Now that you have the basic template, you just use a colored marker (red is best) to color in your progress as you bring in money. If you reach your goal, the whole thermometer will be red (and maybe spurting out the top if you've raised more cash than you planned).
There are even companies offering pre-made fundraising thermometers making it that much easier to get started. Whether on your own hand-drawn poster, or coloring in one that's professionally made, you'll quickly be on your way to raising money for an important cause.
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