Accomplishing Your Goals is Easier Using a Fundraiser Thermometer

You’ve been tasked with fundraising for an important cause. How are you going to push yourself to satisfy that goal? Making a fundraising thermometer offers you a picture to help monitor your progress, and a visual image that motivates you to accomplish that goal.

So what is it? Well, you may have driven into a small town and seen a large thermometer on the side of the road, showing their progress toward raising funds for an important civil project. Sometimes they’re at schools helping monitor a sports team’s progress toward new equipment. You can even find individuals who use them as measures of progress towards an individual goal like saving up for a class trip, buying a gift for a loved one, or an annual charitable donation.

Their power arises from those same savings lessons we were taught when we were young. We’d come running home to ask our parents for something new. Mom, I desire a new shirt. Dad, can you get me a car? But our parents were smart and told us to put away our allowance – to save! The process of saving that money helped motivate us, and pushed us to save more money.

The same basic idea underlies one of these thermometers. As a group, the goal is to raise a certain amount of money to realize a goal. By creating a graphic representation of that goal, we’re more motivated to realize it. Instinctively, we want to see that picture colored all the way up to the top. And as we fill in more and more of the picture by raising more and more money, we’re driven to keep at it.

This urge to meet our goals increases as we make that progress. The closer we get to the goal, the more we want to attain it.

If you’re going to produce one at home, it’s actually quite simple. Yes, it will involve some drawing, but it’s pretty simple drawing. First, get some poster board or some butcher’s paper. Laying out the paper in a portrait format, you’re going to draw a tall, thin rectangular shape. Towards the top end of the rectangle, turn that straight end into a rounded end (now the top looks like a hot dog). On the bottom end (the straight end) you draw a large circle. Now you’ve got the basic thermometer shape. In the body, make marks showing the increments you’re going to use to measure your progress. To make use of your drawing, get yourself a red marker and color in when you make progress towards your goal. You know you’re done when it’s all red (or better, when you’ve beat your goal and the red is shooting out of the top).

Some commercial enterprises even offer already-made charts that make tracking your funding goals even easier. Using one you purchase at a store, or one you draw yourself, a fundraising thermometer is a powerful way to track progress on your fundraising goal!

write by morgan