Hitting Your Goal Is Easier When Utilizing A Fundraising Thermometer

You’ve been tasked with fundraising for an important cause. How can you push yourself to fulfill that goal? Building a fundraising thermometer gives you a picture to help you monitor your progress, and a graphic image that motivates you to realize that goal.

We’ve all seen them. Alongside the road in a community looking to save up to pay for the annual 4th 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 a personal 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 nearer to that goal.

The same thought underlies one of these thermometers. As a group, the goal is to raise a certain amount of money to realize a goal. By having a graphic representation of that goal, we’re more motivated to attain 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.

Well, that determination 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 our efforts get us nearer to to our goal. And making advancement toward that goal pushes us – we need to finish, to achieve, and raise the money.

It’s actually pretty simple to create one. It’s a fairly easy arts and crafts project that needs some very low-level drawing skills. Using A large poster paper (or that nice paper butchers use), you draw a rectangular shape 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 simply 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).

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