Your first thirty days as a partner nonprofit

Signing up takes minutes. What you do in the four weeks after decides whether anything comes of it, and most of that is telling people who already like you.

Week one — get approved, get paid-ready

Your registration number is checked against the government record automatically, so if it matches there's no determination letter to dig out and nobody has to read your application by hand. The part that actually takes a day is connecting the bank account, because it runs identity checks in your organisation's own name. Start that first. Everything else waits on it.

Week two — tell the list you already have

Your existing supporters are the whole advantage; being listed on a marketplace is not. One email to your own list will do more than a month of us. And every link you share records the channel it came from, so you'll be able to see which message worked instead of guessing.

Weeks three and four — give them something to forward

Post an update about something specific the money paid for. Each update gets a page of its own that works for a complete stranger, which is who most of the people who see it will be.

What not to worry about yet

Volume. A cause five people have chosen is five sellers photographing things in a garage on a Sunday, and that compounds in a way an annual appeal doesn't.