What If the Goal Isn't Donations?

I've spent most of the last 15 years helping run Gentle Spirit Horses Rescue, a nonprofit horse rescue in South Dakota. I've also spent much of my professional career in marketing, including working with nonprofits at marketing agencies and now in the marketing department of a large nonprofit. Between the two, I've had plenty of opportunities to think about how nonprofits build audiences, raise money and become part of their communities.

Some of the most useful lessons I've learned, though, have come from the things we almost decided weren't working.

In the early years of Gentle Spirit Horses Rescue, we'd occasionally spend a Saturday at Tractor Supply with a horse or two. We'd set up a table, talk to customers and usually have some opportunity for people to donate or purchase supplies we needed. Then we'd pack everything up, head home and wonder: was that really worth it?

Maybe we'd spent most of a day there and came home with a bag or two of feed, some treats and a little money. When you're running a small nonprofit, that's not an unreasonable calculation. There is always more work than there are people to do it, and when the tangible return on most of a Saturday is two bags of feed, it's pretty easy to decide you could have spent the day doing something more productive.

Eventually, though, I realized we were doing the math wrong. We were measuring the value of the day by what we brought home instead of what had happened while we were there.

We'd spent several hours in a store full of exactly the kind of people we wanted to know we existed. We'd talked to horse owners. Kids had met one of our horses. People had asked questions about rescue. Employees and managers at the store had gotten to know us. None of that was in the truck on the way home, but that didn't mean it didn't have value.

That realization changed the way I thought about nonprofit events. Before deciding whether something worked, you have to know what you expected it to do.

If the purpose is fundraising, absolutely count the money. But not everything a nonprofit does in public needs to be a fundraiser. Sometimes the goal is to meet people, introduce them to your organization, strengthen a relationship with a business or simply contribute something positive to your community.

There are real differences between public relations, outreach and fundraising, and that's probably a topic for another day. The important lesson for me was simpler: once we stopped expecting every appearance to produce donations, we got better at recognizing when something was working in a way that couldn't immediately be counted.

And that gave some things enough time to grow.

Christmas Ponies and the long game

Every December, Gentle Spirit loads up some of our smallest equines, dresses them for Christmas and takes them to visit local businesses. Christmas Ponies has become one of our favorite traditions, and today it also happens to be pretty successful from a fundraising standpoint. By Christmas, we can fill an entire wall of our pony barn with gifts people have purchased for the horses.

It didn't start that way.

Christmas Ponies was always partly a fundraiser—we've always had a Giving Tree or wish list—but it was also a way for us to give something back. We had horses that were wonderful with kids and an opportunity to take them into communities where families could meet a real live Christmas pony, take pictures and have some fun.

In the first couple of years, we might spend hours visiting businesses and come home with a bag or two of grain and some treats. If we'd evaluated Christmas Ponies strictly by what was donated, we could easily have decided it wasn't worth doing again.

Instead, we'd learned enough from those earlier Tractor Supply visits to recognize that the Giving Tree didn't have to be overflowing for the day to have value. Kids had met the horses. Families had gotten Christmas pictures. We'd spent time with people and businesses in our community. We hadn't necessarily received very much, but we'd given something.

That still matters. Some Christmas Pony stops generate a lot of donations. Others don't. We visit stores in smaller communities and lower-income areas where we know there simply may not be as much to give, and we keep going back anyway. Bringing home donations is wonderful, but sometimes bringing smiles is enough.

That's also why we've never made access to the ponies transactional. The message isn't, “Bring a donation and you can pet a pony.” It's, “There's a real live miniature horse here. Bring your kids. Come pet him. Take their picture.”

We'll have a wish list, and if someone wants to buy something for the horses, we'll certainly appreciate it. But they don't have to. A family can spend ten minutes with us, leave without spending a dollar and still have participated in exactly what we came there to do.

Over the years, all that showing up started to compound. Businesses recognized us. Employees remembered the ponies and looked forward to their return. Customers followed along online. Businesses and families shared their pictures, introducing us to people we'd never met.

Eventually, even local media started paying attention. In 2024, a television crew joined us during a Christmas Pony visit at Fleet Farm in Sioux Falls. I love that the resulting headline wasn't about fundraising: “Gentle Spirit Horse Rescue spreads holiday cheer in Sioux Falls.” The story focused on kids meeting and taking photos with four rescued ponies. The Giving Tree was part of it, but the story was really that we were out doing something fun in our community.

Somewhere along the way, the fundraising grew, too. Those couple bags of grain became more gifts, the wish lists became more popular and eventually we needed an entire wall of the pony barn to hold everything people purchased for the horses.

Someone seeing that wall today could reasonably conclude that Christmas Ponies is a fantastic fundraising idea. Dress up some miniature horses, visit businesses, make a wish list and collect a mountain of stuff.

But they'd be seeing the result after years of doing it.

That's something I think is easy to forget when looking at an established nonprofit. We see the fundraiser that raises thousands of dollars or the wish list that gets filled, but we don't see all the ordinary interactions that came before it. It's easy to compare the first year of something we're building with someone else's fifteenth without realizing how much happened during the fourteen years in between.

That doesn't mean every idea deserves another year. Sometimes an event really isn't worth the resources, and if the goal was to raise $2,000 and we raised $150, calling it a success afterward because we got some exposure isn't particularly useful.

But it does mean I've learned to ask a different question before giving up on something: What was this actually supposed to accomplish?

Sometimes the answer is donations, and if they aren't there, something needs to change. Sometimes the goal is building recognition or a relationship that is still brand new. And sometimes the point really was just bringing a pony somewhere a child could pet it.

If we'd judged Christmas Ponies by the first couple bags of grain, we might never have gotten to see the wall of gifts.

Photo by Marea Wellness on Unsplash