Fundraising – Page 32 – The Healthy Non-Profit

Marissa was right . . . crowdfunding works

June 27, 2012 DonorDreams Fundraising, Mondays with Marissa, technology

Let me take you back and set the scene. It was Monday, February 13, 2012, which can can only mean one thing at DonorDreams blog — it was “Mondays with Marissa”. On that particular Monday, Marissa wrote a post titled: “Can your non-profit raise $1,000,000 in 24 hours using a crowd funding site?” I have a confession to make this morning. When I was editing that post, I was a little skeptical. I have seen crowdsourcing sites and know they be a powerful fundraising tool for certain types of projects, but I thought $1,000,000 was a bit exaggerated.

Apparently, I was wrong and Marissa was more right than I gave her credit for.

A few weeks ago that YouTube video of the bus monitor, Karen Klein, being bullied by middle school children went viral. Almost 8 million people have viewed the video, and every media outlet in America has been all over this story. After hearing the story and viewing the video, a good Samaritan set-up an online campaign using a crowdfunding platform called Indiegogo with the intent of raising enough money to send Karen on a vacation.

As of this morning, the fund sits at $660,756, and I am wondering how close it will come to $1,000,000 before it closes down in 24 days.

Now please don’t misunderstand me. I am not suggesting that you rip up your organization’s written resource development plan and put all of your fundraising eggs in a crowdfunding basket. Most of the crowdfunding campaigns that I’ve seen raise relatively small amounts of money. This situation was different (e.g. fueled by public outrage, the viral nature of YouTube, and an insane amount of media attention).

If you have the same ingredients for a project at your non-profit organization, then by all means double down on a crowdfunding strategy. If not, then I suggest recognizing crowdfunding is a viable fundraising strategy and placing it inside of your already crowded fundraising toolbox. Use that tool whenever the situation warrants it.

So, you’re probably asking: “When might the situation warrant a crowdfunding strategy?”

I believe crowdfunding works for non-profit organizations when they are trying to raise money for a specific project from a specific audience. You may want to go back an re-read Marissa’s February 13th post because it contains a few fantastic pointers. Catherine Clifford at entrepreneur.com wrote a post titled “Want to Raise Money With Crowdfunding? Consider These Tips” that you also may want to check out.

Have you ever used a crowdfunding site to raise money for a non-profit project? If so, please share your experiences and lessons learned in the comment box below. We can all learn from each other.

Here’s to your health!

Erik Anderson
Founder & President, The Healthy Non-Profit LLC
www.thehealthynonprofit.com
erik@thehealthynonprofit.com
http://twitter.com/#!/eanderson847
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http://www.linkedin.com/in/erikanderson847

Add a tribute gift strategy to your fundraising plan

June 26, 2012 DonorDreams Fundraising

Over the last few days, Team Obama has come under some mocking scrutiny from media outlets. While Mitt Romney has been cultivating and stewarding fundraising “bundlers,” the President’s team launch a new online wedding registration for couples who want to encourage tribute gifts to their campaign. Of course, the harsh critique springs from the comparison of fundraising strategies. The Romney strategy will literally net hundreds of millions of dollars, and the Obama strategy might bring in thousands of dollars.

Most non-profit organizations don’t have hundreds of fundraising “bundlers” at their disposal, but many of the fundraising professionals who I know are always looking around for good ideas to add to their fundraising plan. In spite of the harsh critique, I think the Obama campaign’s focus on tribute gifts might be something many non-profit organizations can replicate.

In my opinion, this fundraising strategy works for the following reasons:

People like to be honored by their friends and family. It makes them feel good.
Most Americans own too much “stuff” and don’t have space for more “stuff”.
People like to know that they were involved in doing something that benefits the greater good.

Unlike the Obama campaign’s strategy of focusing on weddings, tribute gifts can come in all sorts of sizes and shapes. In fact, the following are just a few ideas that some non-profit organizations are asking their supporters to donate towards in someone’s honor:

birthday
anniversary
new baby
thank you
holidays

I am sure that your organization can get really creative, especially if you enlist the help of your resource development committee or a focus group of donors to help with the brainstorming.

The following are just a few good examples of non-profit organizations who have already added this fundraising tool to their toolbox:

It is important to remember that tribute gifts are not quite the same as regular contributions to your annual campaign. In addition to sending acknowledgement letters to those who make the contributions, you need to send a nice letter to the person who is being honored. It is also customary to tell the honoree the names and addresses of those who made a contribution in their name so that they can also follow-up with a personal note of appreciation.

I also suggest that you consult your donor database manual before embarking on a tribute gift strategy. Every software program that I’ve seen deals with this type of contribution a little differently, and it is important that you appease your technology platform. 🙂

If you’re still skeptical that anyone would ever do such a thing, please take my word that some people get really excited by this kind of opportunity. When my partner and I celebrated our civil union, we rented out a local restaurant and invited 100 of our closest friends and family and begged them not to bring gifts. Instead, we asked everyone to please make a tribute gift to Equality Illinois in honor of our commitment to each other. I must admit that I was a little skeptical, but in the end we ended up raising more than $5,000 for our charity of choice.

Does your organization have a tribute gift strategy? If so, how do you let donors know that this is an opportunity? Is it a stand alone strategy or is it woven throughout your annual campaign? Please share your ideas in the comment box below. We can all learn from each other.

Fundraising questions to ask donors and anticipate from them

June 21, 2012 DonorDreams Fundraising, volunteers

Last week we started a series of blog posts focused on the art of asking questions, and this theme has carried over into this week. So far, we’ve looked at questions that executive directors should be asking themselves and their boards. We’ve also looked at questions board members should be ask of themselves and their fellow board volunteers. Yesterday, we looked at various questions you need to ask prospective board members before asking them to join your board. Today, we’re ending this series of posts by looking at 1) powerful questions that donors should be asking the non-profit agencies they support and 2) questions non-profits should be asking their supporters.

Questions that donors have of you

Over the last 15 years, I have been part of countless solicitation teams and answered more questions than I care to recall at this time of the morning. While those questions tend to be all over the place thanks in part to “unique circumstances,” there are commonly asked questions that many donors seem to ask after they’ve been asked to consider making a charitable contribution.

What will my contribution help accomplish?
Specifically, how will my contribution make a difference in your clients’ lives?
How financial stable is your organization?
There are so many worthy causes that keep asking for support. Why should I support you?
How much of my contribution directly supports programming and how much will underwrite administrative and fundraising expenses?
Tell me more about your fee structure and why are you charging your clients what you’re charging them? How do you know that is the right amount? Why not more?

The list of FAQs is much larger, but these are just questions that I recall answering over and over again. If you want a more comprehensive list of questions, you may want to read Harvey McKinnon’s book “The 11 Questions Every Donor Asks: And the Answers All Donors Crave“.

Why is it important to know what burning questions to expect? I think there are two HUGE reasons:

If you do a better job “anticipating” these questions and build those answers into your case for support and solicitation presentation, I predict that your annual campaign numbers will start climbing.
There is a long list of fears that get in the way of people volunteering to help your agency with fundraising. One of the top reasons is their fear of not being able to answer questions. Addressing FAQs as part of your annual campaign training program will improve volunteer confidence, reduce the amount of avoidance behavior during the campaign, and result in better solicitations (and hopeful result in better fundraising numbers).

Questions that you should have of donors

As I said earlier, I’ve been on many fundraising solicitation teams, and I’ve seen many things throughout the years. Too often, I’ve seen volunteers rush through the solicitation, get a commitment, and quickly downshift into chit-chat of a personal nature. It is almost as if the volunteer solicitor is non-verbally saying “Phew! Thank goodness that is over.”

I don’t believe there is anything wrong with chit-chat after the solicitation is completed. In fact, there is all sorts of important personal information that could and should be harvested from that conversation, captured on a contact report form, and entered into the donor database. However, most volunteer solicitors don’t receive training on what those conversations should look like.

While it would be easy to use that post-solicitation time to talk about family and personal things, it think the following questions might be more useful in developing a deeper philanthropic relationship with your donors:

If you only had one year to live, what would be most important to you to accomplish?
What are the issues, injustices, principles or causes in this world that get you riled up?
If you could change one thing in the world, what would it be?
What accomplishment or legacy would have ultimate significance to you?
In philanthropic terms, if you had unlimited resources, what would you set out to do?

While it is important to know the names of a donor’s spouse and children as well as where they went to school or go to church, I think it is far more important to understand a donor’s passions, dreams, and desires. Knowing and understanding these things puts you in a position of helping them achieve big things. I believe this is one of the biggest differences between transactional fundraising and donor-centered fundraising™.

I believe these types of questions can transform how a donor views you and your organization . . . FROM fundraising vulture TO philanthropic dream-maker.

Please take a minute this morning to share a commonly asked question that you hear donors asking your volunteer solicitors in the comment box below. Or share with this online community one or two questions that you like to ask donors that helps you better understand their philanthropic hopes and dreams. We can all learn from each other and it is just 60 seconds out of your day. Please?

Here’s to your health!

How Nonprofits Can Use Tumblr

June 18, 2012 DonorDreams Fundraising, Mondays with Marissa, technology

Before there was Pinterest, there was Tumblr. Without Tumblr, there would be no Pinterest.

As if there weren’t enough social media sites to manage these days, today we are going to take a look at Tumblr and see if it is a good fit for your non-profit organization.

What is Tumblr?

Tumblr is a short form blogging site that allows users to post photos, videos, blog posts, and audio recordings into what is called a tumblelog. (Yes, it’s a real word. Stick with me here.) Users can follow tumblelogs and re-blog or “like” posts . . . just like on Pinterest.

Who is Tumblr’s Audience?

Every social media site has an audience. Facebook and Twitter’s are the broadest, and they are the most popular. However, sometimes finding a niche audience can be very effective when it comes to reaching more people. The average Tumblr user is under the age of 25. While they probably aren’t big money donor prospects due to their young age, Tumblr users can be very powerful online advocates for your cause. According to Wikipedia, “as of June 8, 2012, Tumblr has over 58.9 million blogs and more than 24.7 billion total posts.”

Young people who may not be able to contribute to your organization today, might be able to do so tomorrow and don’t you want to be on the top of their list? In the meantime, these individuals can be talking about what your organization is up to or become a volunteer.

To put it in fundraising terms, asking these young people to advocate on your behalf will have a “self-cultivating” effect and build a very strong donor base for your organization in the future.

What is a successful Tumblr post?

Just like with most social media sites, you want to create a post that users will want to share with others. (Sharing really is caring.) On Tumblr, most users will like a post if it is short. Don’t get me wrong, there are a lot of long posts out there in the Tumblrverse, but they are usually by people who have an established and large audience.

Photos, lists, videos, and questions do well, and I think it is helpful if you include links citing original sources so that if your post is interesting I will be able find more to read on the subject. Additionally, you can use Tumblr to drive traffic to your agency’s website by creating a short post with a link back to an article on your webpage. You might also consider sharing a photo from your latest event on Tumblr.

Tumblr also has a feature that allows users to ask the tumblelog’s owner a question. Posting answers to those questions is a great way to interact with your followers.

How do I get started on Tumblr?

Take a look at what other nonprofit organizations are doing on the site. See what type of posts work best for an organization like yours.
Follow tumblelogs in your community and actively reblog and like their posts.
Tell your volunteers, supporters, and donors that you are now on Tumblr.
Write a few posts and see which ones your audience responds to most.

If you are looking for a younger audience with whom to share your content, Tumblr just might be the place for you. If you find that Tumblr is not a place for you, I still recommend signing up and claiming your organization’s space on the site so that no one else does. I also recommend using Tumblr as another source for finding out what is going on in your online community.

For more Tumblr tips, check out this Mashable article.

Does your organization already have a tumbleblog? Post a link in the comment section below and let us know what works best for you on this platform.

Jazz up your non-profit agency’s annual report using online video

June 12, 2012 DonorDreams Fundraising, technology

Every once in a blue moon I will scroll down to the very bottom of someone’s email. It has become fairly standard practice for people to tuck all sorts of things into the signature block of their email. A few days ago I received an email from Jonathan Trapp who is a Vice President at Assurance Agency, which is an insurance brokerage company. At the bottom of his email was a YouTube link to a company video they developed last year to celebrate their 50th anniversary of being in business.

I’m dropping a copy of this online video into this morning’s blog post because after watching it I had one of those “Oh-Wow” epiphany moments:

Click here ===> Assurance Agency 50th anniversary video

So, did you see it, too? Did you have the same epiphany ?

I don’t know about you, but after watching that video I immediately flashed back to those days as an executive director when I struggled at the end of every year to develop content for my agency’s annual report. It always felt like I was doing the same thing every year. There was always:

content about the agency’s Youth of the Year,
last year’s financial summary,
a list of the agency’s big accomplishments,
a letter from the executive director and board president, and
of course . . . the long and boring donor honor roll.

Can there be any doubt that the typical non-profit annual report needs to be “jazzed up”???

In reality, the annual report is super important. It is the perfect stewardship piece because it speaks to the return on investment that donors received resulting from the contributions they made to your agency. Additionally, it can be a great cultivation piece because it shows prospective donors what they might expect your agency to do with their future donation.

I think human beings are very visual creatures, which is what intrigues me about using online video to tell the story about where your non-profit organization has been in the last 12 months. If I were in your shoes I don’t think that I’d totally get rid of the paper version, but I would be very tempted to produce a much smaller document that is supplemented by an online video.

You’re probably asking: “How would that work, Erik?” Well, I could see a one-page, double-sided annual report with key content including:

financials
major accomplishments
thank you message to supporters
lots of pictures of your happy clients

At the bottom of the abbreviated annual report, I would print the YouTube link with a message encouraging donors to view the annual report video online. If I were in the habit of distributing the agency’s annual report at a special event, I might consider handing out the abbreviated paper report along with a CDROM or USB flash drive with a copy of the video on it.

You could easily post a copy of the annual report video on your website and Facebook page.

You could also do what Jonathan Trapp of Assurance Agency does and include a link to the video in the signature block of every email you send out for the next year.

While doing some research for today’s blog post, I came across a similar post by the good people at Socialbrite. Click here to view their post on this subject and you will see four sample non-profit annual report videos.

If today’s post generally got you excited about jazzing up your agency’s annual report, then visit Kivi Leroux Miller’s website. She is selling an e-book on this subject. She also offers webinars. You’ll also find a link to her free annual report wiki page with a few resources that you might find useful.

Are you happy with your annual report? What do you put in this critical document? Have you tried using online video as part of your annual report process? If so, how did it work out for you? Please share your thoughts in the comment box below.

Here’s to your health!

Non-Profit Time Management: Letting Go of It All

June 6, 2012 DonorDreams Fundraising, leadership, Planning

This week’s “Mondays with Marissa” post was titled “Non-Profit Time Management: Scheduling Social Media Updates“. After reading Marissa’s weekly pearl of wisdom, it got me thinking. During tough economic times, donors are asking non-profits to do more with less, which is leading to longer task lists for both executive directors and fundraising professionals. All of this contributes to a lot of stress in the workplace. In honor of Marissa’s awesome blog post, I am dedicating this week’s posts to the idea of looking more carefully at time-saving tips with regards to managing your agency and implementing your resource development program.

Let’s continue this conversation by looking at David Allen’s Mind-Sweep concept.

I don’t know about you, but when I’ve found myself “under the gun” to produce, I feel like something has a hold over me. I can best describe it as a “gripping feeling” or a “paralysis”. When I feel this way, my productivity falls dramatically. I think this happens because I am concerned about all of the plates that I have spinning. I get too focused on all of the things I need to do and not focused enough on actually doing them.

A few years ago, when things were especially bad, I asked my employer to send me to a time management training that was based on David Allen’s national best-selling book “Getting Things Done” (GTD).

While I still fundamentally consider myself more of a Frankin-Covey guy, there were a number of interesting and effective tactics that I took away from the GTD training. One of those tactics was called the “Mind-Sweep” and here is how it works:

Secure a pen and stack of loose leaf note cards or a small pad of paper.
Search your mind for things that you need to do — both big and small.
Write down one task per note card and put it in your inbox.
Once you’ve cleared everything out of your head — everything from buying a gallon of milk to calling a specific donor — go back through your inbox and prioritize the tasks in their order of importance.

If you think this exercise seems elementary, I wouldn’t argue with you. However, there is something “freeing” about dumping all of the contents of your brain out onto small pieces of paper. Whenever I have done this, my mind seems to focus and that gripping feeling seems to melt away. Essentially, I am no longer consumed with the thought that I may forget to do something, and I am able to spend time “doing” stuff.

While I’ve done this during extremely busy and chaotic times, I’ve also modified this approach and used it to help me in a Moves Management type of way. Simply focus your mind on an individual donor and everything that you think needs to happen to move them from one gift level to another, and dump it all out on one sheet of paper. The contents of that exercise become all of the “moves” (e.g. cultivation activities) that need to occur to position a donor to the next solicitation. Add dates to that list and put it in a spreadsheet (or your donor database Moves Management relationship tab), and TA-DA you have an individual donor plan.

The same approach can be applied to building a project management plan for a special event fundraiser.

The “mind-sweep” is more than just an organizing tactic, it is a time-savings strategy that can help you stop dithering and start doing. “Getting out of neutral” can be one of the best feelings in the world and can make all the difference when it comes to time management.

Have you ever felt gripped by a similar feeling that I described earlier in this blog post? If so, how did you get “unstuck” and moving forward again? Please scroll down and share a quick thought in the comment section. We can all learn from each other.

Here’s to your health!

Can’t change your non-profit ways? That’s just BS!

June 1, 2012 DonorDreams Fundraising, leadership, organizational development, Planning

Welcome to O.D. Fridays at DonorDreams blog. Every Friday for the foreseeable future we will be looking more closely at a recent post from John Greco’s blog called “johnponders ~ about life at work, mostly” and applying his organizational development messages to the non-profit community.

Today, we’re focusing on a post that John titled “The Cow Path“. In that post, he talks about cow paths that started hundreds of years ago and somehow have turned into urban roads we drive on today. Of course, there is a classic organizational development point of view at the middle of John’s post. In a nutshell, his point is threefold:

It is relatively easy for organizations to start new initiatives.
It is very, very easy for organizations to continue doing what they’ve always done.
It is downright difficult to stop doing things your organization (e.g. staff, board members, volunteers, and donors) have become accustom to doing.

If you haven’t done so already, please make sure that you take a moment to click over to John’s post because he does a very nice job of illustrating this point. Heck, he even uses a poem from Samuel Walter Foss in his post to drive home this point.

When I read “The Cow Path,” I had to chuckle because it describes so many small non-profit organizations that understand the need to change their resource development approach but don’t understand the threefold organizational development principle laid about in John’s blog post.

Let’s look at an example of a typical non-profit organization that I’ve worked with since the economic crash of 2008:

Start a resource development or annual campaign planning process (aka start a new initiative)? Responses range from a hesitant maybe to a lukewarm yes.
Stop pursuing more and more government money? Responses range from polite resistance to outright defiance.
Stop running so many special events (and stop trying to add “just one more event)? Responses range from polite resistance to outright defiance.
Stop recruiting board members who don’t want to fundraise and who don’t have any skills and experiences with fundraising? Responses range from polite resistance to outright defiance.
Continue writing grants, chasing government funding, running special events, and recruiting warm bodies to sit in the boardroom? You betcha! Full steam ahead.

Why is status quo normally the victor in 70% of change initiatives? Because “we’ve always done it that way” is the enemy of “OMG, there is an iceberg ahead and we need to change course immediately“.

In John’s post, he talks about an exercise he uses called “Stop-Start-Continue”. I’ve been through a similar exercise facilitate by Noel Tichy called “Rattlesnakes and Pythons”. Click here “to read a short description of it in Tichy’s book titled “The Cycle of Leadership”.

Unfortunately, my experience with “Rattlesnakes and Pythons” was similar to John’s findings with “Stop-Start-Continue”. Even when things were identified as needing to be eliminated or squeezed out, there was great resistance to it and sometimes it didn’t happen.

In the end, John is right. As always! There is only one person to blame when change is allegedly out of reach, and we continue doing the same thing over and over again with an anticipated different result.

What a load of BS! Grab that bull by the horns and make some change happen.

If you took 15 seconds and wrote down a few things that you know need to be eliminated from your non-profit organization’s modus operandi, what would be on your list? What process have you used in the past to identify things that need to change at your agency? How effective where you at eliminating those things? Please use the comment box to share your answers.

Here’s to your health!

Donor Loyalty: Inspect what you expect

May 31, 2012 DonorDreams Donor-centered fundraising, Fundraising

Tuesday’s post titled “Time in the office versus time with donors” begged more questions than it answered. Today, we’re going to zoom in on one of those questions and examine it more closely.

How do you measure relationship building
and the success of such activities?

It was suggested in earlier posts that a weekly contact report is one tool that can be used to track relationship building activities; however, there are other tools that you should consider using in conjunction with a contact report.

Dashboard
Scorecard
Annual performance plan
Weekly or monthly reports
Donor database reports
Moves Management reports

If you want to learn more about organizational dashboards, click here to check out a BoardSource book titled “The Nonprofit Dashboard: A Tool for Tracking Progress“. If a dashboard isn’t appealing to you, then you might want to look into a balanced scorecard approach. Click here to see what Bernard Marr at the Advanced Performance Institute has to say about this tool.

Of course, choosing the tool is probably the easiest part of this decision. The more difficult thing is determining which relationship building metrics to track. Here are a few suggestions:

Number of cultivation meetings with prospects
Increased contribution size – maintained – decreased
Number of face-to-face stewardship meetings
Number of prospects converted into donors
Donor loyalty rate
Donor satisfaction survey score
Renewal rates for year two, year three, year four, and year five donors
LYBUNT and SYBUNT renewals

There are no right or wrong answers to the question of what you should track. I believe that it really boils down to the title of this post: “Inspect what you expect”.

I suppose the best advice I can give to you is “don’t try to make decision by yourself”. I encourage you to engage fundraising staff, resource development committee volunteers, board members, fundraising volunteers, and even donors. There is nothing wrong with pulling together a small focus group, ordering a few pizzas, and engaging them with a few thoughtful questions.

If you are looking for a few good samples, the following are a few links that I think are worth looking at:

DZO Strategists: “The Beyond ‘Cash Fundraising’ Management Dashboard“
Candler County Schools: “District Balanced Scorecard“
Blackbaud: “Embracing Technology for Moves Management® Success“

Using tools and metrics like these should help you answer the difficult question posed in Tuesday’s blog post: “How much time needs to be spent outside of the office compared to behind your desk?”

What tools does your non-profit organization use to track relationship building and resource development activities? What metrics do you hold your fundraising professionals and executive director to? Please use the comment box below to share your thoughts.

Here’s to your health!

Cultivation and stewardship: Who’s on first? What’s on second?

May 30, 2012 DonorDreams Fundraising, Planning

Yesterday’s post titled “Time in the office versus time with donors” begged more questions than it answered. Today, we’re going to zoom in on one of those questions and examine it more closely.

Should the executive director be more responsible for relationship building than the development director?

I have always advocated that, regardless of how hard they try, a non-profit executive director cannot abdicate their role as their agency’s chief development officer. Even when an organization is lucky enough to have a fully staffed development department with talented fundraising professionals, the executive directors is ultimately the person who needs to provide vision and direction.

I think Harry Truman said it best when he said, “The buck stops here!”

Of course, this doesn’t mean that the executive director needs to be the person out on the street cultivating and stewarding relationships with every prospect and donor.

To answer the question posed at the beginning of this post, I believe it is as simple as taking an inventory of who does what well. While I firmly believe that prospects and donors prefer meeting the executive director and developing a relationship with him/her, there may be situations where the executive director doesn’t possess the requisite relationship building skills to cultivate and steward people to the extent necessary for a successful fundraising program. If this is the case, then the answer becomes simple . . . whoever is the natural “people-person” takes on the lion’s share of cultivation and stewardship.

It really can be that simple. Right?

How do you know if someone is a natural relationship builder? Here are a few things I lused to ook for when I interviewed fundraising professionals:

If their network is big, then there is a good likelihood that they are good at building relationships.
Do they keep in contact with their network? If so, then they are most likely someone who intuitively knows how to maintain relationships.
Have they ever “taken advantage of” someone and violated their trust? Trust is a foundational issue in building relationships, and it is something good fundraising professionals know how to navigate.
I always like to learn more about what is being talked about between a relationship builder and the person with whom they are trying to build a relationship. Why? Because good relationship builders are inquisitive and take an interest in the prospect or donor.

Again . . . while I personally prefer that the executive director takes on this role, it doesn’t always work that way and the fundraising professional might need to become the primary cultivation and stewardship person for the agency. It might also become something where certain board volunteers need to help step-in and help. Regardless, the executive director cannot abdicate this role completely and must find places where they are comfortable meeting prospects and donors.

In these circumstances, it is important to clarify roles and responsibilities and the executive director needs to take the initiative in doing this. Off the top of my head, the following are a few tools that can and should be used to achieve clarity:

written annual performance plan
weekly contact reports
written comprehensive resource development plan
weekly in-person checkpoint meetings
written cultivation & stewardship plan
Moves Management program

Doing an inventory of skill sets and assigning and managing roles and responsibilities for cultivation and stewardship activities will keep your agency from sounding like Abbott and Costello in their famous Who’s on First? comedy sketch. It will also likely help you answer the difficult question posed in yesterday’s blog post about how much time needs to be spent outside of the office compared to behind your desk.

Who is the person primarily responsible for cultivating prospects in your agency? Who stewards your donors? What tools and strategies are used to maintain clarity? Please scroll down and share your thoughts in the comment box below.

Here’s to your health!

Time in the office versus time with donors

May 29, 2012 DonorDreams Fundraising

When I was an executive director, I always struggled with the question of how much time should a fundraising professional spend behind their desk? In fact, it drove me crazy. My personal opinion has always been that resource development is all about relationship building, and it is hard to build or grow a relationship from behind a desk. My assumption was that the less I saw the development director in the office, the more effective they were at growing relationships with donors and implementing the organization’s resource development program.

After many years of reflecting upon these beliefs, I now wonder how wrong I might have been.

Please don’t misunderstand me. I still believe with all my heart that resource development is all about relationships, but I now have questions such as:

Should the executive director be more responsible for relationship building than the development director?
Should the development director be more responsible for the “technical” stuff involved in implementing the annual resource development plan (e.g. writing, organizing, planning, etc)?
If it is a “shared responsibility” (which is what I suspect many of you will conclude), then how much time behind the desk versus out of the office is the right balance for both the executive director and the development director?
How do you measure relationship building and the success of such activities?

If you are an executive director who likes to chain their fundraising professionals to a chair in the office, then you need to get over that instinct. You are most likely killing your resource development program unless your plan is highly focused on grant writing. I think Marc Pitman does a great job of speaking to this issue and provides a free weekly call report tool for your use in his blog post titled “Are fundraising professionals stupid?”

My best suggestion for both executive directors and fundraising professionals is to read Marc’s blog post, download his weekly call report template, and start using them. I might even go as far as suggesting that copies of these reports get attached to the executive director’s monthly report that gets turned in to the board of directors (possibly included in the board packet).

You’ve probably heard the old expression:

What gets measured gets done.

I believe that Marc’s weekly call reports speak to this point. If you want to motivate yourself and your resource development staff to get out of the office, then start measuring it.

I posed a number of different questions in this blog post and haven’t even come close to providing as many answers. I thought I’d ask the readers of this blog to first weigh-in with what you think the answers are. Please scroll down and use the comment box to share your opinions or how your organization addresses such questions. There are no wrong answers. In the next few days, I will spin-off a few more posts on related subjects.

Here’s to your health!