My big dream for 2013 is . . .

January 29, 2013 erik organizational development, Planning

The Nonprofit Blog Carnival is a collection of the best advice and resources that consultants, support organizations, and nonprofits themselves are offering to the nonprofit community through their blogs. The January theme focuses on “your big dream for your organization, cause or the nonprofit community this year, and how you’ll get there.” Today’s post looks at dreams and how your agency can go about framing its strategy in 2013.

Whenever I work with a non-profit organization on goal setting and planning, there are a number of quotes that immediately come to mind such as:

“Good is the enemy of great.” ~Jim Collins

“Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again but expecting different results.” ~Rita Mae Brown

A few weeks ago, I shared a cup of coffee with a local non-profit executive director, and we engaged in a conversation about grant writing and sustainability planning. During that conversation, she said something like: “If agencies only did things that at face value appear to be sustainable, there wouldn’t be a lot of risk taking and innovation going on in the non-profit sector.”

After chewing on this, I absolutely agree with her, but I also don’t see a lot of risk taking going on out there. This got me thinking about this month’s Nonprofit Blog Carnival topic related to big dreams.

My wish/dream for my non-profit clients in 2013 is that they overcome their resistance to planning.

The following are just a few quick tips I think will help agencies achieve quick little victories and get them closer to goal setting, taking a few risks, more deeply engaging volunteers, and moving the needle:

Don’t give up on doing some assessment work to get things started, but keep these efforts focused on quick and simple. A SWOT analysis tool can accomplish a heck of a lot in a short period of time.
Include volunteers at every step of the process because planning is an “engagement” activity. If you want a plan that only you will work on implementing, then exclude others. If you will need others to help, then include them.
Use SMART Goals. Any “dummy” can do it, click here for more information.
Focus on 50,000 feet in the beginning and make sure to come out of the clouds toward the end of the process by asking specific questions about who will do what and by when.
Find ways to inject urgency into the process. Don’t drag these efforts out over a few months. Can you work hard? Sprint? Get it done in a matter of weeks? I suggest setting deadlines and assigning someone the responsibility of being the “task master” (e.g. a person who pushes hard to keep your project on track).

Accountability and urgency are sometime best achieved if your agency engages an external consultant like me, but it doesn’t have to be that way. If you are part of a larger national organization, I’m sure there are internal consultants standing by to provide technical assistance. If you don’t have money to hire someone like me and don’t belong to a national network, then you can always talk to your local network of nonprofit agencies. One of your peers might be experienced in facilitation and willing to donate their time in exchange for something. You never know unless you ask, right?

What obstacles do you find get in your way when dreaming big? What has worked for you when trying to overcome those obstacles to planning and engaging volunteers. Please scroll down and use the comment box below to share your thoughts and experiences. We don’t need to re-invent the wheel. 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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Are you a “Fred the Baker” type of non-profit leader?

January 18, 2013 erik Fundraising, 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.

In a post titled “Tracking,” John talks about the power of planning by sharing an amazing story about a stretch of mountains in the Alps that is next to impossible to pass. Instead of waiting for the train technology to catch up, Europeans decided years ago to build train tracks through that part of the mountains in anticipation that train technology will one day produce an engine with enough horsepower to get the job done.

Reading John’s post made me think of the countless non-profit executive directors and fundraising professionals who take on the role of “Fred the Baker” instead of embodying the spirit of those European planners who built those train tracks.

What? You don’t remember who Fred the Baker is? Check out this YouTube video and ask yourself this simple question: “Do I look like this every day and evening on my way to and from my non-profit job?”

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=petqFm94osQ]

The story that immediately comes to mind and is very common and why many non-profit organizations can’t seem to get a major gifts program off the ground. When asked what is stopping them from building the capacity to add a major gifts program to their fundraising program, the explanation looks and sounds remarkably like “Fred the Baker”:

The day-to-day, month-to-month routine is so fast and mundane that there is no time for planning.
In January, we do the dinner.
In February-March-April we do the annual campaign.
In May we do the golf outing.
Etc, Etc, Etc

I recently had the privilege of working with a group of non-profit volunteers who said . . . ENOUGH . . . let’s build some train tracks.

They understood the following:

They didn’t have the right staff in place to implement a major gifts initiative.
Their technology (e.g. donor database) needs a lot of work to support an initiative like this.
Their resource development practices and systems need to change (e.g. stewardship)
They might even need to change the people sitting around the table.

Yet, none of this stopped them from working on those train tracks. They made it a goal in their resource development plan to some day have a fully functional major gifts program. They then look realistically at what they could start doing rather than what they couldn’t do and came up with the following handful of objectives for this year:

Develop an internal case for support.
Develop a menu of gift opportunities.
Identify a small handful of potential major gift prospects.
Develop personal confidential personal strategy plans for each prospect.
Engage in implementing each plan and start cultivating.

They are laying train tracks for the future and doing what they can today in anticipation for what they want to happen tomorrow.

How are you ensuring that you and the folks at your agency are NOT “Fred the Baker”? Do you use the planning process (e.g. strategic plan, board development plan, resource development plan, marketing plan, program plan, etc) to lay future train tracks for your organization? Do you have a great success story that you want to share? Please scroll down and use the comment box to jump into this discussion because we can all learn from each other.

Here’s to your health!

Solving the age-old battle between fundraising vs grantwriting

December 26, 2012 erik Board development, Fundraising, Planning

It is the end of the year and for many non-profit organizations it means:

constructing an agency budget for 2013, and
putting together a comprehensive resource development plan to add meaning and depth to the revenue side of the agency budget.

In the last few weeks as I’ve talked with various agencies about their resource development planning efforts, I’m reminded of age-old battle:

Fundraising vs. Grantwriting

Donors see government grants as “wealth redistribution” and a substitute for their charitable contributions. Fundraising volunteers (and even fundraising staff) get squeamish about asking other people for money, and they prefer asking government and private sector foundations over soliciting family, friends, co-workers and neighbors.

crowding1 This phenomenon is called the “crowding out effect” and I wrote about it in the following blog posts in 2011:

While I would love for you to go back and read those posts, I also encourage you to read an awesome 2009 research paper written by James Andreoni and A. Abigail Payne titled “Is Crowding Out Due Entirely to Fundraising? Evidence from a Panel of Charities“. They do an awesome job of looking at this from a data perspective, and they conclude the following:

Using instrumental variable techniques, we estimate total crowding is around 73 percent, and that this crowding out is almost exclusively is the result of reduced fund-raising. A $10,000 grant, for instance, reduces fund-raising expenses by $1370, which in turn reduces donations by $7271. Adding this $1370 savings in fund-raising expenses reduces the estimate of crowding out to 59 percent. If charities had maintained their fund-raising efforts, our estimates show that donations would have risen by the full amount of the grant.

hell2 The crowding out effect is real, and it is something non-profit organizations need to understand and deal with. If not, then I advise putting the following age-old expression in a frame above the boardroom door: “The road to hell is paved with good intentions.”

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking lately about how to put the “crowding out effect” in check, and the following few paragraphs are just a few ideas. I think some are good thoughts and others are a little out there, but let’s work together on refining these ideas.

Planning – Planning – Planning

The planning process is not about the executive director putting stuff in writing and handing it over to volunteers for implementation. Planning is an engagement activity.

So, why not introduce volunteers who are involved in the resource development planning process to the research paper by James Andreoni and A. Abigail Payne and ask them: “What should we do about this? How should we accommodate for this in our plan?”

Simply stated . . . planning is the antidote for the crowding out effect.

Fundraising policies

I’ve always seen “policies” as a way of creating hard and fast rules for things that board volunteers and non-profit staff might otherwise find hard to implement if it weren’t “required“. Since so many people find grantwriting easier and preferable to fundraising, I started wondering if there weren’t some policies we could create that could put the “crowding out effect” in check. The following are just a few thoughts:

A written policy prohibiting government and private foundation grant revenue from exceeding a certain percentage of the agency’s overall revenue.
A written policy that commits board members to increasing their personal contributions by a certain percentage whenever grant revenue exceeds a certain level.
A written policy that commits board members to asking a certain number of new prospective donors whenever grant revenue exceeds a certain level.
A written policy that ties the agency’s annual campaign goal to the level of grant revenue. (e.g. every 1% increase in revenue goals from grant writing results in a 2% increase in qualified individual giving prospects and corresponding campaign infrastructure)

Truth be told . . . I’m not a huge fan of this approach, but I do think it is worth continued discussion and dialog.

Board development

I suspect that the best solution is the simplest solution — recruit the right board members.

Smart business people will understand a simple concept like the “crowding out effect”. Put this challenge in front of them and ask them to solve it.

I suspect they will simply conclude that more “fundraising-minded volunteers” need to be recruited to off-set the effects of grantwriting on the agency. After all, isn’t that what they’d probably conclude when it comes to their sales force staff and their business if confronted with the same challenge?

Are you in the middle of writing your 2013 resource development plan? Are you facing some of the same challenges with volunteers regarding the question of more fundraising versus more grantwriting? If so, how are you tackling this challenge? Do you have any suggestions on how to improve upon the recommendations I’m providing in this blog post? Please use the comment box below to weigh-in with your thoughts and suggestions.

Here’s to your health!

Does your non-profit organization have policies about grant writing?

December 11, 2012 erik Fundraising, Planning

grant writing1 This morning I am asking for your help with a small project I am working on. A few weeks ago I agreed to help one of my favorite non-profit organizations with a staff transition. Not only did their development director move on to greener pastures at the end of the summer, but their executive director also recently resigned. So, the board asked me to step into the void and help their management team with a variety of year-end miscellaneous projects (e.g. year-end holiday mailing, 2013 budget construction, resource development plan, etc).

One of the projects with which I provide a little assistance is grant writing. I am part of the review team that proofreads, edits and asks questions before any proposal is allowed to go out the door. I am not the only person involved in this agency’s grant writing process . . . there is a grant writer (who is an independent contractor), a program/operations person and a board member. I kind of like the process they’ve designed. It feels comprehensive, responsible and serious.

The other day someone brought another grant opportunity to the team. It was a RFP that would’ve brought $2,000 in the door that wouldn’t have supplemented existing programming . . . it was an “add-on” proposition. Here is a list of questions that the grant writing team started asking itself:

Is this grant opportunity “budget relieving”?
Are the program costs totally off-set by the grant? Or will the $2,000 grant only partially cover the expenses of the add-on programming?
Are there other reasons (e.g. political, relationship building, etc) for the agency to consider writing this proposal?

Somewhere in the middle of this discussion, the board member blurted out the following really good question:

“How many more $2,000 grants are we going to write?”

ROI This question was inspired by a string of two or three grants in a row that this organization had just written. As a businessman, he asked this question because he is accustom to looking at everything through a “return on investment” (ROI) lens. In hindsight, this is what he saw:

The grant writer was putting in three to six hours researching and writing the proposal.
The program/operations person was putting in a few hours pull together outcomes data and proofreading the final proposal to make sure we weren’t over-promising anything.
The board member, who serves on the management team as the agency searches for a new executive director, is investing a few hours in proofreading and asking tough questions to ensure the organization isn’t over-promising and under-delivering. This is essentially the same role that the executive director would play if there was one on the payroll.
I was back stopping the entire process and doing some same.

WOW! It shouldn’t be a surprise after a few small grant writing opportunities he’d ask such a question.

Of course, this touched off an interesting conversation on many different fronts including a discussion about non-profit fundraising policies.

I promised the group that I would blog about this topic and ask the readership of DonorDreams blog for their best possible world-class coaching and advice.

So, I have a holiday season favor to ask each of you this morning:

Would you please take a minute or two out of your busy schedule this morning and use the comment box below to do one of the following two things?

share your agency’s grant writing policy/policies, or
share how your organization makes decisions on when to write or pass on a grant writing opportunity.

Seriously, your feedback this morning will directly help another organization in its pursuit of developing fundraising best practices. Your participation will take all of a minute or two this morning. Please weigh-in. Your collective wisdom is massive and will bring tremendous value to this organization’s discussion. You can consider the few minutes that you invest in responding to this request as your “good turn” this holiday season. Please pay it forward!

Here’s to your health!

Robert Frost’s cautionary words for your non-profit agency

November 23, 2012 erik organizational development, Planning

In a recent post, John deconstructed one of my favorite poems of all time — Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken”. While many of us read this popular poem and conclude that it is about self-actualization, John helps us see that this is far from the case when he says, “This is far from being about self-actualization and appreciating the immense satisfaction and reward of going our own way. It is about our propensity to rationalize.”

I’ve spent a lot time this morning combing through this post and all of the supporting links, and I buy into all of the analysis about “The Road Not Taken”. I can honestly say that I will never look at this poem in the same way. Additionally, there are all sorts of organizational development lessons to be learned for non-profit agencies embedded in this poem.

For example, the line in the poem that says “Yet knowing how way leads on to way, I doubted if I should ever come back.” are big time words of warning about the cause-and-effect nature of the world and the effect of our actions carrying us away so that we don’t typically backtrack to the divergence of those same two paths.

Up to this point, I am buying into everything and there are a number of “AH-HA” moments going off in my head, until I read this . . .

“But here’s the real deal: We can’t possibly know which path is our path before we choose it.”

I have to laugh at myself sometimes because I have wrestled with these words for an hour now. I’ve paced my living room and consumed two cups of coffee trying to process exactly what John is getting at. I struggle with this because I am a planner. I have two degrees in planning from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. I have facilitated countless numbers of plans for non-profit organizations including strategic plans, resource development plans, board development plans, marketing plans, business plans, annual campaign plans, etc etc etc.

I believe “planning” is akin to creating a map for your agency, which means that as you approach those two roads that diverge in a yellow wood you have a map in your hands, you have considered a number of facts, and you’re prepared to make a choice that makes sense for your organization.

So, for the last hour I’ve struggled with John’s words because it feels like an indictment of planning. However, I can feel it in my bones that he isn’t saying that your organization shouldn’t invest time in planning efforts.

Since planning is an engagement activity (e.g. not something a non-profit professional should do in the silence of their office), there is a lot of value in it. Yet, you can have the best plan (aka road map) in the world and you may even know far in advance which of the two roads your agency will take, but you can’t and won’t know if the path you choose is the right path until you actually start walking down it.

Now that is a terrifying revelation for someone like me. LOL Why? Because planning is how I deal with an uncertain and scary future. Planning activities bring me peace of mind because it allows me to bring the uncertain future into the present, and it gives me the a false sense of security that I can exert some control over uncertainty.

Apparently, the Nile (read de-nial) is more than just a river in Egypt.

Did you see that big flash a moment ago? If so, then you probably recognize it as the final “AH-HA” moment and light bulb going off over my head.

Please don’t misunderstand me. As I circle back around to Robert Frost’s poem, I don’t see any mention of the traveler NOT having a map. I still feel strongly that any agency that chooses to do business in today’s rough-and-tumble business world without a plan is doomed to wander the woods lost and will likely starve to death.

So, there are a few different sets of cautionary words that emerge from today’s post:

The cause-and-effect nature of our world has a tendency to sweep us away so that we seldom end up backtracking and approaching the same fork in the road again. One decision begets another decision, we get carried away, and oftentimes look back with regret and unable to unwind a series of decisions. So, be thoughtful and intentional
The woods are confusing and a map (e.g. plan) is necessary so that you can improve your chances of making a good decision as your approach the fork in the road; however, you will never know if you are making the right choice until you choose it.
Don’t let the fact that you have a plan fool you into making blind decisions or prevent you from questioning your decisions along the way.

Well, this “O.D. Friday” certainly involved a lot of deep thinking. I blame last night’s Thanksgiving turkey meal. 😉

What do you think about all of this? Has your agency ever had a plan/roadmap, used it to make a difficult choice, and then regretted making that choice? If so, what happened? Since hindsight is 20/20, would you please help others benefit from your experiences and wisdom? Please use the comment box below to share your thoughts. We can all learn from each other.

Here’s to your health!

Does your non-profit agency pass “The Marshmallow Test”?

October 26, 2012 erik Board development, Fundraising, leadership, organizational development, Planning

In a recent post, John talked about something called The Marshmallow Test, which is a real life academic study related to impulse control. You probably know this by other names and expressions such as “A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush“.

John poses the question, “What happens when the environment is perceived to shift a bit?” Both he and the academic study conclude, “The promise of a second marshmallow holds no sway, if the promise is perceived as unreliable.”

So, I thought I’d ask a very simple question on this Friday morning . . . Does your non-profit agency pass “The Marshmallow Test”?

Confused? Let me give you a few examples to get you started:

If your organization doesn’t invest in and value professional development (e.g. very little training, no professional development plans embedded in performance management plans, few promotion opportunities, etc), then how does that impact your employees’ behavior in the workplace? Do they still strive for improvement or do they settle into the status quo?
If your organization doesn’t measure the impact of its programming, then how does that impact donor behavior? Does it influence how your fundraising professionals do their jobs?
If your organization doesn’t value the importance of planning and fails to involve board volunteers in strategic planning, then will that have a “disengaging” effect on board members? Does it impact what they’re willing to do on behalf of your mission?

Yes, today was intentionally a short post because John’s Marshmallow Test post really said it all, and I wanted to provoke you to think about your specific non-profit agency rather than share a fun non-profit story from my past.

So, have you given this question any thought? Does your agency pass the test? On what level were you considering this question (e.g. operations, human resources, resource development, etc)? Is your organizational structure designed to engage employees, volunteers and donors and result in them having some impulse control?

Please scroll down and use the comment box to share your answer. If you still don’t have an answer, please weigh-in on any thoughts this might have spurred. We can all learn from each other.

Here’s to your health!

Who is minding the gap at your agency?

September 28, 2012 erik organizational development, Planning

Today, we are talking about one of the most important things that your organizations must do if it wants to achieve its mission and vision of the future. We are talking about “minding the gap,” which is something John talked about in terms of strategic planning.

At the foundation of every good strategic plan (or any plan for that matter) is “gap analysis,” which John summarizes well when he says:

“Which is a pretty fancy way of saying that the team spends some time comparing the current situation with the future state. Comparing actual performance with potential performance. Comparing current capabilities to projected capabilities.”

When I read this, my mind wandered to the countless evaluation sessions and SWOT exercises in which I’ve participated and facilitated throughout the years. However, I then read this in John’s post . . .

“The team doing the gap analysis rarely delivers the plans necessary to actually bridge the gap and achieve the future state. Look; it’s not that the team is a bunch of do nothing know nothing stiffs. Far from it; they are very often strong contributors, hand-picked for the job — logical, analytical; detail oriented, project planners and operational executioners. Without them, the current state would be nowhere near as good as it is.”

Now this stopped me cold in my tracks on a Friday morning because it is a powerful and true statement. It also made my brain hurt because it raises all sorts of questions that are difficult to contemplate on only 1/2 cup of coffee such as:

Who do you involve in your gap analysis?
How do you assess who those right people are when building your prospect list?
How do you keep the gap assessment from feeling like a judgement on your current team?
Are there different groups who mind different gaps in your organization? For example, who is minding the program/operations gap? The board governance gap? The fundraising gap?
What role should donors play in minding the gap? How can we get over our fears around exposing donors to the data that comes out of minding the gap? (Ditto these questions for board members as it relates to staff and programming)

So, here is the take away for me this morning . . .

Spend lots of time getting the “WHO” right,
when it comes to gap assessment and planning.

If you get this wrong, then it will likely haunt you for years and years to come.

Do you have any strategic planning stories that you would like to share about how you determined who the right people were and put them in the right seat of your strategic planning bus? Please share your experiences in the comment box below.

Here’s to your health!

What is your non-profit agency’s year-end stewardship strategy?

September 26, 2012 erik Donor-centered fundraising, Fundraising, Planning, resource development

Yesterday, I posted about the importance of developing your organization’s year-end fundraising strategy and doing so ASAP (by which I mean get it in writing by the end of this week). As I reflected on my post all day yesterday, I started thinking about all of the great holiday opportunities with regard to donor stewardship activities.

Over the years, I posted a number of articles immediately before, during or after a holiday talking about how organizations could have piggy backed on the holiday to implement some effective stewardship activities. After each of those posts, I remember thinking . . . “Hmmmm, perhaps I should’ve posted this a few weeks or months ago and readers might have had some time to put thought and planning into such an idea.”

With this in mind, let’s go back in time and revisit two blog posts from the fourth quarter of last year that spoke to the idea of using holidays as stewardship opportunities. Here they are:

Another thought that I’ve shared with a number of clients throughout the years is the idea of taking the “Twelve Days of Christmas” song and using it as a December theme for “The Twelve Days of Stewardship”. It can be as simple as doing 12 stewardship activities in December or as complicated as the song suggests (e.g. giving the donor two of this, three of that, etc etc etc).

If you’re rolling your eyes at this suggestion, I encourage you to stop and think about it for a moment. I bet that right now off the top of your head, you’ll be able to rattle off three or four stewardship things your agency does around the holidays, such as:

mailing holiday cards
hosting a holiday party for supporters and donors
thank-a-thon (e.g. stewardship thank you phone calls)
annual report
Running a “A few of my favorite things . . .” essay contest with your clients about your services and sharing the results with your donors.

With a little bit of thought and creativity, I bet you can weave things that you already do into a 12 day tapestry of stewardship opportunities.

The bigger point that I am trying to make today (and yesterday) is that these things don’t just happen. They require some thought and planning (and more than just a few days before).

The fourth quarter and holiday season offer unique and fun opportunities to steward donors, and it is something you need to start thinking about this week because the fourth quarter will be here starting Monday of next week. (Eeeeek! Talk about a scary Halloween gift)

What is your organization doing to steward donors for Halloween? Thanksgiving? Hanukkah? Kwanzaa? Do you have thoughts or ideas to help flesh out the aforementioned 12 Days of Stewardship concept?

Please scroll down and share your thoughts, plans and questions in the comment box below. We can all learn from and inspire each other.

Here’s to your health!

Uh oh . . . you’re thinking outside-the-box again

September 14, 2012 erik Fundraising, leadership, organizational development, Planning

Today, I am not really “focusing” on John’s recent post about inside-the-box thinking, outside-the-box thinking, and just plain old reconstruction of your box thinking. Instead, I’m using his post as a springboard to set-up deeper discussions next Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday on specific “inside-the-box thinking” topics pertaining to the non-profit community.

When I was a young executive director a decade ago, I decided a few years into my tenure that I probably didn’t know everything there was to know about running a non-profit organization and a business. So, I committed myself to becoming a lifelong learner about such things. I started reading various manuals that our national organization published. I used Google to search for online articles. I especially loved going to Borders book stores on weekends and purchasing business books.

When John talked about the importance of organizational leadership and building new boxes where employees can be productive again, it reminded me of a book I once read and still sits on my bookshelf. The author is Kirk Cheyfitz, and the book is titled “Thinking Inside The Box: The 12 Timeless Rules for Managing a Successful Business“.

After reading a sentence or two from that short promotional passage on the inside cover, purchasing the book was a forgone conclusion. It was these words that hooked me and succinctly captures the essence of the book:

“For the past decade and more, everyone in business was told that success in a rapidly changing world required constant “thinking outside the box.” The result has often been financially and ethically disastrous. Now, in a radical reassessment of what really works, this book shows that the business world lost its way when it forgot how to think inside the box.”

Hmmmm? Re-reading those same words today now makes me think about Wall Street, mortgage-backed securities, derivatives, and the economic crash of 2008. However, I will resist the temptation of going down that rabbit hole this morning.

There are many things that stick with me 10 years after reading this book. One of the biggest things is what goes through my mind every time I hear a non-profit executive director say those magical words:

“Thinking outside-the-box”

I don’t conjure up images of “innovation” or “leadership” like many other people apparently do. The first thing that runs through my head is “uh-oh, they’re in trouble”. For me, the phrase “thinking outside-the-box” represents all of the following:

magical thinking
hope (which is not a strategy)
abandonment of best practices

I believe there are some “business practices” that are timeless and always work regardless of which sector you’re working and in what boxes you find yourself. Abandoning those practices in the name of “outside-the-box thinking” is what gets you in trouble.

For example, the following are just a few of the chapter titles you will find in the book:

The Money Box: Cash Is Everything . . . If you don’t manage your cash, you won’t be managing anything for long.
The Box Top: Customers Are the Boss . . . Give customers what they want, not what you want to give them.
The Basic Box: Some Things Never Change . . . Know the difference between what will change and what won’t, and pay attention to the former.
The Marketing Box: Unifying the Whole Business . . . You should be selling all the time.
The People Box: Hire Smart or Manage Hard . . . When it comes to people, you can hire smart and get out of the way, or you can run yourself ragged micromanaging.

There are many more chapters with equally thought-provoking business practices. Every new non-profit executive director should read this book.

Next week I will choose three chapters and go in-depth on those subjects in a way that speaks to the challenges non-profit leaders face every day. I also will pull stories from my non-profit experiences to illustrate those points and have a little fund along the way.

Using the poll below, please vote for three ideas that interest you the most. If you’re a subscriber and reading this as an email, you may not be able to vote (you never know … please try). If you find that you can’t vote from the email copy of this post, please click the hyperlink blog post title, which will take you to my WordPress blog site and cast your vote there. I am genuinely interested in your opinion and need help shaping next week’s content. Please?

[polldaddy poll=6533936]

For the love of God, it is 2012 and it is a Presidential Election year. Please vote!

Have you ever done something that you and others considered “outside-the-box”? If so, what was it? Did it work? How do you know it worked? Would you have been better off building a different box per John Greco’s suggestion? Please weigh-in with your thoughts using the comment box below (and please take 5 seconds to cast your votes).

Here’s to your health!

Reaching for the stars? Do your homework first!

August 31, 2012 erik Fundraising, organizational development, Planning

Today, I am focusing on a post that John wrote that was inspired by the following quotation from Robert Browning:

“Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp, else what’s a heaven for?”

He uses Browning’s words to springboard off into two significant issues that every non-profit organization confronts during strategic planning.

How lofty should the strategic goals be?
What capacity building efforts need to be undertaken to support the new vision and strategic goals?

If you’re a non-profit professional who dislikes strategic planning, I suspect that John’s blog post might speak to you. I also suspect it will give you a much-needed new perspective before heading into your next strategic planning initiative.

While it is tempting for me to use John’s post to get on a soapbox and pontificate about strategic planning, I will resist doing so and instead talk about annual campaign planning.

As many of you know, I spent the last six years working with countless non-profit organizations on planning, implementing and evaluating annual campaigns. During the planning process, there are a variety of decisions that must be made including how big is the fundraising goal.

My approach has always been to starts off conservatively:

Identify prospective donors
Evaluate capacity to give and propensity to give
Set a suggested ask amount based upon what the prospect is likely to give (factoring in who is asking, giving history to the agency, and state of the relationship between the organization and prospective donor)

After going through all of these gymnastics, we have a spreadsheet with names and ask amounts. It is at this point that I urge the planning committee to sum the column of ask amounts and then divide by two.

Why divide by two? First, not everyone is going to say ‘YES’ to your request for a contribution. Second, not everyone who agrees to contribute will agree to the give at the suggested ask amount. Third, we sometimes miss the mark when setting suggested ask amounts.

This approach flies in the face of Robert Browning’s quotation and John Greco’s blog post.

But wait . . . there’s more!

Looking around the planning table, the sight isn’t pretty. Campaign volunteers are usually a little upset. All of that work and the goal seems small. The executive director or fundraising professional is wringing their hands and they look nauseated.

It is at this point that I like to introduce the idea of “reaching for the stars”.

In my opinion, timing is everything. To introduce the idea of reaching for the stars, before everyone has a realistic view of organizational and campaign capacity, is irresponsible.

Truth be told, this is my favorite part of the annual campaign planning process. Campaign volunteers are chomping at the bit to talk about what needs to be done to increase the size of the campaign goal. The following are just a few of the questions that get asked and answered:

How many more prospects need to be identified and added to our prospect list?
How many more volunteer solicitors need to be recruited?
Does the case for support need to be strengthened?
Is there more cultivation or stewardship activities that should be done prior to the solicitation that would maximize the chances of getting what we need to reach our campaign goal?

These are engaging and powerful discussions that are tons of fun to facilitate!

Finally, these conversations always end with a robust discussion about how the new annual campaign stretch goal should be included in the agency’s budget. This is where it gets interesting.

Some folks are conservative and advocate for budgeting the original smaller goal. Others want to go for it and budget the whole amount.

Over the years, I’ve given lots of different sounding advice to a number of different organizations. However, the common thread has always been that you need to have “skin in the game”. If you don’t hold yourself accountable to reaching the stretch goal, then you’ll never reach it.

Human beings normally don’t accomplish things unless we absolutely have to do so. Behind every audacious vision has been an urgent and pressing need to do it. So, whatever you end up budgeting, it needs to feel like a bit of a stretch.

In conclusion, I encourage you to set an annual campaign goal that is a bit of a stretch, but whatever you do don’t just pull the number out of the air or apply a percentage increase over last year. Do the hard work around prospecting and evaluating propensity and capacity, then conservatively divide everything by a factor of two or three.

It is only at this point that everyone will be ready to reach for the stars and focus on those capacity building questions that are necessary for success!

How has your organization set its annual campaign goals? What has worked or not worked for you? Please share your thoughts in the comment section because we can all learn from each other.

Spend lots of time getting the “WHO” right, when it comes to gap assessment and planning.

Spend lots of time getting the “WHO” right,
when it comes to gap assessment and planning.