Is Fundraising an Art or a Science?

You meet your donor for coffee and chat about what’s happening in her life. Mostly it’s personal stuff, but you smile, nod and sip your coffee.

She asks about one of your nonprofit’s program and you’re prepared with solid stats and a couple of impact stories. Your donor smiles and shakes her head, yes.

So you make the ask.

Suddenly, the temperature drops 10 degrees, a noticeable change in your donor’s demeanor. She glances at her phone, exclaims over the time and rushes out the door without saying yes, but not saying no either.

You give her a quick hug, and sit back down to finish your coffee, wondering what went wrong. In your mind, you review the steps you’ve taken to cultivate this donor and prepare for the ask.

How you wrote a warm, personal note on the thank-you letter of her and her husband’s third gift this year.

How you took them on of a tour of your facility, showing them the impact of the program for which they both seem to have an affinity. You even invited the chair of your board to join you for this tour, and they discovered they both belonged to the same country club.

How this Power Couple also came to your gala dinner last month, bidding on some high ticket items while seated at a table of other high-end donors.

According to all the training and guides and handbooks on fundraising, you should have had a very willing donor ready to make a substantial gift at your coffee meeting. That’s the science behind fundraising – a series of steps and interactions that ultimately lead to major gifts.

But fundraising is more than a science. A good fundraiser understands the art of fundraising, and knows that sometimes the best ask is no ask.

In this scenario, here’s where a truly savvy fundraiser is going to succeed by recognizing that art.

While it’s true that women tend to be the charitable-giving driver in heterosexual couples, agreement is required from both members of a power couple. In this case, both people needed to be present for a major ask.

Your Power Couple has already made four gifts this year – three smaller donations and one fairly large one at a gala event. Why are you asking again just a month after a major fundraising event? Donors don’t like being treated like ATMs where you consistently make withdrawals.

Your donor started off the meeting talking more about personal topics. The fundraiser would have been smarter to simply follow her donor’s lead and talk about the program the donor asked about, but simply thank the donor for their major gift at the event and talk about how much of an impact it made.

That warm, effusive and genuine gratitude would likely have been carried back to the donor’s spouse in their conversation over dinner or as they were turning in the for the night.

Instead of making an ask, you’ve planted a seed that will grow as the couple continues to be engaged. Perhaps they would have taken your nonprofit’s mission back to their respective businesses as potential recipients of corporate donors.

Perhaps in a few months, you could have invited both of them to dinner with your executive director and made a substantial ask then. With both of them present, after a period of months have passed since their last substantial gift.

That, my friends, is a fundraiser who understands the art of fundraising, one who will be highly successful in using both the art and the science of fundraising.

 

 

 

When Event Fundraising Fails

The COVID-19 Pandemic may have finally finished off event-style fundraising models. Certainly, with the Delta strain surging, we’re all hearing that dreaded death rattle as fundraisers attempt to go back to their familiar standby.

I’ve never been an “event person,” and I most definitely have a bias against events as the primary mode of fundraising. How many golf tournaments, bowl-a-thons, gala parties, or silent (loud?) auctions do we need before recognizing events don’t work.

Sure, people have a lot of fun at parties. Golfers love the chance to play a round on a prestigious course. The artist who “donated” the painting for your silent auction gets a nice charitable gift tax write off when the piece doesn’t sell at the gallery. And your nonprofit just spent a boatload of money and staff hours for a one-time budget boost – assuming your event broke even.

Then, a global pandemic hits and you’re looking at a $50K hole in your fundraising plan. It’s happened far too often in the last couple of years.

Nonprofit gurus have been saying this for years, including Joan Garry. Her post “Why Do So Many Nonprofits Live or Die by Special Events?” outlines exactly why special events are a very poor way to build a successful fundraising plan. They’re expensive, unpredictable and a huge drain on staff time, Garry says.

Finally, they don’t encourage donors to invest in your mission. And that is the crux of why I’ve never been a fan of events as an effective fundraising plan.

I cut my fundraising teeth on the Benevon fundraising model, which is based on building lasting relationships with people who share an affinity for your mission and vision. Sure, the model calls for regular tours and a large-scale annual fundraising breakfast, but these can and should be adapted for virtual tours and small group asks, even one-on-one relationships. It’s not about the menu, the decorations or the swag bags!

It’s all about your mission, the work your nonprofit is doing to achieve its vision and how ordinary people can be an important part of it!

COVID-19 has forced every single nonprofit to re-think event fundraising. Despite the loss of events, nonprofits with a robust variety of fundraising channels with strong, established donor relationships are doing just fine shifting their fundraising plans to these changing times.

Direct mail companies are finding donations growing in average gift size and in new donors. Online giving, including Facebook and Instagram, report growth as campaigns and events go virtual.

If one good thing can come from COVID-19, I hope it encourages nonprofits to scrap large scale events and adopt a more diverse fundraising plan – even when the pandemic is over.

So You Want to Hire a Development Director?

Your board leadership has given the thumbs up to hire a development director. You’ve managed to pull together funds to cover the position’s salary and benefits. You’ve interviewed a slew of candidates, found exactly the right person, and they’ve accepted your offer.

Congratulations! It’s a big step!

Now the real work begins!

Come again?

That’s right. Everyone wants to hire a fundraiser, but very few organizations actually want to fundraise. [Yes, I just verbed a noun.]

Hiring a development director is just the beginning of a massive cultural shift for every level of your organization. Every single person in your organization from the program staff to the administrative staff, from the board of directors to you – yes, you as executive leadership – will be called upon to help.

If you truly want your new development director to be successful and to raise money for your organization, here are some very specific needs:  

• A Development Plan: This can be the first thing that you both work on together, but having a plan will help your new employee set priorities and reach specific benchmarks for the first year’s performance. It also manages everyone’s expectations. 
• A Case Statement: One of the key elements of a good development plan is a case statement, a document that outlines the needs of the organization and presents clear, factual evidence of the need and why a donor’s support will help address that need.
• A Robust Donor Database: Along with tracking all donations, this database needs to bring together online giving and website traffic. This is NOT your accounting system – although it can be used to cross-verify income in your accounting system. It needs to provide a record of donor contacts, a donor’s interests, the donor’s network and relationships. And, it should be able to pull out specific donor prospects to cultivate increased giving.
• A Fundraising Budget: And I don’t mean just the development director’s annual salary and benefits. Your new fundraiser is going to need support to take donors out for coffee and lunch, to send personalized thank you notes, to keep learning with professional development, to attend networking events in the community, to host events, and create and distribute direct mail, annual reports and other items donors will want to see. If you can’t afford these things, you’re setting your new development director up for failure.
• Cooperation from Staff and Board Members. You and your board members should be willing to help make introductions and meet with potential donors. Key leadership staff from programming also must be willing to meet with donors. No one is more passionate about the organization’s needs! A good development director wants that passion to come through with donors.

In order to create the plan and the case statement, your new development director needs access to information from the program side of the house. Yes, it’s going to create more work for your staff and for you! But if you don’t make a convincing case nor have a plan to fill the greatest needs to make the biggest impact, your new development director isn’t going to be successful. 

Having someone taking the development reins for your organization is a big step, a critically important step for an organization that wants to grow and develop sustainable funding for the long term. 

Hiring a development director is just the beginning of an agency-wide commitment to be successful. After all, you hired a development director, not a miracle worker with a magic wand who makes money appear from thin air.