"F" is for Fundraising

First-time fundraising.
(image by Sharon Drummond)

This issue is grim death for the many smaller organizations that are dealing with a reduction (or end) of government funding. Seriously – I get about two calls a month asking for advice on how to plan for first-time-ever fundraising. The groups are usually super-small with only two or three staff.

My suggestion is the same in most cases – and kind of self-serving as you will see – I tell them to get a consultant to hack out an initial plan based on the organization’s resources and contact list. This way, they don’t end up just throwing money at a full-time fundraiser without a plan in place. Better to pay a pro for a few hours to get things set up right the first time.

Now for some points to keep in mind:

Do:

• Ask an expert, don’t waste time guessing, get all the options and evaluate. Get RFPs and references! (Yes, this was worth repeating!)
• Educate the whole organization about the need for fundraising – it can’t happen in a vacuum.
• Make a plan, and change it as you get better information.
• Pick types of fundraising that will appeal to the people currently involved with your group or cause.
• Use social media to get the contact info (emails) of people associated with, or interested in, your cause. They are your prospects.
• If you decide on doing some grant writing, call your prospective foundations first. Don’t “spray and pray” by sending out a zillion generic applications.
• Pick a system to track your prospects and donors – recipe cards are fun and have that whiff of nostalgia, but maybe get serious and get a cheap database in place.
• Start simple in your planning, but with an eye to future diversification.

Don’t:

• Hire a fundraiser before you have a plan of action.
• Hold an event without resources for follow up.
• Stage an event that is too complicated or expensive. Events are pricy and time-consuming – pick the simple ones!
• Like I said above, don’t Firehose your community with grant applications.
• Pay anyone on commission to raise money. A pre-arranged set bonus based on multiple performance points is fine. Paying a percentage of dollars raised is considered unethical by the Association of Fundraising Professionals’ code of ethics.
• Invest in an expensive database until you have a couple hundred donors/prospects at least. Even then it doesn’t have to be pricy.
• Skimp on the fundraiser’s salary – you’ll lose out on long-term earning potential. You get what you pay for in terms of experience and efficiency. Do it right from the start.

And yes, I can help! Tell your friends and thanks for following my blog!

–          Siobhan

Follow my blog and sleep better at night.

When I can’t sleep at night, I blame Imagine Canada’s sector monitor reports.  They do a fantastic job of freaking me out about donor churn and the competition over charitable dollars.

Fundraising 101 tells us that the secret to controlling the horror is to reduce donor turnover. But despite the well-researched financial costs of letting current donors lapse, the push for many fundraisers today is to spend our time closing gifts, instead of stewarding those already in the door.

As a result, stewardship receives less attention and investment than it should. The standard approach is to ask for the gift, send out a thank you letter, wait a year, deliver the final report and immediately re-ask. Even worse, I often see stewardship taking second place to its flashier cousin “recognition.” Now there’s nothing wrong with recognition, but do you work in an organization that spends countless hours agonizing over giving levels, where to list donors’ names, how many trinkets they get and who should sign the thank you letter? Half the time this recognition isn’t worth the glue it took to stick it on the donor wall. Recognition may sweeten the proposal, but stewardship is what strengthens the relationship and keeps the gifts coming (and growing).

Don’t give in to the mindset that stewarding your donors will take too much time or effort. Set aside an hour each week to look after your peeps. Send out thoughtful, informal touch points before asking for the next gift. Try sending something out once every six weeks or so, and keep it up unless the donor tells you to cork it.

Towards the end of the year, gather those touch points as the outline/content for a more formal stewardship report. You’ll save time in the long run and stay top-of-mind with your donors, using palatable updates that they may actually have time to look at. I’ll spell out some easy ideas for content and delivery in a future blog, but here are a few basic tips to keep in mind:

• Wherever you can, reference the donors’ support by talking about the results of their investment.
• Avoid talking about your organization. For example, replace “We were proud to open the new homeless shelter this month” with “You helped shelter an additional 50 people this month.” See the awesome difference?
• Personalize. Use first names, visuals, anything handwritten. No time? Take a blue ballpoint pen and write a smiley face on the envelope. It’s better than nothing and shows that a happy human handled the correspondence.
• Don’t be afraid to use email – it’s quick and accessible, and less likely to be seen as an interruption. Don’t use mailchimp or constant contact – the mark of a contrived mass mailing – just send a very brief email with a link or image of something relevant.

Try it and see for yourself. You’ll sleep better at night! Enter your email above to follow my blog and you won’t miss my follow-up checklist of yummy stewardship ideas – coming soon!

–          Siobhan  : )

No-one likes BS!
(image by nebojsa mladjenovic)

Hoo boy. I went to a fantastic fundraising conference in Toronto, but sometimes when people are trying to impress other people you start hearing a lot of words that qualify for a round of Bullsh*t Bingo (BSB).

Here’s a fresh batch of words to expunge* from your proposals, meetings and other human interactions. For serious – I’m not fooling around here.

Orthopraxy: Yes! Orthopraxy! I bet you don’t even believe someone said that in front of me and lived. Well it happened in Toronto and it could happen here too. The person was discussing the difference between rules and actual practices in fundraising (orthodoxy versus orthopraxy) and when I regained consciousness I vowed to shame this word on my blog.

Ideation: Unbelievably, this is a synonym for the word “thinking.” If I was a funder and read this in a proposal I would roll it up and smoke it.

Value proposition: My awesome colleague Theresa F. blew the whistle on this phrase. Please don’t ever use it unless a donor says it first. Then you will just have to suck it up. Normally, I’d use words like “impact” or “results.”

Programs: I know what you’re thinking – this is a normal word, right? Not when used in the social sector to describe an activity when you could just name the activity itself.
Example: “At Junior Achievement, we deliver programs on business education.”
What does that even mean?
Instead: “At Junior Achievement, volunteers teach business education to elementary and high school students.”
If you can substitute the actual activity for the word “program,” do it.

Meme: NerdSpeak for a catchy idea. Like posting cat photos on Pinterest. An unusual percentage of fundraisers and major gift donors are closet Luddites, so this kind of language can really scare us to pieces. Tap the brakes Sweetpea.

Comment, follow, and stay tuned for BSB4.

– Siobhan : )

* “Expunge”! Pah! That’s exactly what I’m talking about here people.

People give to people!
(image by Patrick Q)

Perfect timing for Christmas, n’est-ce pas?

Think of these fundraising best practices as the key to getting others excited about their own philanthropy.

People follow cues from their peers more than any other source of influence.

This is more a marketing law than a fundraising one, but you know how I feel about the connection between the two! People love to talk, and now their talk goes viral instead of just over the neighbour’s fence. There’s still a role for advertising and public relations but the majority of people trust what a friend says* over anything your marketing budget can pay for, and that goes double for charitable giving. 

“Peers asking peers” is the most effective way to ask for money.

The most common survey response by those who don’t give to charity is that no-one asked them to. It’s a weird statistic but super-obvious. We don’t just wake up in the morning and start writing cheques. Someone has to ask: via email, a news story, a ringing Salvation Army kettle, or a letter. The most successful asks are personalized and come from sources we know and respect, ideally delivered face-to-face. 

When asking for a gift you will have more influence if you have already made a donation yourself.

Every fundraiser knows this one. However, I find that many of us think about this solely in a peer ask situation. We think about matching our prospects to volunteers who are current donors and sometimes forget that our own philanthropy carries some weight too. I can’t think of a fundraiser I know who isn’t also a donor to one or more causes. We’re generous people but we rarely discuss it for some reason, as if it doesn’t count because we’re “just the fundraiser”.

Here’s an uplifting game to try with your colleagues to get them thinking about the power of their own generosity. Get everyone to write down the cumulative amount of their most generous year’s giving. In my case, this means seven monthly donations, the one-off gifts for fundraising events throughout the year, and a big annual gift to Union Gospel Mission. Get them to write their total for that year on a piece of paper – no names! – and hand it forward for someone to add up. Before you announce the group’s total, get them to guess it first. I guarantee that they’ll under-estimate 80% of the time and that they’ll walk away inspired by the group’s generosity every time.

Organizations reach fundraising potential more easily when their board members donate.

Getting board volunteers involved and excited in fundraising is a common source of frustration in the social sector, but I think it’s largely because of our approach. Asking for money is supposedly only slightly less fearsome than public speaking or those hairy black spiders that inexplicably find their way into the bathtub.

The next time you’re talking with your organization’s volunteers, think about changing your wording from “fundraising” to “philanthropy”. Try playing that game I just told you about. Many board volunteers do not understand the importance of their leadership to fundraising efforts, but I see the lights go on when we total up the power of their giving.

Did the lights go on for you? Great! Now get out there and talk about giving.

–          Siobhan

* Don’t believe me? Check this great Nielsen report.