Over the past 25 years, I have worked with dozens of organizations to further nonprofit missions in health care, education, and progressive causes. These organizations have ranged from global nonprofits seeking to execute multi-billion-dollar fundraising plans to volunteer-led start-ups that have operating budgets below $500,000. During this time, my clients and I noticed three troubling trends:
Most nonprofits are constrained in recruiting experienced fundraisers. Those nonprofits that are able to recruit a talented fundraising professional usually have trouble holding onto them for long—the national average tenure for a Director of Development is 15 months.
If fundraising is about relationships, how can a nonprofit build relationships with its donors in such little time with such high turnover?
How is a nonprofit expected to diversify its donor base if it has a hard time diversifying the people who interact with its donors?
When fundraising is restricted to one department, it creates a disconnect between the development staff and the rest of the nonprofit.
Why limit the success and sustainability of fundraising by isolating those efforts to development staff?
Even more problematic? The unhealthy power dynamic within nonprofits, both at the staff and the board level, between people who understand and feel confident in fundraising and those who have not been exposed to ethical and successful fundraising practices.
This scenario plays out in a few expected but disappointing ways. Maybe there is a CEO who has risen through the ranks of the programming side of the nonprofit, with a Director of Development insisting, “Let me handle the donors so that you can focus on other things.” Maybe the nonprofit has never had a development department because of its size. When you factor in the typical distribution of race, ethnicity, and gender within the field, imbalances are even further ingrained.
Regardless of specifics, the results remain the same. Nonprofit CEOs do not feel comfortable or empowered to own the revenue portion of their business model. This in turn invites boards to assume that they need to take charge of the business model, which draws them too much into operations. As a result, the nonprofit may throw more money towards hiring a development person who won’t stay long enough to make a difference, and the cycle continues. In this scenario, almost no one is happy, and there is a very limited chance of sustained fundraising success.
What’s missing here is what’s known in fundraising circles as the Culture of Philanthropy. This concept is frequently discussed at fundraising conferences but is elusive in practice. My clever colleagues at =mc consulting created a tool that consistently helps nonprofits discover and build a culture of philanthropy.
It’s said that the first step in finding a solution is to acknowledge that there is a problem. If any of the above sounds eerily familiar, I recommend the following:
This could take the form of hiring a fundraising coach, but it also requires hiring the operational, administrative, and finance support necessary to free up the CEO’s bandwidth enough to engage the fundraising coaching. Your donors want to get to know your CEO, and these investments may be necessary to make that happen.
Telling boards to “give or get” hasn’t worked in decades, and the notion is every bit as offensive and exclusionary now as it was a generation ago. Fundraising training can be helpful, but the real breakthroughs occur when fundraising skill-building becomes personal and customized to each board member’s talents and passions. This support needs to take into account each board member’s comfort level in fundraising, connections, and available time.
Let me share one of my favorite examples of a nonprofit that has brilliantly implemented this strategy: this organization has no full-time development staff, has a donor base who feels loved and has a personal connection to one or more staff members, and has a groundskeeper who solicits a sponsorship when he takes the mower in for repair. Oh, and they’ve increased unrestricted revenue by 500% in the past 7 years — that’s probably worth mentioning, too. This is result of implementing a Culture of Philanthropy.
I would be happy to discuss how the above processes can work over a friendly cup of coffee — nonprofits don’t need to pay for knowledge. And if you’d like help implementing any of the above practices, let’s discuss the type of coaching and support that could help make that possible.
