Came across the attached and thought it was so good that I’m encouraging anyone I know who cares about social change, particularly fundraising for social change, to read it. Now.
Lisa Simpson for Nonprofits: What Science Can Teach You About Fundraising, Marketing, and Making Social Change, a 24 page ebook by Network for Good and Sea Change Strategies.
Would love to hear your thoughts on it.
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the transition of organization from all-volunteer, to their first Executive Director, to the build out of additional staff.
One of the recurring questions that comes up — when do you add a Development Director to the staff?
I know of several organizations that hired a Development Director as the first or second hire after the Executive Director, and the results have been mixed.
So here are some of the questions I’d ask myself before hiring a first Development Director:
Do I have a clear fundraising plan so they can hit the ground running? If not, they could wind up spinning their wheels at the beginning or worse, going off in pursuit of the wrong strategies.
Do I already have more true organizational prospects to solicit than I have time to solicit? If the biggest barrier you have to major donor fundraising is lack of prospects, how does adding a Development Director help?
If I expect the development director to manage low dollar fundraising, have I made a realistic assessment of the time that will take and the net revenue it will generate, taking their staff costs into account in determining net revenue. Low dollar programs are very valuable over the long-run, but often cost money in the short run to develop them, particularly when staff time is included in the evaluation.
If they will be taking over management of a major fundraising event or series of events that I have previously managed, how much time will that free up for me to raise money through other methods? What will those methods be? And am I taking into account the time I will need to supervise the Development Director?
Can I find somebody who’s a true self-starter and who starts out with relationships they can tap into for fundraising, so that they’re bringing new donors to the table with less time necessary for my management of them?
If they do start bringing in more donations, do I have the administrative systems and staffing in place to handle a larger flow of donations (eg. banking, databasing, thank you’s, cultivation, etc.). Or will the development director have to manage all of that? Have I taken that into account when guesstimating how much money they will be able to raise?
Have I set aside in savings up to 3 months of their salary so that they can ramp up their work methodically for the long-run, rather than forcing them to cut corners up-front trying to raise money at all costs. I’ve seen Development Directors start who’ve come in with a burst of frantic energy tapping a small number of their own relationships with some success, but having done nothing to lay the groundwork for future fundraising, so it sputters to a halt.
From the above, one would think I’m negative on hiring Development Directors. To the contrary, for a thriving organization, you will at some point reach the stage where the Executive Director must have somebody else whose full-time job is thinking about and executing development plans.
But adding that staff prematurely is as likely to set you back organizationally as move you forward. So think it through!
What do you think? Are there additional considerations that I haven’t mentioned?
I’m often asked by Executive Directors to give advice as to the division of responsibilities between the staff and board.
Here’s my two cents.
The traditional view is the following:
The board:
The Executive Director:
In the real world, I’ve rarely found the traditional scenario played out. Almost always, the Executive Director must set the conditions necessary for the board to fulfill its role.
This includes:
It sounds exhausting. And it is.
But when it clicks — when the ED does one role and then the board plays its role — an organization can truly thrive. When thinking about my long tenure as an ED, those moments when everything clicked were priceless.
Of course, the above begs the question of how things are different when an organization is small, just getting started, and not yet thriving. Almost always, this means the board must take on more responsibility in some areas and less in others. I’ll write more about that in a separate blog post soon.
A mercenary donor is one who gives to you for some reason that isn’t primarily about agreement with your mission. They may give out of loyalty to a friend, out of a desire for good PR/marketing, or because you happen to be doing something at the tactical level that will have incidental impacts they want.
Organizations often seek mercenary donations and I’d be the last to tell you to avoid them at all costs. But if I have a choice between a mercenary donor – whatever the type — giving me $1,000 and a mission-driven donor giving me $750, I’d take the $750 every time.
Why? Because I’m evaluating the long-term expected value of the donor relationship and not the short-term monetary impact of the donation.
The long-term value of a mission-driven donor is higher for at least two key reasons.
For starters, getting a subsequent gift from them is more likely. And getting a larger gift from them in the future is more likely. You are looking for donors, not donations. The $750 donor may very well turn into $5,000 over the next 4 years if the relationship is handled well. Whether the $1,000 mercenary donation ever turns into a repeat donation depends on factors out of your control.
Aside from this, mission-driven donors are also critical in growing the organization in another way. They are far more likely to turn around and help your organization by reaching out to their friends and colleagues to help you grow your organization. Indeed, part of any well-designed major donor program and/or annual event is precisely the process of turning donors over time into fundraisers and friend-raisers.
So if mercenary donors are less valuable, should you ever seek them? Heck yes. But with a huge yellow caution sign – your programs, events, and strategies should focus on mission-driven donors. And once you’ve created them, it’s okay to sweep in some mercenary donors as cream on the top.
A great article in the Stanford Social Innovation Review: The Elusive Craft of Evaluating Advocacy.
Very much worth a read for those who want to understand the real-world of advocacy.
I’m often struck when talking to people how often individual work plans are wholly disconnected from strategic plans. Or even more by how some organizations never develop work plans.
A good strategic plan should set the structure for work plans. Every member of staff should have a work plan, as should board members.
The strategic plan should list out some combination of goals, strategies, tactics, and objectives. These should cover both your programmatic mission-driven goals, as well as your institutional goals.
Individual work plans should flow from the strategic plan. It should identify each tactic you’re working on, what strategy and goal that tactic is connected to, what you’re doing in more detail and by when each major step should be completed. Don’t just say: We’ll issue the Legislative Scorecard in September. You should break that down into its major pieces; Initiate selecting votes and do research in July, Select votes and do writing/design in August, Release in September, etc.
Each individual should have a work plan. It should clearly identify for each of these goals/strategies/tactics what you’re doing, who’s doing it, and by when. Excel can be one way to make this visually flow. But you can do it effectively in Word if you haven’t mastered the wonders of Excel formatting.
If you find yourself putting something in your work plan that can’t be clearly linked to one of your programmatic or institutional goals, it probably means you shouldn’t be doing it.
Board members also need work plans. They’re more likely to be narrowly focused on a few institution-building goals (fundraising, accountability, financial management).
You can draft these plans either bottom up or top down. Bottom up: You can ask each individual to go through the strategic plan and draft their work plan and then somebody has the task of making sure everything’s covered and, if not, assigning tasks by editing work plans as appropriate. Top down: the Executive Director can start with the strategic plan and draft these for each individual.
Drafting these plans should be done in a way that makes sure that all the individual plans add up to accomplishing the strategic plan, or at least the piece of the strategic plan that you aim to accomplish in the next year.
You then need to hold yourself accountable to the work plans. If you create your work plan for individual staff and then never look back at it over the course of the year, it’s probably not an effective work planning process. Even the best staff needs a supervisor who meets with them monthly and going over the work plan is something that should happen at the meeting. Evaluation of staff (and board) performance should focus first and foremost on whether the work plan was implemented and how effectively the work was done.
So build time for this accountability into the work plans themselves!
I recently heard Nick Fellers of For Impact present.
Great speaker if you ever have the opportunity.
One of the things he suggested that rang true for me is the following:
As Executive Director, you should do a 1 on 1 donor meeting with all board members (with or without your board chair joining you) at least once per year.
Treat them like the major donors that they are.
You’re doing this partly to excite them.
You’re doing this partly to train them on effective fundraising by modeling best practices.
And you’re doing this to ask the to take on more responsibility.
In this day and age, as board members lead complicated lives with competing priorities, you can’t expect a board member who perhaps thinks about your cause an hour a week to always self-motivate.
So go ask them!
I heard this from Nick Fellers of For Impact. I’m paraphrasing, not quoting.
If a lion hunts a mice, it can catch it. But it probably burns more calories catching it than the mice will provide.
If a lion hunts an antelope and catches it, it can feed the lion for days.
In the fundraising context, this means don’t go chasing lots of smaller donations if your goal is to transform your organization. Yes, a larger organization with lots of staff can and should build a broader base. But especially if you’re a small organization in the first few years, you should be almost exclusively hunting antelopes, not mice.
I couldn’t agree more.
But I’d add one thing. There are also some magic mice out there. Magic mice are actually antelope hunters themselves, and if you can catch the mice, the mice will hunt antelopes for you.
Don’t focus just on those who can write you the big check. Focus also on those people who have access to those who can write you the big check and go sell them on your organization and turn them into champions for you. But be clear: if the strategy is to hunt magic mice and you think you have one, don’t stop at just getting a donation, or else the strategy isn’t being followed.
The number one way to transform your organization financially is to engage people one on one and to invite them to champion your organization.
Something happens in a one-on-one conversation that doesn’t happen at events and certainly not via mail or phone.
What happens isn’t just that you as an individual form a personal relationship with the giver, although that certainly helps.
It’s that the giver is asked to take personal responsibility and not collective responsibility.
It’s not about how all these people in the room can help. It’s about how you can help.
I recall studies done in the 1970s and 1980s that focused on personal versus collective responsibility in a different context. The scientists had people fake epileptic seizures in public places to see who would help. The interesting thing is you were more likely to get help if you had the seizure when one person was there to observe than you were if several people observed.
This is contrary to what most people would predict. But it rings true upon further reflection. When something happens and other people are around, you tend to look around to see how they’re responding. If everyone else is just looking around, you may think: I guess it’s not my problem. But if there’s nobody to look at, you know it’s about you, and you alone.
*When you’re asked to give and the ask is clearly about you, that’s when people tend to step up and make larger donations.
(Incidentally, the scientists advise that to avoid this trap if you’re having some health crisis in public and there’s several people there, single out one in any way you can to ask them as an individual for help).
So stop putting your time into the next great event and banking on social media revolutionizing your organization. If you want to grow, and grow quickly — get out and meet with more people and invite them to take responsibility.
An organization has done a LOT of fundraising, but has never had a real development plan, either short or long-term.
One set of consultants advised them to create a three-year development plan prior to doing a one-year plan. How do you know what you want to accomplish in year one unless you know the long-term plan?
But my response is: How do you know what your long-term real capacity is until you do a one-year plan, stick with it, and evaluate it. So I’m pushing them to do a one-year plan and write a 3 year plan in about a year.
What do you think?
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