Make the last week of 2009 the most important week of 2010

I’d like a show of hands from all of the fundraisers out there who didn’t miss a deadline or blow an opportunity in 2009.

That’s funny, I’m not seeing a lot of hands. Maybe I should install Skype or something on my computer.

Anyway, for those of you who did raise your hands: thank you. You probably don’t need to read the rest of this post.

Now for the rest of you.

So what was it? Did you receive the dreaded polite phone call from a program officer asking about an errant final grant report? Did you blanch when your boss asked about the status of a major donor’s annual gift? Did you realize that the birthday for Mr. Friskers, your board chair’s cat, has come and gone and you forgot to send a card again?

Did you lose a lot of sleep worrying about all of the above?

Consider using this week (or if you’re on holiday, make it next week), to set up a tickler system using Outlook Tasks.

The first step is to gather all of your real and self-imposed deadlines in one place, right now.  I’m talking about the anniversary dates of all your 2009 asks (assuming they were on time – if you were late in 2009, schedule them earlier in 2010), the dates of your unexpected gifts (if you had any), the grant deadlines you are currently anticipating, report deadlines (whether mandated by a funder or appropriate as good stewardship), invitation mailing dates, birthdays or other personal milestones you’ll want to acknowledge, etc. etc. etc.  Take some time to gather everything.

The second step is to create 12 new categories in Outlook Tasks.  One for each month of the year.  Name them like this: “01-2010 January 2010” so that they’ll appear in chronological order when you view your tasks by category.  Then populate each of these categories with your deadlines, leaving yourself plenty of cushion.

Sound complicated?  It is!  But don’t worry, I’ve got detailed instructions on my website (click on Outlook Development Office Task Master).  You can download it for free.  And you don’t even have to register.

Shoot me an email at matt@tacticalfundraising.com if you have questions -- and please forward this resource to a friend.

Competition is Good

There was a nice piece by Becky Graninger at Donor Power Blog recently about how there should be more cooperation among nonprofits.

Becky’s position is unassailable and I agree completely.

But…

I also believe that nonprofits should be more competitive with one another.

The competition, of course, should be fair and high minded.  I never disparage other nonprofits, and unless another group is doing something truly egregious, I don’t think anyone ever should.

But that doesn’t mean we can’t try to outdo one another, even while we continue to work together wherever possible.

The competition should extend to all elements of what we do – not only fundraising (my favorite, of course), but also service provision, marketing, transparency of our finances, etc.

A few years ago, I had the pleasure of attending a multi-day workshop on strategy conducted by two Stanford Business School professors.  (Actually, the first day – when we talked about business – was the most pleasurable.  Once we started to talk about nonprofits, which the instructors seemed to know only in theory, I got pretty frustrated.) 

What was most exciting to me was learning about how businesses, at least ideally, move forward by assessing their position among their competitors, figure out their competitive advantages, and then allocate their resources accordingly.

In other words, they are driven by their desire to beat the other guys.  It strikes me that that’s a pretty basic human impulse.  It explains why we watch the Olympics, professional sports, American Idol and Dancing with the Stars.  (It doesn’t explain why I watch the Jets, but that’s another story.)

We in the nonprofit world, on the other hand, don’t really think about beating the other guy.  The very suggestion seems a little vulgar. 

But I think we should.  As long as the competition remains fair and constructive, it will force us to be better.

Here’s a concrete example.  As virtually everyone in the nonprofit world knows, Chase is running a Facebook contest through which it will distribute a few million dollars.    (This contest has encountered some controversy, which is considered intelligently in a recent posting on Beth's Blog.)

Whatever its shortcomings, I think it was pretty exciting that hundreds of thousands of charities were engaged in the first round of a fun and open (sort of) competition for some significant cash.

For those of us who didn’t make it to the final 100, we’ve learned that we have room for improvement when it comes to mobilizing our online supporters.  And there’s no hiding behind bromides about how people don’t like to use social media for philanthropy, since 100 organizations are $25,000 richer thanks to the quality and size of their contact lists, their creativity and their aggressiveness.

I think every nonprofit organization with a big enough budget to have its own Website should be disappointed to have lost that competition, and should be figuring out how to expand its online reach exponentially.

Because winning is more fun.

Yeah, Who’s Asking? Or, How Nonprofits Can be More Like For-Profits, Part the Second

Most nonprofits, from what I’ve seen, exist in the state that Thoreau called “quiet desperation.”  Or maybe James Thurber’s noisy desperation would be more accurate.  Anyhow, we’re desperate.  We lurch from anxiety to crisis and back, with occasional moments of temporary relief.

That’s our culture.  It’s written into the very word we use to define ourselves: nonprofit.  We cover all sorts of activities, from health to education to social services to environmental issues to the arts and many other realms of human experience.  The one thing we have in common is that we have chosen to engage in a brutal annual battle that by definition must result each year in either a loss or a tie.  This is the life we’ve chosen.

Well, it seems to me that we’ve made an implicit deal with ourselves: we’ll struggle along without any hope of profiting, organizationally or personally, from our labors as long as no one looks too closely at our results.

When I speak of results, by the way, I’m not talking about programs.  There’s an extensive literature on outcome-based program evaluation, and I’m by no means pretending to be a thought leader in that arena.

And I'm not talking only about fundraising.  I’m talking instead about all the administrative component of our organizations:  fundraising, earned income, worker productivity, marketing, human resources, etc.

In our world, we are usually permitted to feel that as long as we’re working hard, struggling and suffering, producing outputs and avoiding improprieties, it would be inappropriate to challenge our effectiveness.

We get points for going without sleep or answering three-week old emails at 2 am because it proves how dedicated and overwhelmed we are.  We justify ourselves by how hard we work and by our successes, rather than by how smart we work and by our results in comparison with reasonable but ambitious expectations. 

So I’m saying: let’s bring rationality to the nonprofit world.  Let’s institute the process of establishing numerical goals for all of the important thing we do and then analyzing how well we did.  I think our organizations would flourish.  And I think we would find our jobs more satisfying, since we’d have justification for eliminating those tasks we intuit are a waste of time and energy.

And perhaps most important, this accountability process should reach up to the board room.  So maybe some of those crazy organization directors we’ve all encountered, who seem to get by on a combination of intimidation and charm while their organizations founder, would finally have to answer for their behavior.  Wouldn’t that make it all worthwhile? 

It is hard for us to develop these systems because there’s so little precedent for doing so.  We don’t learn them in school and we don’t see them in action when we first get into the industry.  

And unlike for-profits, there is no group of shareholders who make or lose money based on our results.  So we don’t have these systems imposed on us from the top down.

Samuel Johnson wrote that "The prospect of the gallows concentrates a man's mind wonderfully.”  I think the same could be said about the prospect of missing your numbers and having to explain why in public.

Taking care of business.

There’s a lot of talk in the nonprofit trade papers and blogs about whether nonprofits should behave more like for-profit businesses.  I’m fascinated by this question, especially as it applies to fundraising.

What’s this conversation really about?

I don’t think it should be about behaving in a more “corporate” manner -- wearing better suits and mandating money-oriented results in a top-down, heavy handed manner. (Though personally I would love some better suits.)

And I agree with those who argue that there are plenty of dysfunctional for-profit corporations out there that are more cautionary tale than role model. We sure don’t need more autocratic executives, bureaucratic decision-making or ruthless (and often unwarranted or counter-productive) headcount reductions.

And the point shouldn’t be to make bottom line profit our primary goal. That, obviously, doesn’t make sense if you’re a nonprofit.

But I’m convinced that there are at least three areas in which nonprofits would benefit from adapting the habits of successful, well-managed for-profit businesses: 1) Quantifiable evaluation of success; 2) Accountability; and 3) Competition.

From my experience, these ideas are not well integrated into nonprofit management practice. We need to change that.

First let’s look at “quantifiable evaluation of success.”

To me, that means setting numerical goals and then continuously assessing how we are doing in terms of them.

In a fundraising office, that would mean creating a set of ambitious but achievable goals for each fundraising area at the beginning of each fiscal year and then breaking those goals down into quarterly and/or monthly and/or weekly milestones. 

These goals shouldn’t only cover money raised. They might also cover issues like timeliness of acknowledgement letters, stewardship touches, requests made, prospects identified, networking events attended, etc.

And then the manager and his or her direct reports need to meet every week (or two weeks or month, perhaps) to look at the results and assess how things are going.

For many, probably most, development people, that would radically change the way they do business. 

But it would benefit everyone. The staffer doing the reporting can quantify all of his or her hard work and demonstrate what makes sense and what is a waste of time. The manager gets solid data to use for his or her own prioritization, and to report to his or her own boss and/or the board. 

We move from managing by intuition and anxiety to managing by plan and execution.

How many development directors are doing this already? That’s a real question: if you’ve seen this in action, let me know.

I’ll continue with all of this in my next posting.

What do you mean, tactical?

Why, you may ask, did I name my company "Tactical" Fundraising?


Because I've noticed that usually fundraising instruction focuses on issues that are too vague or philosophical for people just starting out.


New fundraisers are typically advised to do things like focus on their missions, understand the psychology of their donors and treat the fundraising process in terms of relationships, rather than transactions.


(All of which I agree with, by the way.)


But I remember being a brand new fundraiser 20 years ago.


And I remember getting advice like that.  And I remember thinking to myself: that sounds great, but what am I supposed to do to get people to give me money?


That's what this blog and my training company are about. The basic tactics of fundraising.  How to write the letters, set up the request meetings, make the asks, pitch the corporate benefits, hire and manage the staff, run the membership program, meet with board members, set projections, measure success, etc. etc. etc.


Because the philosophical and psychological dimensions of fundraising mean nothing if you don't know the tools of the trade.


Don't you agree?

I've just launched my Website -- www.tacticalfundraising.com -- and now I'm writing a blog. I'm sitting at the kitchen table in my New York City apartment and my wife is talking to my mother-in-law on the phone. Social networking is glamorous.

I thought I'd be rich and famous by now, but instead I'm a professional fundraiser earning additional income by teaching other people to be successful fundraisers.

But that's okay. Because I love fundraising. And I love teaching. And I love additional income. (I really need a bigger apartment with some separate office space.)

On my blog I'll be offering fundraising tips, sharing insights, posting reactions to trends and other blogs, etc. On my Website I'll be offering free fundraising tools and promoting my weekend fundraising intensives. (My next one will be from March 26-28 in New York City.)

So please stay tuned.

Thanks.

Matt