Goodbye to All This

Let's face it.  I've lost interest in this Blog.

I started this process a little over a year ago in order to promote my fundraising workshop.  It was my short term hope that my workshop would put some extra cash in my pocket.  It was my longer term dream that I would build an international fundraising training empire and amass the kind of wealth that allows you to drive Cadillac convertibles and wear flagrantly false toupes.  (Even if you have a full head of hair.)

I dared to dream these dreams because of the reportedly dizzying power of social media to transform one's idea into a global phenomenon overnight.

Needless to say, none of it came true.  The workshop lost money, I didn't build an empire, and I never seemed to gather much of a following for my Blog.  A few times it got picked up by other blogs or email newsletters with significant followings, including the excellent You've Cott Mail, and on those days my readership would spike into the triple digits.

Anyway, I've learned two primary lessons along the way which I'd like to share with anyone who happens to read this:

1) Social media is pretty hard.  The competition is enormous and it's tough to rise above the noise.  Like everything else in life, you have to grind away (or get very lucky) to have an impact.
2) There are endless lessons to learn in fundraising -- I feel that I'm forever reaching deeper levels of understanding.  But after a while, in my opinion, the kinds of things people like me write about fundraising on blogs start to feel worn out.

I had been toying with the idea of relaunching this effort.  But just recently I got a great, exciting, challenging new job: I'm going to be the Vice President of Development at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.  That will require my full attention, and so this seems like the right time to sign off.

I'm going to unplug the blog (can one do that?) and my Website.  But feel free to drop me a line if you want to get in touch or have any questions.

Thanks for reading.

Best,

Matt

My goodness -- did I fall asleep?

Well, I thought I would stop blogging for a week or two (which turned into a month or two) just for the perverse thrill of being inundated by calls and emails from terrified readers. Sort of like getting to go to your own funeral.

But apparently those emails and calls all went into some extremely effective spam killer in my computer's security system, because I never received even one of them. So to all of you who have been trying relentlessly to get in touch with me, I offer my humblest apologies.

And I guess I owe you an explanation.

My excuse is that my family recently moved from Brooklyn to the suburbs of New Jersey, and between packing and unpacking (and work and my kids), I haven't had much time for anything.

But I'm back now. So please, take heart. The long summer of my absence is finally over.

Here in my new home state, there's news which would send a chill down any fundraiser's spine. My new state, apparently, lost hundreds of millions of dollars in education funds because someone made a mistake filling out an application form.

Let's focus, for a moment, on the version of the story that I heard initially: some other-than-meticulous grant writer put the wrong column of numbers in an application for "Race to the Top" funding. The federal government, unwilling to bend in its bureaucratic regulations, refused to allow a simple correction to be made.

I had two reactions when I first heard that story. First, I thought of all the little mistakes and typos I've made, or failed to catch, on the zillions of proposals I've submitted over the last 20 years. [Note to future prospective employers (if I'm ever looking for a job again): Kidding! I'm just making that up for the sake of my readers.]

The idea that a screw up by me or one of my staff could lead to the loss of hundreds of millions of dollars (or even hundreds of dollars) is terrifying.

But I was also struck by the absurdity of such a situation. After all, shouldn't the decision of how to appropriate federal monies -- money that could have a profound effect on the lives of countless kids --be determined by underlying merit, and not by who has the most careful proposal writer on staff?

Recent news reports, however, make the issue more cloudy. Perhaps the New Jersey officials were given an opportunity to make the correction and failed to do so. And apparently they opted out of a grant training session -- which all of the ten winners opted into.

What's the point?

Certainly it's a cautionary tale about being careful with applications. And about avoiding hubris.

But also, when you look deeper into the story, you begin to see how the carelessness of the applicant seems to reflect a kind of cynicism about the goals of the program.

And there's no quality more undermining for a fundraiser than cynicism.

Sometime a Paradox

A  few months ago, I was driving up the West Side Highway in a car teeming with discontented children (alright, there were only two of them), when we hit heavy traffic.  Needless to say, we were running late, anxiety was high and the relentless sound of childish whining was unbearable (and that was just me).

After crawling for what seemed like hours, I saw the problem: a half-marathon was underway.

We were hitting the tail end of it.  The winner had probably passed the finish line 30 minutes earlier.  But there were still hundreds, thousands of people running toward the finish line.  As we crawled up the highway, the parade became attenuated and the remaining participants -- the stragglers -- looked increasingly exhausted.  Yet it went on and on.

The sheer volume of people up early on a Saturday morning was astonishing.

And it occurred to me that it is probably easier to recruit thousands of people to do something hard -- run 13 miles, say -- than it would be to get them to do something easy.  That's the always-surprising paradox: people love challenges.  We tend to get bored by experiences that are easy and embrace the ones that are hard.

I thought of that recently during a friendly debate among some colleagues about board giving.

My colleague was arguing that setting a specific high financial obligation for new trustees would turn those new trustees off.

I disagree. In fact, the challenge is part of the attraction.  

Smart, well adjusted, ambitious young people want to go to a school that will make them work hard in order to learn a lot (and then get good jobs).  Serious athletes want to compete against the best.  Mountain climbers want to scale mountains, not escalators.  (I prefer escalators, but I digress.)

I think board members, at least the ones we really want on our team, are likely to feel the same about their financial participation.  They want to know that the expectation of them is serious and significant -- so it is an accomplishment when they achieve it.

I think we make a serious error when we intentionally avoid presenting our board members with a clear expectation of what to give.  It puts an undue burden on them as they try to figure out how to avoid cheapness on one side and ostentation on the other, and it sends the message that there is nothing particularly exclusive about the club they just joined.

In a variation on the Groucho Marx joke, many of them wouldn't want to join a club that would have them as a member even if they didn't make a contribution.  Or would have the guy sitting next to them who hasn't given much of anything.  No one wants to be the only person chipping in for the pizza.  If there is no stated giving requirement, then every board member has to worry that they are over paying in relation to their peers.

Let's all do our board members a favor: tell them, in writing, what we expect them to pay.  It's the least we can do.

Do You Know What Puffery Means?

I didn't.  But now I do.  I just read about it in the Fundraising Detective blog.

Puffery refers to the perfectly legal way that companies brag about their products, making claims that are exaggerated but not provably false (think "coldest beer in Brooklyn" or "best pizza in Chicago").

There are a few fascinating things about puffery.

First of all, it's legal because it is generally assumed that no one really believes it.

But if no one believes is, you may ask, then what is the point of saying it?

The point is, I would guess, that even if the prospective buyer doesn't exactly believe it, he or she still believes that something like it must be true.  Or at least believes that the seller is very enthusiastic and confident about the product.  I conjecture that the enthusiasm and confidence itself is the message.  (If you want to explore a  brilliant gloss on this topic by one of my intellectual heroes, Northrop Frye, read The Vocation of Eloquence chapter of The Educated Imagination.)

Second, it is only effective on people who do not consider themselves experts on the subject.

Which brings me back to fundraising.

I often read pieces by fundraising experts about the importance of avoiding dry statistics and complex logic in fundraising writing, and instead using stories and appealing to emotions.

And I'm sure that's true -- for direct mail.  But it strikes me as dead wrong in foundation grant proposals.

Because when we're reading direct mail pieces, we want to believe that an act of generosity on our part will have a profound impact on an urgent problem.  Just as we want to believe that the pizza we're about to eat is the best in Chicago, or the shampoo we're about to buy is going to make us look like fashion models.  We are, to paraphrase Frye, thinking with our imaginations.  We live much of our lives in a state of imagination; if we didn't, life might be unbearable.

But sometimes we know we must suspend our imaginations to make important decisions.  We'll pull off the highway because we read a sign that says "best barbecue in Tennessee," but we won't stake our life savings on an email that promises the "investment opportunity of a lifetime."

And the foundation program officer, who is paid to direct grants to the most effective possible use, won't be swayed by your attempts to bring tears to her eyes.  She is an expert in what she does and your puffery will likely leave her cold.  She want facts.

At least while she's at work.  After pouring over proposals all day I'm sure she'll head to that new bar she passed by recently -- you know, the one with the big sign that says "Best Martinis in Manhattan."

Fundraising vs. Begging

I had a job once as a canvass director.  Which means it was my job to co-run an office of (mostly) young people who went out door to door asking for money.

A guy I worked with told me that every day when he went to work, his roommate would say: "Good luck with the begging today."

Sometimes, in our darkest hours, we fundraisers do feel like impoverished mendicants.

But that feeling should be a warning system: if it feels like begging, we're doing something wrong.

Fundraising is most successful, and fun and satisfying, when we feel that we're providing something valuable in exchange for our donors' dollars.

Sometimes the "something valuable" is a good or a service.  Like great theater tickets or curator-led private viewings or opportunities to meet brilliant leaders in a field of interest.  The big players in the nonprofit cultural world provide those privileges in abundance, and it plays a big part in their fundraising strategy.  We smaller guys need to figure out how to replicate that formula in a manageable but meaningful way.

For non-arts organizations, the "something valuable" might just be the opportunity to be involved in something important and exciting.  The opportunity to make a real and significant difference in the lives of people who need help, or to get a school built, or to provide potable water to a village that needs it desperately.

Or perhaps there are opportunities to partner with organizations that will enable you to provide special benefits for your donors.

My point is: innovation and bold creativity can go a long way in terms of transforming our asks from unpleasant obligations to stimulating opportunities in the minds of our prospects.

Fundraising is dreary and difficult when we're doing nothing particularly exciting or important and providing our donors with uninspired gratitude in return.

The first step, I remind myself continuously, is figuring out how to make ourselves, and then our donors, excited about the project and the ask.  Sometimes that means expanding the project and increasing the goal.  I tend to think that it's easier to raise a million dollars for a fabulous project than a half million for a mediocre one.

With the right "something valuable" in hand, the fundraising challenge may not be easy, but it won't feel like begging either.

The Shock of the Obvious

Today I went to the final session of the Carnegie Corporation/Kennedy Center Arts Management Initiative.

I found it quite fascinating, although I think many people were annoyed by this one guy who kept raising his hand to ask questions.  (Okay I admit it, it was me.)

There was a tremendous amount covered, but if you know Michael Kaiser's spiel, none of it will be shocking.  Kaiser essentially urges arts organizations to plan exciting programming way in advance (five years), market their work aggressively, build a family of fans and supporters, and repeat.  He is adamant, sometimes to the point of controversy, that arts organizations undermine themselves when they chip away at programming and marketing to save money.

But today, I realized what is special about a leader like Michael Kaiser -- or Reynold Levy or Karen Hopkins, for that matter.

In each case, these people have two special qualities, each of which is rare in its own right.

The first is fearless imagination.  

It takes courage to be imaginative.  Right after we have a bold imaginative thought (I want to be the President of the United States, I want to get Paul McCartney to play at my benefit concert, I want to launch a $10 million fundraising campaign), most of us hear a little voice in our head that says: you are crazy.  You are not the kind of person/organization to which such grand and glorious things happen.  If you tell people this idea, they will laugh at you.  If you try this you will fail and be scorned.  

But the Michael Kaisers of the world don't hear that voice.  Or maybe they hear it and ignore it.

Because they seem to be relentlessly audacious.  They are constantly surprising us with the grandiosity of their plans.  International collaborations involving hundreds of people.  Productions that cost millions and transform spaces.  

And if you inquire about the origin of the ideas, you'll find they often start with  an almost childlike enthusiasm leading to the question: why not?

But that's just the first quality.

The second quality, when combined with the first, is devastatingly powerful.

They execute relentlessly.

Most of the world's imaginative ideas are voiced over drinks and dissipate with the buzz of the alcohol.

But Michael Kaiser, as you'll know if you hear him speak (and he speaks widely -- you can listen to him here) meets with his marketing and development vice presidents every day (I'm not sure if that includes weekends) beginning at 7 am.

And they keep talking -- about implementation and adjustment of plans -- all day long.  

The point isn't to hero-worship Michael Kaiser or the others, but to be candid about why many of us in the nonprofit world bemoan the difficulty of raising money and surviving.

In the spirit of that candor, we must admit that standard operating procedure is to program cautiously and then manage haphazardly.

We're not committing ourselves to outrageously bold ideas.  And we're not arriving at the office at 7 am to hammer out the endless details to pull it off.  

So of course life is hard.

(My emphasis on the early morning issue, by the way, is just to illustrate the intensity of the process -- the point is the relentless commitment to the management of small details, no matter when you start.)

I can't prove it, but I think if we could all become more like Michael and Reynold and Karen, whether as leaders of organizations or trustees or development directors, we would all have more success.  Because "the pie" would just get bigger as more people got excited about all the amazing new things going on in the nonprofit world.

 

I'm at my computer now. Where does the food come out?

When this whole Internet thing started (or maybe ten years later, when the news finally reached me), I remember people saying that soon we'd be getting food through our computers.

I recall wondering if that meant that the food would actually come out of the computer. Like maybe binary code would somehow be transmogrified into food. Or perhaps we wouldn't need to eat at all -- the nourishment would just be biochemically programmed into our bodies.  All of which seemed horribly alienating. (Full disclosure: I love food.)

I realize that in retrospect my confusion seems unnervingly idiotic. But I recollect that others were equally perplexed. We knew computers were somehow going to revolutionize the world, but we couldn't imagine what that meant.

With a mixture of relief and disappointment, I've since apprehended that computers will not fundamentally change my experience as a human being.  So far they've just made it faster and easier to produce, transmit and access information.  Ultimately, it all gets translated back into familiar human experience.

Facebook, for example, feels like I'm stepping into a party (sans food and drink) every time I log on. Being able to access a party of lots of old friends and co-workers and half-remembered schoolmates is indeed different from life before Facebook. But on the other hand, I've been to parties before.

Anyway, all of these reflections are prompted by my reading of Janet Levine's latest Too Busy to Fundraise Blog post.

I can relate to Janet's bouts of exhaustion and discouragement in relation to the incessant chatter about nonprofits and social media. All of the compulsion to master Twitter and LinkedIn, not to mention Facebook and Blogging, and online fundraising opportunities like ChipIn or Karma 411, can be overwhelming.

But my feeling is that no matter how well we master this new world, we're never going to get pizza slices from our computer.

And, more to the point, I don't think we're ever going to transcend the fundamental human desire for personal interaction.

Just as watching TV doesn't make us lose the joy of seeing live performance or attending church or going to parties and restaurants, online fundraising won't replace one-on-one personal fundraising. It's just a new, and admittedly exciting, additional option.

We owe it to ourselves to learn all we can about these often fun and powerful tools.  But at the same time, we should accept that some of us, based on some permutation of personal inclination and organizational focus, will not likely incorporate online fundraising into our development strategy. Or will try and not have great results.

Because there are only so many hours in the day, and for some people, it's all just too hard to learn, and perhaps too poor a fit.  If you abandon your personal relationships, which you understand and which have meaning for you, in favor of crowd-sourced, media rich online giving efforts, which are baffling to you, you're going to look like a middle aged guy with a bad combover at a Radiohead concert, trying to dance your way over to an intensely ironic 25-year-old in a Sex Pistols t-shirt. Metaphorically speaking, you won't go home with the girl.  (More full disclosure: I've never actually listened to Radiohead.  It was the only cool contemporary group I could think of.  I just looked in Wikipedia and saw they started in 1985.)

Ideally, you'll figure out how to do it all.  Individually cultivated gifts and online efforts and grants and sponsorships and board development and planned giving and government grants and earned revenue initiatives and lots of other stuff. Whatever you can manage and whatever works.

Less ideally, you'll prioritize what works best for you.

Social media is another tool in the arsenal, not the war to end all wars.

At my fundraising workshop last weekend, I quipped that if the person in charge of your social media strategy needs to buy the book "Facebook for Dummies," you're probably not going to have much success.  (Final full disclosure: No one at the workshop laughed.  I hope someone reading this thinks it's funny.)

Call Me Naive

A few weeks ago, a colleague and I were having a friendly disagreement about a donor.

He argued that this donor's philanthropic priorities were carefully calculated to promote his professional ambitions.

I said I thought the donor was just giving money to the things he cares about.

And it occurred to me that I'm pretty naive by nature.

It also occurred to that to be a fundraiser, one has to be a bit naive.

We have to be naive because we have nothing to gain by being cynical.

Cynicism, of course, is tempting.  (Especially for a naturally sarcastic person like me.)  What's great about being cynical is that you run very little risk of being embarrassed.

Imagine someone offers you a great-sounding deal and you have to guess whether they are being nice or trying to rip you off.

If you guess they are trying to rip you off, and you're right, it shows you are worldly and smart.  If you're wrong -- well, it just means that this was an exception to the rule.

Now imagine you guessed they were just being nice.  If you were right, you got lucky.  If you were wrong, you're an idiot with terrible judgment.

That kind of skepticism probably serves people very well in a wide range of professions.

But it doesn't help us fundraisers.

Because we have nothing to gain by guessing people aren't going to respond to our appeals, attend our dinners, join our membership programs, say yes to our major gift requests, approve our proposals or sponsor our events.  It just makes us hesitate to ask them.  And the less we ask, the less we get.

And so we sally forth with slightly ridiculous expressions of wonderment on our faces, expecting acts of selfless altruism from everyone we encounter, impassively disregarding waves of counter-evidence and feeling enormous satisfaction each time we are right.

The Fundraiser's Guide to Serenity

I haven't posted in a week.

Why? Because I've been busy promoting my fundraising workshop at Lincoln Center at the end of March.

I'm very excited about the workshop. But there is one fundamental issue connected to it that makes me a little uneasy. 

The truth is: some organizations won't succeed with their fundraising efforts, no matter how hard and smart their development staff work.

In my workshops, I emphasize the "tactics" of fundraising. (Hence the name of my training company.) I teach the fundamentals of grantwriting, corporate sponsorships, board development, membership and annual giving, special events, etc. I intentionally focus on those dynamics within the direct control of the fundraiser.

But the truth is: some dynamics are out of our control.

The serenity prayer advises us to accept the things we cannot change and to have the courage to change the things we can.

For development professionals, I think "accepting the things we cannot change" is the path to insanity, not serenity. If you choose to stay at an organization that does second-rate (or tenth-rate) work, alienates natural partners, mismanages finances, etc., you'll need a truckload of pharmaceuticals to experience anything like serenity.

People often ask me how I came to work at El Museo del Barrio.  I'm not Latino.  I don't speak Spanish. And until I started there, I didn't know the first thing about Latino or Latin American art. (Now I do know the first thing.  But my colleagues might dispute that I know the second or third thing.)

Why did I go there, and why do I stay there?  Because I need to work at an arts organization that does excellent work; that demonstrates a sincere commitment to its staff, audience and community; and that wants to succeed.  El Museo is all of that.

When I meet fundraisers who work for self-destructive tyrants, or at organizations that just don't do anything terribly important or exciting, I know that they will be very limited in their success until and unless they move on with their careers.

I usually start my courses by sharing this bitter truth with fundraisers. I tell them to take a hard look at their organizations and determine whether the elements necessary for success exist for them.

But maybe I should start with the fundraiser's serenity prayer instead: Give me the serenity to go forth boldly with my fundraising plan as long as I'm raising money for a cause that deserves it, the courage to find a new job if my organization doesn't deserve it, and enough self respect to admit there's a difference.

Don't Be Afraid to Tell Me What You Want

For most of us Development Directors, the selection of a new Executive Director is probably the single most important factor in whether or not we will enjoy and succeed at our jobs, or struggle in misery.

At El Museo del Barrio, where I work, Julian Zugazagoitia has just announced that he will be leaving his position to become the Director and CEO of the Nelson-Atkins Museum in Kansas City. I will miss Julian profoundly, both personally and professionally.

Fortunately, El Museo is in a very strong position -- the staff is talented and motivated, and the board is unified and clear headed. I am very confident that the board will choose an effective leader to build on Julian's excellent tenure.

Still, this transition has caused me to reflect on what we Development Directors want from an Executive Director/CEO. Here are my top five priorities -- I'd love to hear yours:

1) The Director must be passionate about a vision and able to communicate that vision in a way that gets people excited. One of my favorite quotations is "Make no little plans. They have no magic to stir men's blood." The Director must have that kind of fire in his or her belly -- even if it means continuously cutting through the cynicism and doubts of others.

2) The Director should be a manager, but not a micro-manager. Ideally, the Director should carefully track the organization's goals and hold direct reports accountable for delivering on their responsibilities. But frankly, if I had to choose between a micro-manager and a space cadet, I'd take the space cadet.  A few strong deputies can fill in for a charismatic but unfocused boss.  But micromanagement is a disease that will decimate a nonprofit. (And it is epidemic.)

3) The Director should be someone who, when in doubt, says "yes."   

4) The Director should be someone who knows how to make decisions. Bad decisions are usually better than no decisions. Like micromanagement, the inability to make a decision renders your staff impotent.  

5) The Director should love funders and fundraising. The four points above are all crucial to the success of a fundraising program. But just as crucial, the Director needs to respect his or her funders as partners, and should never perceive them as necessary evils. The Director must be eager to share plans with these stakeholders and ready to listen to their input. (And should take every possible meeting and arrive on time and well prepared.)

Those are my top five. What are yours?

Life Lessons

I've been asked to fill out a questionnaire for an interview with Fundraising Success Magazine, in follow up to the Fundraising Star piece.  I'm quite flattered.

Some of the questions are purely factual and some are very fundraising focused. But a few others are a bit more expansive.

The hardest one for me to answer is the final one: "Greatest Lesson Ever Learned."

I've spent a fair amount of time pondering that in the last day or two. Frankly, I'm not sure I've learned much in my life.

So I'd like try a few life lessons out on you, dear reader, and ask you to let me know which one seems most profound. None are about fundraising, but could perhaps serve as analogies of some kind.

Let's take them in chronological order.

The first one that comes to mind is the time I was going door to door in my neighborhood selling candy for my synagogue. (Look at that, fundraising after all.) I was around 13. A small fleet of young hoodlums, in my memory there were about 63 of them but the real number might be closer to five, passed by me on their bikes. One of them, the leader of the group, called out to me to ask if I was Jewish. When I said yes, he started to sing Havah Nagilah and all his friends laughed derisively. Having heard all my life that if you stand up to a bully he will immediately back down, I called out to him, in an admittedly tremulous voice, "Why, you want to make something out of it?"  (I really did use that phrase.) And to my irritation, he immediately -- and I mean without even a shadow of hesitation or ambivalence -- jumped off his bike and ran straight at me.  Lesson learned: If you are a chubby kid with glasses and you stand up to a bully, he will probably jump off his bike and start punching you. Secondary lesson learned: A lot of what grown ups tell you is a load of crap.

The second one is less comical and more melodramatic. It concerns the famous Miracle on Ice of the 1980 Olympics. (Summary: a rag tag team of young American amateurs beat the Soviet Union and Finland to win the gold medal. You can read about it here, if you're interested.) Anyway, what I find so instructive about that victory is this: after the U.S. team had defied all expectations to beat five teams in a row, every sportscaster in the world (as I recall) was saying, more or less: well that was an amazing run, but there is zero, zero chance these U.S. amateurs can beat the Soviet team. It isn't a long shot, it's impossible.  Don't even hope they win, because that would be pointless. They can't win.  But I guess the U.S. team didn't accept that, because as you either know or have guessed, they did win (and then beat Finland and won the gold). Now, I wasn't much of a hockey fan then (and still am not), but I was an anguished romantic who always seemed to be making emotionally charged, idealistic arguments and having them disputed by the cynics all around me.  And when the U.S. team won that gold medal I said to myself: for the rest of my life I'll know that when someone says something is simply too far fetched and cannot happen, it isn't true. Lesson learned: Sometimes highly improbable things do come true, so never give up hope. Secondary lesson learned: A lot of what grown ups tell you is a load of crap.

The third one took place about 18 months later, when I spent a summer in an advanced placement program at Cornell University. It was July 4 and a bunch of us -- three or four nerdy, nervous guys and one pretty girl -- walked somewhere to see some fireworks. The girl's name was Sue, actually, and she was talking quite a bit about some guy (I don't remember his name, or the name of anyone else in the story, except for the pretty girl) who she like, totally couldn't stand. (People didn't really say "like, totally" back then, but you get the idea.) I knew who she meant -- he was an athletic, cocky, loud kind of guy. Let's call him Patrick. And then, in what seemed to be a cosmic coincidence, that very guy, let's-call-him-Patrick, suddenly appeared.  And while we all sort of trailed behind Sue, let's-call-him-Patrick walked right alongside her. And he was sort of teasing her and bumping into her a little. Can you imagine? I felt sorry for both of them -- her, because she had to put up with this guy she like totally couldn't stand, and him because any minute now she was going to humiliate him and tell him to get lost. When we got to the field to view the fireworks, let's-call-him-Patrick sat right next to her.  Couldn't he read her signals? She kept pushing him and yelling things like "shut up" and "you're such a jerk" -- I mean, she was laughing to be nice, but we knew she couldn't stand him.  So we all sat there, somewhat enjoying the spectacle of Patrick's imminent demise. And then, I probably don't need to tell you, the next thing we knew they were making out with each other. Making out! With each other!  I mean, she'd just been telling us that she especially disliked him. I'll tell you something: I was surprised. Lesson learned: In general (and in fundraising), it is better to be self-assured, goal oriented and unafraid than timid, nerdy and passive. Secondary lesson learned: People don't always know what they really want, and you could go crazy trying to figure it out.  Sometimes it's better just to offer them what you have and see if they get used to it.

Overall lesson: You should pursue your greatest dreams, hopes and desires, because anything is possible.  But you'd better be smart and aggressive, or you will probably just blow it.

I Am Truly Humbled

Well, the big day has arrived.  The new issue of Fundraising Success magazine finally appeared in my mailbox, and there I am, right on page 20: a "Fundraising Star."

I always find it funny when someone gets a big award and claims to be humbled. What does that mean? Isn't everyone who wins an Oscar or a Nobel Prize really the opposite of humble? Aren't they all proud, exalted and vainglorious?

Well, believe it or not, I am truly humbled.

Two reasons:

1) Even though this news has gone out via email to the Fundraising Success email list at least once, and maybe twice, and has now been mailed across the country in a glossy print publication, I haven't exactly been overwhelmed by congratulatory telegrams. (In other words, I haven't heard a peep from anyone.)

2) I am well aware that every fundraiser is only as good as his or her last fiscal year. I could screw up everything in the coming months. Then I'd really show you humble.

In fact, I'm a pretty superstitious guy, and I'm a little worried that I might start to relax a little.  Have you ever seen a decent fundraiser who looked relaxed?  We're a pretty nervous group.

So all I can do to maintain my aura of appropriate anxiety is keep in mind the lessons of three great nonprofit leaders with whom I've worked:

The first is from Karen Hopkins, my boss when I was at Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM).  Though I'd been a fundraiser for at least five years before I met Karen, she is my role model when it comes to development work.  And the main thing I learned from her is to follow every lead until it either turns into money or into nothing -- but don't give up until you reach a conclusion.  I'm convinced that we all leave piles of money on the metaphorical table because we get fatigued by the elusiveness of prospects or ambiguity of situations.  Karen doesn't, and I try not to.

The second is from Harvey Lichtenstein, who was Karen's boss for the first few years that she was mine.  Karen quotes Harvey as saying (I'm paraphrasing): "In life, things usually don't work out.  But sometime they do." That quote deserves a post by itself. Because not only do we have to try a lot of things to discover the strategies that succeed, but we have to put up with boldly trying lots of things that fail. In public.

The third is from Reynold Levy, President of Lincoln Center.  Reynold likes to say -- as you could read in his great fundraising book Yours for the Asking -- "In soliciting donors in writing, it is far better to be roughly right, brief and early than perfect, comprehensive and late." That simple adage, which far too many fastidious fundraisers ignore, should be the equivalent of the Hippocratic Oath for Development Directors.  And perhaps even more important, though harder to achieve: "It's the Board of Directors, Stupid."

So, I will once again remind myself to follow those great examples and do my best to live up to my brief moment of glory (hey, my mother is proud), and not go from truly humbled to completely humiliated.

On another note: if you've read this far, thank you!  If you or anyone you know could use a three-day course in fundraising, register for my Weekend Intensive at the end of March.  Use the discount code MattsBlog and save $250.

A Tale of Two Missions

Once in a while, in a nonprofit organization, someone will propose a creative idea for raising new earned revenue.


And often, someone else will point out that regardless of its business merits, that idea is just too far afield of the organization's mission. And that's not what the organization knows how to do.  So...forget it.


I find that reaction mystifying.


Imagine if baseball teams were so sanctimonious about their sport?  "No selling hot dogs -- that's not our mission.  We hit balls and run around bases."  Or movie theaters?  "We're here to show moving pictures with sound, not peddle exploded kernels of corn!"


I'm exaggerating a bit, of course.  Nonprofits will serve hot dogs and popcorn to make money.  We'll also run cafes and gifts shops.  Actually, we'll do all sorts of things, as long as they've been done a million times before by a million other organizations.


But when a new idea is suggested, many nonprofits will recoil in shock.  That's not our mission!


So I'd like to propose that we nonprofits hereby consider ourselves to have two missions: Our first mission is whatever it says in our mission statement.  Our second mission is to raise as much revenue as possible, in whatever way is legal and inoffensive, to support the first mission.


Here's an example:


Imagine you are an orchestra with a little concert hall, conveniently located in the middle of a functional but unused gas station, which your organization happens to own.  (In fact, it is a magical gas station: the underground tanks never run out, it's the only station within miles of a thruway off ramp, and it's environmentally harmless.)


But forget about all that for now.  After all, you need money to run your orchestra.  So you duly hire a development staff to write grants, seek sponsorships, build a membership group, hold a few fundraising events each year, etc.


But your community is not wealthy, and so you barely muddle through.  There's never enough money to pay the musicians what they deserve or fix the acoustics in the hall.  You consider transposing all the violin parts for tubas because tuba players don't need such high wages.  You are in a continuous state of under-funding.


Then one day a new staff member asks, meekly: "Why don't we try selling some gas from those pumps out front?"


And everyone shouts back: "Because that's not our mission!  We're an orchestra, not a gas station!"


I'm arguing that if you can better fulfill your mission of being an orchestra by also being a gas station, then you are obligated to be an orchestra and a gas station. 


If you're an orchestra, you expect your musical quality to rise to the highest possible level.  You strive for perfection.  Because that's your mission.


But we're often willing to overlook opportunities to leverage our assets for earned revenue because it's a distraction, or simply because it's off mission.  Carry advertising on our Website?  Rent our mailing lists?  Play weddings and bar mitzvahs?  Horrors!


Well I say, if it doesn't seriously harm your reputation or otherwise undermine your organization, then you are obligated to do everything you can think of, and to do it as well as any for-profit business could be expected to do it under the same circumstances.  If you don't have the expertise to maximize the opportunity, then go and find it.  


After all, it is your mission -- or at least it's one of them.

(I should point out, by the way, that I'm not secretly talking about the nonprofit I work for, which is very flexible and open to new ideas.  This post, and most of my posts, are culled from decades of direct experience with various organizations, some great and some crazy, and shop talk with colleagues.)

Want to Hear About My Problems?

When I was in high school, I had a strategy for getting girls to fall in love with me.


The plan was to act sullen a lot and then wait for some beautiful girl with a poetic sensibility to notice how special I was.  Then I would tell her about all of my problems and she'd be fascinated and enraptured.


Did I mention that I didn't have any girlfriends in high school?

Most moody adolescents figure out, eventually, that few people are particularly attracted to people who exude unhappiness.  (It does seem to work in the movies sometimes, to judge from the advertisements of movies I never see, but I think you have to look like Johnny Depp.)


So it's kind of funny that so many nonprofits never seem to figure it out.


I've worked for a bunch of nonprofits now, and I've consulted, formally or informally, with many more of them.  I can't tell you how many times I've sat through strategy sessions, or read appeal letters, or watched testimony, about the dire circumstance nonprofit x was facing, and how much they needed urgent support to survive.


But I can tell you how many times I've seen that strategy work.   Zero.


This point was driven home for me about eight years ago in a City Council delegation hearing in Queens.  All of these Queens nonprofits were lined up to make heartwrenching pleas for increased support in the wake of September 11.  As I waited my turn, I watched the leader of a little senior center stand at the microphone and detail all of the draconian cuts her agency had already enacted.  The center was, she said in a shaky voice, at the end of its rope.


I particularly remember her explaining something about how they couldn't afford to keep the refrigerator plugged in any more.  This was desperation at its sharpest.


And here's what else I remember: 1) Two City Councilmembers were pointing to something funny on a soda can that one of them was drinking -- they were totally detached from the testimony; and 2) I myself felt bored and annoyed by the testimony.  (And I'm a guy who tears up at babyfood commercials.)  I figured, if she can't figure out how to raise enough money to keep appliances plugged in, she probably shouldn't be running that senior center.  


From what I can tell, first-time donors will often respond to a well crafted emotionally charged message about a severe problem that an organization is going to solve -- but not to a problem within the organization itself.  And long-time donors will quickly tire of requests to be rescued.


So my advice: Don't go there.


At El Museo del Barrio, where I work, we are looking at a significant fundraising goal for the upcoming fiscal year.  Despite the self-assured proclamations of my last post, I'm a little nervous about how we're going to meet our goal.


The reason for the big goal is simple: we've got a lot of great things we want to do, and we haven't yet figured out how to fund them all.  (A few big grants have run their course.)  So we don't have problems -- we have challenges.  And we will embrace those challenges and celebrate when we meet them.


Because even if we did have problems, no one would care that much.  (Unless we could make ourselves look like Johnny Depp.)

Easy Time for Fundraising

So I just did a Google search of the phrase "difficult time for fundraising."  I got 182,000 results.

Then I Googled "easy time for fundraising."  I got three results, two of which were part of the phrase "not an easy time for fundraising."  Ditto for "good time for fundraising."

I did these searches because I'm always amazed when people talk about how the last year or two has been a tough period for raising money.  But before that, weren't we all saying that it was a difficult time to raise money because everyone was focused on the Presidential election, or Katrina, or New Orleans?

And besides, we'd never fully recovered from the economic crisis after September 11.  (Which followed hard upon the dot com crash, which was also a hard time for raising money...)

We're always talking about what a tough time "this" is for raising money.

And yet hundreds of billions of dollars are raised in this country every year.

I often wonder why fundraising has such a special aura of difficulty to it.  We're constantly telling ourselves, our colleagues, our bosses -- anyone who will listen (or pretend to) how hard it is.  Usually when I tell someone I'm a fundraiser, their first response is "Wow, that's a hard job."

But isn't everything worth doing pretty hard to do?

Imagine selling iPods.  People love iPods -- they're enormously popular and Apple has sold zillions of them.

But I am guessing that that if Steve Jobs handed you a case of them and let you sell them at a table in Grand Central Station, you'd find it pretty rough going.  After all, don't most people who want iPods already have them?  Why should someone buy them from you, a person at a table, when they could get it at a reputable store for the same price?  How do people even know yours are real, and not stolen?

And even if you weren't standing at a table in Grand Central, but were in charge of sales at a well located retail store, you'd probably be handed a sales goal significantly higher than anything you'd set for yourself.

What's my point?

My point is that of course fundraising is hard.  That's why we're paid to do it.

But if you're fundraising for a worthy cause on behalf of a solid organization in a manner that makes sense -- and you have set goals that are ambitious but feasible -- then the only difficulty should be executing every step of your plan.  And avoiding a patch of really bad luck.

The problem is that we spend too much time at metaphorical folding tables -- staying with labor intensive, unpleasant strategies that yield little.  And which undermine our self esteem and make us depressed.

No doubt about it: fundraising is always going to be hard.  But it shouldn't be any harder than selling iPods.

Can we try something complicated for a change?

Have you read Lewis Cullman's book Can't Take It With You: The Art of Making and Giving Money?


I read it a few years ago.  Definitely worthwhile if you're a fundraiser.


But what really fascinated me wasn't the "Giving" section.  It was the "Making" part.


Lewis Cullman got rich, apparently, by innovating the "leveraged buyout."  He explains the mechanics of that process in great detail.  Frankly, I didn't understand a word of it.


But I was still fascinated. 


What I found so mesmerizing is that he and his partners decided to do something overwhelmingly complicated (and, I guess, unprecedented) which involved huge sums of money, most of which they didn't get to keep.  When the smoke cleared, there were still some millions left for him.


Anyway, I was thinking about Cullman's book on the subway today.


I thought of it because I was trying to read a fundraising magazine, which shall remain nameless.  (But I'll tell you it wasn't Fundraising Success.  I like Fundraising Success magazine.  More about that in a future post.)


I say "trying" to read because it was just too boring.  Everything seemed so self evident and tired.  


Look, I agree that we need to treat our donors like human beings and not pieces of data.  I know that we need to remember to say thank you soon and often.  I know how important it is to listen to our prospects, and not talk at them.  Read foundation guidelines; consider corporate business strategies when approaching them for a major ask; keep our messages short and relevant, especially in these challenging economic times.


And I admit that we can all use the occasional reminder about these and other fundamental points.


But isn't there something more challenging we can write about in this profession?


For the most part, no. Because we insist on sticking to basics.  And there just isn't much to talk about regarding those basics -- unless you're new to the profession.  (In which case you should take my course, which will cover all the basics in thorough detail.)


That's what made me think about Cullman.  He dared to do something new and complicated and it made all the difference.


I believe that the nonprofit world is petrified of complexity.  The only "business deals" we like involve at least 90% "profit" margins -- you give us money, we'll say thank you and put your name on a sign.  If someone proposes a sophisticated deal involving multiple parties where our nonprofit, for argument's sake, will gross a million and net a quarter of that, I daresay the vast majority of directors/CFO's/boards would reject it out of hand. 


Too risky, too little return, and even ethically questionable. (Though it seems to me that a 25% profit margin would be just fine for the vast majority of for-profit businesses out there.)


So instead we stick to the same dozen or so tactics


I say that it's time for the nonprofit world to embrace some risk and complexity -- and for our foundation friends to encourage it.


Go ahead, tell me you disagree.  I dare you!

What can we learn from Haiti fundraising efforts?

Over at The Agitator, Roger Craver and Tom Belford are having a provocative, and somewhat surprising, debate about whether the work of the American Red Cross in the last week really deserves to be called "fundraising." Tom says it's merely "gift receiving."  Roger, if I may paraphrase, considers it a laudable success, saying they "are doing everything right."

I side with Roger.  Assuming the money is well spent, I think we should applaud the American Red Cross, not criticize it.

But can those of us not in the disaster field learn from this success?

Yes.  And no.

Yes because, it seems to me, the American Red Cross's response was a case study in preparedness.  When the awful quake hit, they were up and running right away on multiple channels -- Website, texting, Facebook, Twitter, etc.  I didn't hear many stories about crashing systems or scrambling to get a strategy in place.

And so I disagree heartily with Tom when he says that what they're doing is mere gift receiving.  All of the work that went into having the right infrastructure in place for quick and robust response was first-rate fundraising.  But fundraising of an unusual variety.

But on the other hand (this is the "no" part) it would be illogical to transfer the mass response techniques of national and international disaster organizations to the contexts of most other kinds of fundraising.  I cringe at the thought of a board or staff somewhere saying "let's stop all of this direct mail/grant writing/corporate sponsorship/major gifts/special events nonsense and just get people to text us $10 at a time.  It works for the Red Cross!"

What surprises me about this debate is the bitterness which some participants seem to feel about the lack of sustained engagement in this immediate-response form of fundraising.  As if it's somehow a betrayal of our fundraising values.

We need to distinguish between the kind of relationship-building fundraising that sustains our organizations, and the ability to raise significant amounts of cash quickly in extraordinary circumstances.

So what if most of those $10 texters don't sustain a relationship with the Red Cross?  Why should the ARC (or any of us) be worried about that now?

As long as they are maintaining and building other relationships -- and maintaining the infrastructure to handle surges of response -- why do they also need to have a long-term relationship with an enormous category of people who may only ever want to respond in ultra-intense situations?

And God knows: when catastrophe strikes, we don't want our disaster response nonprofits demanding a long-term relationship before they'll accept a donation.

Fundraising and the English Language

Most people who bother with the matter at all would admit that writing in the fundraising profession is in a bad way.


I didn't really write that sentence.  Except for the words "writing in the fundraising profession," which I stuck in in place of "the English language," the sentence was written by George Orwell.  It's the first clause of his brilliant essay "Politics and the English Language."


I try to re-read this essay every year or so.  It is an incisive analysis of what is wrong with most of the writing one encounters, and a master class in how to do better.


Orwell gets into a lot of esoterica about mid-century ideological battles, which you will find either fascinating or tedious depending on your taste.  But his analysis of writing style is highly applicable to the fundraising profession.


You can find the essay here, or you can buy Orwell's collected essays here.  (I don't know for sure that free link is really kosher -- if you think it isn't tell me and I'll disable it.)


In the meantime, here are a few of his exhortations:

1. Avoid dead metaphors.  Phrases like "toe the line," "ride roughshod over," "grist for the mill," "swan song," "hot bed," etc.  There are two main problems with using them: a) our brains go to sleep when we read them because we're so bored with them; and b) much of the time, we don't even know what we're saying when we use them.  (Do you know what "roughshod" means?  Until a few minutes I didn't -- and I use it all the time.)  If our writing is out of focus, then our ideas are out of focus and our readers don't understand what we're saying.
2. Avoid what Orwell calls "verbal false limbs."  That is, the replacement of simple verbs with wordy phrases.  You don't "break" something, you "render it inoperative"; you don't "stop" it you "bring it to cessation."  Sounds more professional and/or academic, but in fact is just longer and duller.
3. Avoid meaningless words.  Orwell goes into that in fascinating depth.  In our world, a good example of this is "unique."  Of course "unique" does have an actual definition -- it refers to something that is the only example of its kind.  But we rarely use it that way -- we usually use it to mean something blending the ideas of good and special.  And since virtually everything in the nonprofit world is or should be good and special, we're adding nothing by using (or misusing and certainly overusing) the word unique.

Another of his themes, though he doesn't state it in just this way, is to be as concrete as possible.  We have to force ourselves to tie ideas to specific nouns.  Instead of saying "there were a multitude of options for resolving the issues at hand, each of which was problematic in terms of lacking certainty in terms of effectiveness" we ought to say something more like "I saw two or three possible solutions for each problem, and I had no idea which would work."

Our writing will only be vivid, clear and read through to the end when we know what we want to say, when the thing is worth saying, and when we challenge ourselves to say it as clearly and concisely as possible.  For us fundraisers that could mean the difference between being read, understood and funded or, on the other hand, ignored.

Anyway, I encourage you to read the essay.  And let me know what you think.

Bring on the Managers

Sandy Rees over at Get Fully Funded Blog offers a tongue-in-cheek short piece about the difference between a leader and a manager. It includes a whimsical video.

I love the fact that Sandy is writing about nonprofit management (see her too-true piece about how to spot a dysfunctional leader), but I disagree with the message this time, which seems to be that "managers" are square and unimaginative (a la the PC guy) and "leaders" are creative and inspirational (a la... you get the idea).

I admit that I'm a pretty square guy; that can't be helped.  Still, I believe that we need more straightforward management in the nonprofit world.

I mean: procedures for hiring staff, managing staff on a week-to-week basis, creating goals and tracking success against those goals, creating and tracking budgets, creating timelines for important projects and assessing whether those projects are on schedule while it's still early enough to do something about it, establishing key metrics and monitoring them on an ongoing basis, etc. We don't have to cling to those procedures like gospel, but they provide a starting point for action.

I had an embarrassingly messy room as a kid (my mother was more horrified than embarrassed, actually), so management hasn't exactly come naturally to me.  So it is unfortunate that I've received almost no formal training about any kind of management in most of my jobs. That's how it is for most of us in nonprofits -- we jump into some pretty choppy waters on a sink-or-swim basis. Is it any wonder that most of us spend our careers doing one endless, exhausting, panicked doggy paddle?

I've worked with some great fundraisers in my life, and with some very inspiring leaders.  But most of my colleagues and bosses over my career (with some impressive exceptions) have succeeded through sheer force of will and hard work, accepting missed opportunities as the inevitable fall out of too much work filling up too little time.  We just don't have the training to do it a different way.  It isn't part of our culture.

Our organizations could get a lot more done if we instilled management training as standard operating procedure.  We owe it to our entry level staff to provide them with that training, and we owe it to our CEOs to provide them with the tools they need to lead our organizations to satisfying success.

Everytime We Say Goodbye I Cry a Little

Most of us in fundraising spend some nauseating percentage of our time on funding situations that produce small returns, or worse.

For example, a little theater group I know used to (perhaps still does) spend weeks each fall mailing out (by hand) a multi-thousand piece fundraising appeal signed personally by the artistic director.  Even though the same handful of donors respond each year.  (They are fantastically good at doing theater though.)

For example, at some point in our careers we've all spent days or weeks trying to get $150 worth of wine donated for a reception because we "can't afford" to spend money on wine. (But somehow we can afford to maintain full-time staff who spend their time trying to find wine donations for receptions.)

For example, consider the email exchange I read recently about a slew of online appeals for end-of-year funding, each of which yielded in the hundreds of dollars for the multi-million dollar organizations in the conversation.

I'm convinced that we need to get better at refusing to spend our time on fundraising situations where the likely yield does not merit the effort.

Even if saying goodbye to the money makes us cry a little.

Today, a colleague and I decided to say goodbye to a grant we've been getting for many years. This colleague is not a fundraiser -- he's on the programming side of the organization. (I'd like to mention that he's also very smart, charming and handsome. And I'm not just saying that because he's offered to help me improve the design of this blog.)

Anyway, we decided to break things off with this funder. No hard feelings. We still want to be friends, we just don't want to, you know, "cash their checks" anymore. So we won't be sending them an application this year.

It isn't them, it's us.

The problem is that this particular grant represented less than 2% of the budget of my colleague's department, and necessitated a program that probably took up something like 10% of his department's time.  (And which cost at least as much as the grant money provided.)*  Nine more grants like that and we'd be out of business.  Plus, organizations can't grow when they're tethered to these small and perpetually underfunded projects.

It is hard to say goodbye to a grant like this. Why? In large part because we are neurotic and superstitious, I believe.  Even if we aren't all Jewish (I am), we can hear some imaginary grandmother somewhere saying "Now you're picking and choosing your grants, Mr. Bigshot? At the end of the fiscal year, when all your funders have abandoned you, you won't be such a Mr. Bigshot anymore."

But when we sober up from our chicken soup stupor, we must remember that fundraising (and nonprofit management generally) is a business. And saying goodbye to mass appeals to the same dead list, barely break-even fundraising events, in-kind treasure hunts and wag-the-dog grants is good business.


*(I'd like to mention, since I'm superstitious and neurotic, that we are delighted to receive other kinds of grants from this same wonderful funder, which are extremely helpful and for which we are very grateful. It's just this particular grant program that no longer makes sense for us.)