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.)

My New Year's Resolutions

It's late on Sunday night and I'm moving a little slowly.  I've been distracted by occasional glimpses (every 30 seconds) at the Jets -Bengals game all night (Jets won, 37-0) and I'm getting over a minor virus of some kind.

So "My New Year's Resolutions" is the best title I could come up with.  Timely, but admittedly not very imaginative.

Anyway, the resolutions (all work related) boil down to these five:

1) This first one is a resolution my whole department is going to share: we're going to get our acknowledgement letters out within two business days of receipt of payment.

Look, I realize that isn't a very lofty aspiration, but as Louis Brandeis apparently liked to say, quoting Goethe, "One is the master through small details."  (I just read that in The New Yorker.)  That's why I call my business Tactical Fundraising.

2) I'm going to learn more from my peers.  Since starting this blog I've been spending a lot more time reading the blogs and newsletters of fundraising colleagues and other nonprofit professionals around the country and the world.  A lot of what I read is obvious stuff (like the guy who wrote about sending all his thank you notes within two days -- oh wait, that was me), but much of it is thought provoking, and it's fun to participate in serious conversations with other development professionals.  To wit, I encourage you to take a look (if you haven't already) at the Nonprofit Blog Carnival list that Jeff Brooks put together.  (My favorite is called Fundraising by the numbers, which addresses the issue of emotionality vs. statistics in a very rational manner.)

3) I'm never going to let my main email inbox grow to more than 25 messages (well, at least it won't stay that way for more than 24 hours).

4) I'm going to implement at least five ideas I've never tried before.  Establish monthly giving, a new fundraising event, a new approach to online giving, etc.  I'll consider the effort a (partial) success even if some of these don't work out -- the goal is to be daring and proactive.  We fundraisers are too risk averse.

5) I'm going to become more sophisticated in the way I use metrics and structured reporting to manage my fundraising work.

There they are -- I'd love to know, dear reader, what your fundraising-related resolutions are for the coming year.  Leave me a comment and let me know.