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.