The Paralyzed By Materials Paradox

How beautiful are my materials…!

I’ve seen a couple of boards lately that are paralyzed by the materials paradox – they can’t get started going out and asking for money because their materials aren’t ready, and they’re running out of money and volunteer enthusiasm because they’re not going out and asking for money.

It happens – you get to a stage in fundraising planning where you’re bursting to get the rubber hitting the road.

And then someone says: “We’ve got to have the right materials to leave with our prospects – we don’t have the right message, we don’t have the right information, we don’t have the right framing.”

And 3 months go by while a fundraising/marketing task force develops collateral material by committee.

Ouch.

Sure the eventual product is great, and sure it represents the organization well, even redefines the group’s case and profile. Perhaps even revolutionizes how people conceptualize and articulate the agency’s appeal.

But the prospects have grown cold and the askers have slinked away and you’re left all dressed up for the party with nowhere to go.

So the answer is: it just needs to be good enough. Not perfect.

For many years I had a list above my desk of ways to avoid procrastination (I think one of my employees finally stole the list from me!). Number one was:

“Don’t giftwrap the garbage.”

Not that fundraising collateral materials are garbage – but spending time on them is sometimes (not all the time) yet another way of avoiding the eyeball-to-eyeball moment of making the ask.

So take the plunge, set up the meeting, and then figure out what you need to bring along once the date is looming large.

And good luck!

Know (And Improve) Thyself

In a workshop we led today, we asked participants what their fundraising capacity-building goals were for the coming year.

I was a little worried that groups might not be able to articulate a strategy for strengthening their ability to raise money (as opposed to simply naming a figure they hoped to raise).  But never fear, their self-revelations, and self-prescribed remedies, were right on target:

“Strengthen the connection between our vision, our board, and our donors.”

“Become intentional about showcasing our work to cultivate our volunteers.”

“Create a development advisory committee to complement our community-based board.”

“Build up our roster of supporters so we’re not as dependent on a few generous donors.”

“Directly connect our board with our fundraising plan so they understand what their part in it is.”

“Build a friendraising system for board/staff/supporters so folks don't have to reinvent the wheel every time they want to help us fundraise.”

It was inspiring to sit in the room and listen to these folks think deeply about their fundraising – and name a focus that was way beyond the direct dollars raised.

Later on, I realized it was like being privy to people’s New Year’s resolutions. Lose weight, learn guitar, master an unassisted headstand.

Self-improvement, a great and uniquely human trait.

Let’s put it to work for our organizations.

What are your capacity-building goals for fundraising for this year?

Ownership Begets Responsibility, Yet Again…

We hosted a roundtable here last week called: “Creating An Inspired Board-Staff Fundraising Partnership.” A mixture of staff and board members discussed their frustrations and victories in moving board members along the continuum from avoiding staff phone calls to carrying out assigned tasks to taking responsibility for soliciting new askers.

One recurring premise was getting true board buy-in on fundraising strategies – if the staff thinks it’s a great idea to do a dinner-dance at the Pierre but none of the board members feel they’ll be able to get their friends to attend, guess what? They won’t be able to get their friends to attend.

Likewise, one staffer lamented that his board members didn’t give him many names for his annual appeal – but the fact is, they were handed that task and told to obey, not brought through a soul-searching discussion in which the board itself concluded this was a good idea and they were going to try their darndest to bring in contributions from everyone they knew. Undertaking a Valentine’s Day fund drive needs to be a conscious board decision to produce full-hearted board involvement.

Creating internal fiefdoms is one way to encourage board members’ ownership of turf – carving out pieces of the fundraising puzzle that different members can take charge of. For example, one person takes on responsibility for the annual appeal, one for the house party, one for the Fall Fiesta – with board and staff fundraising leadership overseeing a whole composed of each mini-leader’s bite-sized domain.

Related to that, Board leadership development was another persistent theme. Looking ahead 3 years (at a minimum) so that you’re recruiting for the leadership you’ll need in the future, rather than for the board you needed yesterday, means that the nominating committee needs some pretty strategic players at its helm. The nominating committee doesn’t actually have to possess access to all the organization’s potential contacts in its back pocket – but it does need to know how to ask for help and to draw connections from and between people.

Staff’s role in supporting board member initiative was the final revelation to many around the table. Yes, we all want board members who email us at 6:30 am with a fundraising idea they’ve had in the shower – but even board members that motivated still need us to send them the follow-up email, the materials, the nudge, and the thinking-power that a 50+-hour-a-week (and who’s counting) full-time job allows nonprofit staff to track.

In the final analysis, board members are volunteers. The dog gets sick, the kid flunks a Spanish test, someone’s workload gets doubled – in other words, life intervenes. A true board-staff partnership builds a structure that respects those impediments to board fundraising performance – and then vaults above them.

Is the Energy Getting Better (and what does that mean, anyway)?

Last Friday, the Commerce Department announced the third quarter in a row of economic growth and increased consumer spending. However, according to a New York Times article last week, “While the expansion in output was welcome, it still has not brought the level of hiring growth needed to recover ground lost during the recession.”

What does this mean for non-profits?

Ah, isn’t that the $64,000 question…

To try and suss it out, let’s go back to one of the fundamental tenets of fundraising – the psychological underpinnings of capacity.

Maslow’s famous hierarchy of needs is directly applicable here. Maslow believed that human beings are motivated by unsatisfied needs, and that needs lower on the pyramid have to be satisfied before higher needs can be addressed. In other words, if you’re hungry (physiological needs), or you don’t know where your kids are going to sleep (safety needs), you can’t concentrate on pursing friendship (social needs), social status (esteem needs), or strive for justice (self-actualization).

So how does that apply to fundraising?

The fact is, that a huge part of the capacity to give is psychological. It’s based on feeling that you have disposable income – extra to your life needs – and not on actual dollars in the bank.

If you feel poor, no matter how much you have parked in CDs, you’re not going to be a major giver – you’re not going to feel like you have the space in your life to direct some of your assets to a nonprofit.

(Which is one of the reasons for the truism in fundraising that you never ask someone for a major gift who’s going through a divorce; the ground – financial and otherwise – is shifting beneath them and they don’t feel able to be generous.)

Likewise, in Fall 2008 at the beginning of the recession when it looked like people’s investment portfolios were going through some sort of extra-gravitational free-fall, the fear factor – of not being able to meet the physiological and safety needs that are way down towards the bottom of Maslow’s pyramid – was keeping just about every potential donor from making a major gift commitment.

I think that fear factor is starting to lift.

Back to that NY Times article: 

“Nate Evans, who owns a pottery-making business…said sales in 2009 were the worst ever but that they were just starting to see things pick up. ‘I felt like the energy of the crowd was better,’ Mr. Evans said of their first fair this year…‘Most of the people we talked to said it was better than last year. Hey, it’s not great, but it’s better than last year.’”

I guess that’s the watch-phrase of the day…

“Hey, it’s not great, but it’s better than last year.”