Development = Sales?

“You wouldn’t try to sell a product without an adequate sales team, would you?”

That’s the analogy a board member put out, as he tried to convince his organization to hire an additional development staffer.

It was an interesting thought – that posited the development department as the organization’s advance team, and the group’s real-world impact as an item to be sold to people just waiting to buy something they hadn’t known they needed.

Well, sure. Sorta.

And yet – it made me uneasy.

Not the aspect that posited that it takes staff to position and support an organization’s fund-seeking visibility/viability.

But the part that implied that staff itself were the “sales team” masterminding a pitch to an unsuspecting public.

Maybe I’m naïve in thinking of fundraising as a higher calling, but I see it as partnering with people of good will to help the world rise to a better place. There’s an element of sales, sure, because that’s the tools you need to get the job done. But at the core is a fierce dedication to mission, by all means necessary. At the core, it’s not about finding people who need/will purchase your wares – it’s about saving the world and bringing us all along with you.

But in any case, your development department is not your sales team. Your board is. The development department supplies the tools, but the board – and committee members, volunteers, other donors – are the ones doing the listening that allows the organization to close the sale.

OK, I said it. I guess there is more than a little element of sales here. But it’s a means, not the end.

Moving Raw Ideas Around – or Editing as Fundraising

Spent a day editing various documents and realized, for each of them, that the ideas were all there – just jumbled together. 

Some of my work was inventing an outline system that separated big ideas from means.  That ordered recommendations so that a followed b.  That made sure, to get down to a level of detail, that the break on the first page happened at a point that the reader had been given enough intriguing “meat” to make the effort to turn the page.

Presentation details, sure.  But essential to content perception – yep.

And why is this relevant for fundraising?

Because when you’re asking someone else to invest in your ideas, you’d better be clear on what’s first and what follows.  The higher the stakes, the more your vision and clarity about what it’d take to get there, matters.

There’s lots of great vision out there.  We see nonprofits all the time with fantastic visions.  Hey – there are 30,000 nonprofits in New York City, and hundreds of thousands more in the rest of the country – and many have fabulous visions…especially those led by fresh founders!

The real separator is those that have the drive to adapt to the real world and figure out what it takes to move that vision the first steps into fruition.

Moving raw ideas into background and foreground.  Editing as the process of opening up vision into a real plan to move forward.

The red pencil as a primary tool of fundraising.

Get your sharpeners out…

The People Who Surround You

“Make a list,” I said.

Not a list of donors, or potential donors, or even potential board members, which was the subject at hand.

A list of people who know people (not to quote Barbra Streisand or anything) – and who think your work is great.

It was amazing how the names, and descriptions of relationships, began to flow, once the imperative/constraint of naming people who could be asked for something now, was off the table.

And so affirming to discover how many people surrounded this organization, and the people who worked for it, and cared.

When a group is facing financial difficulties (and who isn’t, now-a-days), we tend to get hunkered down. No matter the latest economic trends in the news, we feel that somehow, the situation is our fault. If we’d been smarter, better managers, more connected, made wiser choices, our nonprofits could have been nimbler, had more options, been more resourceful.

But reaching out is, in fact, resourceful.

And while the instructions had been to create a list of people who cared, the idea was not that we’d never ask them for help – just that we’d “give” them something first. The magic of witnessing work that changes lives. The breathtaking opportunity to be part of that change moment (we asked them to take part in a youth outing). The camaraderie of doing this alongside someone they respected and liked.

A moment of meaning.

The strategy will get played out over the Fall, so we’ll see where we are when it comes time to actually ask some of these individuals to serve on the board. “Now that you’ve seen our work firsthand, and been part of making it happen, might you step up to a greater place of responsibility for it?” is the planned pitch.

But even before that “consummation” close, the very listing of those who care, and the realization that we are surrounded by those who are – has started this group on the road to revival.

We get so scrunched over, scrutinizing the numbers, that we forget we’re surrounded by a universe that wants us to succeed. And is just waiting for us to ask them to help us.

The Moment of Re-Think

Maybe it’s because I’ve been on vacation, but I’ve had several moments of “re-think the plan” since I’ve been back. And so I’ve been realizing how useful that can be.

One was for an organization whose development director is taking another job. Of course there’s the race-to-replace; but we spent some time on the phone talking through what kind of a development department they’d need in 3-5 years (as opposed to what they’d home-grown through the skills and contacts they had on hand). By the end of the call, the job description they were thinking through – indeed the very job of development for this organization – had shifted. The way they might most profitably spend their staff time and energy had evolved.

New possibilities had opened up.

Another was for a nonprofit – like so many others these days – approaching the end of its fiscal year with a noticeable budget gap. Instead of just re-shaking the same trees, we took the occasion to rethink the whole formula – the relationship to the board, the percentage of earned and unearned income the group was striving for, even the timing of when the group was aiming for economic independence (that holy grail when expenses equal business-as-usual income). We ended up creating a 3-year-framework to climb towards that mountain, and the group is sounding out its board to get buy-in (and start-up funding) to move towards that trajectory.

A different game plan.

The final “re-think the plan” moment was for Cause Effective ourselves. We’re coming up on celebrating our 30th Anniversary, and we’ve had trouble settling on the right space to hold our celebration. Last week we broke through our miasma around a sea of options, none of them perfect (what is?), changed the date, and signed a contract. Done! (and on to the next decision-point…)

What links these disparate occurrences is an out-of-the-weeds moment of clarity – when we pick our heads up from doggedly following the plan, and choose an alternate route.

These days, that can be a really important moment in the day-in, day-out struggle of running a nonprofit.