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.

Getting it Wrong

I was sitting with a new executive director last week, making suggestions that wouldn’t work.

Which she found invaluable.

And not because she wanted an ego boost by hearing me make mistakes!

What she found so helpful was the process of thinking through what a donor might be interested in and how to figure that out.

Sure, I’d get it wrong.  I don’t know her organization all that well, and I sure as heck don’t know her donors all that well.  But I do know how to strategize about what’s in it for the donor, and what would give meaning to them in their affiliation with the organization.

As I explained to her, it’s like a puzzle, and we keep thinking about ways to put the pieces together till they unlock the relationship to get us to the next level.

Advice, intro gifts, door-opening, rolling up one’s sleeves – there’s lots of ways to move a prospect onto our team.  And that’s the key – being on the same side of the table in making the world a healthier, more creative, or more equitable place.

Once you’ve got that positioning, it’s just a matter of time (and playing your cards right).

So I laid down the wrong cards – and in so doing, taught her the rules of the game.

Raising the Stakes

We just taught a full day seminar yesterday– on upgrading.

Deepening the relationship, we called it.

The message? It’s not about the money – it’s about the motivation.

What is the donor getting out of making the gift, and how can we strengthen that? How can we amplify the donor’s return on investment? How can we draw a donor closer to our impact, so that he or she sees firsthand how their gift is about making the future possible for these kids right before us, or these immigrants laboring to get ahead?

We spent a lot of time at the seminar today talking about transition moments.

From the first gift to the second. (The first gift is made for any number of reasons – it’s the second gift that signals an actual interest in your organization.)

The upgrade conversation, when we start to stand out from the pack.

The capital or “special” gift (I know, all gifts are special…) when we ask the donor to be thoughtful about their impact instead of simply giving from habit.

The take-a-way? There’s gold in these hills all around us. And sure we need to be mindful of adding new donors, but we get so fixated on “getting names” from our board members that we stop focusing so fiercely on mining the relationships that are already started.

It’s a partnership – we say that a lot. But for that to truly be the case, we need to consider our donors as our partners, as equals with interests, wishes, needs… and make choices with our time that support this partnership.

We need to upgrade our input, to upgrade their output.

Meeting Them ½ - Way

Well, let’s say, ¾ - way….

I’m talking about the idea that once board members get activated, it makes more work – for us, as staff.

We have to give them lists! We have to research options! We have to do the legwork! Yipes! We already have full-time-plus-plus-plus jobs…

It’s often true that once a board “catches fire” – the staff literally has to sprint to keep up with their enthusiasm. Board members get serious about asking other board members to bring personal friends to the benefit, and they start asking for info on how other organizations have transitioned a vendor-oriented event into one that feels appropriate for personal friends. They decide to run a family-oriented fundraiser, and ask for materials to be created. They brainstorm a Spring fundraising campaign, and ask for a wall-display to be created in the lobby.

All of these have direct returns for the dollars invested, so it’s easy to see the reward. But sometimes board members ask for info that isn’t so transparently remunerative. Like requesting data on economic trends in the neighborhood. Or 3-year projections of earned-to-contributed revenue. Or even past history of program graduates and “where they are now.”

But I was reminded of the necessity of all this – fundraising or not – when I was meeting recently with a group I’ve known for awhile, that’s really in trouble. A long-time funder suffered some extensive losses and pulled out, unexpectedly, contributing to a perfect storm that may leave them going under.

We’re helping them with scenarios, but the big question remains: Where’s the Board? Who’s the group sitting around the table, worrying this out? It’s just the founder, his devoted second-in-command, and one friend – and us. And that’s just not enough.

But the die was cast long ago, when the staff did it all, and the board – every once in a while – advised.

The moral? Be happy for a board that asks for work – and is ready to roll up their sleeves to deliver.

But we all knew that, right?

A Nose for Trouble

I’ve been following the Susan G. Komen Foundation debacle, as I’m sure everyone concerned with nonprofit governance has been. There’s been millions of words cast into the blogosphere about it, but the failure I’m thinking about has to do with the board’s job to sniff out trouble – to act as a brake on staff’s impulse to fix a problem with an immediate solution…that seems reasonable at the time.

Okay, here’s what I mean.

Laying aside the failure of the Komen Foundation’s value judgments – and the wrongheadedness of those value assumptions are, I admit, hard to put aside – the Komen Foundation’s leadership made a series of decisions based on a spectacular misreading of public temperament. To wit, if you can believe the backpedaling as the decision was reversed:

1) They thought that hiring an avowed partisan political figure (Karen Handel) would help them make headway in state Republican administrations (and goodness knows, there’s plenty of those) – but not affect their policies otherwise

2) They thought that including Planned Parenthood among their grantees was causing more controversy than would casting Planned Parenthood adrift

3) They thought that a decision of this magnitude could be released unnoticed

Wow.

And those are just some of the more egregious decisions they made along the way that seem to make no sense from a “What were they thinking?” smack-on-the-head, what-planet-are-they-living-on perspective.

In retrospect.

But isn’t that what the Board of Directors is for – to provide that retrospect in more-or-less real time – to serve as a brake on staff assumptions, be a sounding board, give feedback, all those other Governance 101 principles?

Or, in other words – to have a “nose for trouble” and bring the community’s perspective to decisions that make a whole lot of sense (OK, some sense) from a narrow, immediate, running-the-store stance?

Here’s another example of that “nose for trouble” real-world board perspective, from my own board service.

I’m chair of a arts community center with a flourishing afterschool music and arts program. So flourishing that during the prime hours of 3-6 pm, every inch of space in the school is booked, even to the extent that offices are commandeered for violin lessons, there’s a piano tucked into the staff lounge, etc. Get more space – you say – well we did that, and other than 3-6 pm Monday-Thursday we’ve got plenty of room to grow.

Under a mandate from the board to squeeze out more earned revenue wherever we were leaving money on the table, the staff came up with the idea of “value pricing” the time of the lessons. In other words, during prime time, lessons would cost more. Makes sense, from a business perspective…

But from a community-relations perspective, a potential disaster! Warning bells went off in my head: “Rich kids get preference for afterschool program, poor kids have to miss dinner to learn” – newspaper headlines like that. I voiced my concern at a board meeting, and we decided to table the solution for now – and to run it by a cross section of the community if we did decide to institute it someday, to see if the firestorm I was afraid of would erupt or if it would be a yawner (as in “Sure, do what you can do to increase your revenue as long as there’s space somewhere for all our children to learn.”)

Where were those warning bells among the Susan G. Komen Foundation board members?

Or were they so blinded with admiration for a founder that’d taken the organization from a promise 20 years ago to a fundraising juggernaut that’s generated over $1.9 billion…that they ignored what their common sense – their nose for trouble – told them?

Of Gentrification and Fundraising

We were sitting with a grassroots board last week that’s doing a yeoman’s job of addressing the ever-creeping specter of gentrification in their neighborhood. Hardly a neighborhood in New York where that’s not the case…

This group had actually done an excellent job of defining its values and welcoming those newcomers who shared its ideals into the fold. In fact, several had taken seats on the board and were eager to start a fundraising committee to raise unrestricted funds from their contacts. What’s not to like about that?

And yet…

There was a neon red flag, to mix metaphors, going on here.

First off, to relegate fundraising to the “new folks on the block” was to mimic the larger society’s denigration of the neighborhood as lacking in value. By setting up two classes – the old and the new – and assuming one had the capacity to raise funds and the other was too poor and too lacking to do so…well you can see why we saw that as a set-up for trouble.

Secondly, that fed into a growing segregation on the board, also of the old and the new, where the new delivered and the old talked. Yipes!

Third, by assigning the fundraising duties to the “gentrifiers,” the board was implicitly linking fundraising with “dirty money” – again, shedding the idea that everyone is responsible for the organization’s financial survival.

And finally, and most importantly, this entire organization was founded under the predicate that diversity – economic diversity, ethnic diversity, professional and class diversity – is what makes the neighborhood a wonderful New York pot of stew. Why couldn’t it fashion a board that acted that way as well?

And the fact is, it could.

The board asked two long-time members, fearless organizers from the old days, to serve on the fundraising committee, and appointed one as a co-chair. They brought in Cause Effective to do some board training and work with the fundraising committee to draft a multi-faceted board fundraising plan – this ensured that the whole board spoke the same language around fundraising and that no one was more privileged by their prior experience with fundraising.

Finally, the board devised a set of metrics for success that included factors such as number of new donors brought into the fold, range of donor backgrounds, and variety of solicitation strategies – so the prize didn’t simply go to the one whose asks raised the most immediate cash.

We learned an important lesson with this group, about gentrification and values and fundraising. And that is, that while fundraising can be associated with gentrification and all things bad – hey it’s about the power of money to make things happen, isn’t it? – that fundraising can actually be a tool, a magnifying glass, to integrate the best of the old and new.

And that fundraising can, indeed, be about values, when practiced in a mindful way.