Being Clear

Posted on May 23, 2012 by

I’m on a clarity kick.  Not that being clear about what is being done, what direction things are heading, what outcomes are desired is ever far from my thoughts, but lately it feels more imperative.

Several organizations I work with or have worked with have lost their development directors; will be losing their development directors; one or two probably should lose their development director.

Worrisome as that is, the bigger worry is that I see them pulling out old job descriptions and simply dusting them off.

Have you looked at job descriptions for development directors lately?  I hyperventilate just reading them.  In addition to raising more money than the organization has ever even come close to raising, these paragons of multitasking are expected to implement a comprehensive fund development program from events to grants; annual giving drives to planned giving.  And in between, should master social media fundraising (as if that isn’t an oxymoron at the moment), oversee communications and marketing, manage volunteers, receipt all gifts and be proficient is one or another donor tracking system, and oh, other duties as assigned.  Why don’t we just ask them to leap tall buildings?

Getting clarity on what you can reasonably ask any one person to accomplish  (as in “To succeed in doing”) is the first step in setting your new development director up for success.  Thinking that they can do it all—any more than the last development director did—is quite simply nuts.

I know, there is at least three of you who had, have, or are the most extraordinary development director ever.  She/he did it all, raised millions, and never had a hair out of place.

In addition to hating that person beyond any reasonable level, I also don’t believe it.  More likely, this amazing person had a boss and a board who actually did their part of the heavy lifting.  Still, a great development person makes sure that he or she is managing every move and coaching the board and the CEO every step of the way.  Just as likely, the organization doesn’t have a clue about what fundraising is being done and is simply thrilled to death that the doors are staying open.

All right.  I’m getting snarky.  But I hate it when good people are set up to fail.  Or don’t fail but spend their time doing the least effective fundraising because that is also the most pleasing to the Board.

So, clarity.  There are a lot of different ways to raise funds. Without making any value judgments, you do need to decide if you want your development director to focus on major individual gifts or in planning a party.  Likewise writing grants, doing direct mail, overseeing the phone program.  Each of these discrete ways (and too many others to mention) take time and skill.  While many development directors have the ability to do it all, they don’t have the time to do all (or even most) of it well.  And then, many development directors specialize.

Before you go out to hire a development director, consider what you really want that person to be doing, and how you will evaluate the success of his or her endeavors.

 

Janet Levine helps nonprofits and educational organizations increase their fundraising capacity, often by coaching their development directors and CEO’s so that their fundraising muscles get strengthened and stretched.  Learn more at http://janetlevineconsulting.com

 

Posted in fundraising, hiring | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

Getting Things Done

Posted on May 16, 2012 by

Maybe it’s that adrenalin rush.  Or perhaps the way panic focuses my mind.  Whatever.  I love deadlines.  While I don’t particularly agree with the idea that “Failure is not an option”—often failure is our greatest teacher—I am totally sold if failure is replaced with “missing deadlines.”

Like many people, I don’t often jump on work or other chores as soon as they appear.  I diddle and dawdle.  I write totally unnecessary emails and research things I have no earthly reason to know.

But the minute a deadline looms, I am totally there.  Focused.  Involved.  Awake.  But it has to be real.  Self-imposed deadlines don’t always work.  “I’ll make that call tomorrow,” often becomes the day after, and then the day after that.  I’ve learned that I have to make deadlines and I have to make them real.

Making them real means making them public—that is, making sure that others know I have this deadline.  That’s easy when it is something I am doing for a client.  “Ill have this to you by….” works for me.  It doesn’t even matter if the client isn’t good at deadlines and wouldn’t actually notice if I missed this one.  I know there is a time set and I am too neurotic to miss it.

Just making it public doesn’t work so well for me if the public isn’t actually involved.  For example, the things I need to do for my business (or my sanity) that impact only me.  I have to find something else.  “When I write this blog, I can have a cookie.”  Treats, in other words, can keep me on schedule, though it works better when the thing has become a habit.

For the first few years I was consulting, I had a really hard time tracking my hours.  There was kind of deadline—each month I needed to submit an invoice and so, for most of my clients, I needed to know how much time I had spent doing work for them.  More, I needed to know when those hours were spent and for what purpose.  The treat?  When I got it right, I would get paid.  If I didn’t, payment would be delayed.  The habit—6 weeks of forcing myself to record things done at my computer as soon as I was finished and nightly to make sure that everything else such as things done off site, was recorded before I closed down for the night. Habits, while hard to make are equally difficult to break.

What do you do to keep yourself on track and on time?

Janet Levine works with nonprofits and educational organizations, helping to keep them on track for increasing their fundraising capacity.   Learn more at http://janetlevineconsulting.com.

 

Posted in accountability, productivity | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

Targeted Fundraising

Posted on May 10, 2012 by

It was one of those “Duh!” moments.  We were talking about creating a fundraising plan, so the organization would stop lurching from one (not very well thought out) idea to another; each one more or less disappointing.  The word “plan” seemed to trigger something—and suddenly Board members were deep into the “We could this,” and “We could do that,” frame of mind.

Whoa!  Stop, cease and desist.  You could, of course.  But let’s get’s a little more disciplined here.  Let’s start, I suggested, with figuring out how much money we need to raise.

“You mean, like a target?” someone asked and all over the room, I could see lightbulbs flashing on.  If we know how much we need to raise, we can better figure out how to raise those funds.

A target.  There are lots of ways to reach that target—pick a number out of a hat; increase last year’s number by some percent.  I like to be a little more thoughtful.

Start with your annual budget—how much money do you need to have in order to run your business as it is today.

Add to that any initiatives or things you really want to do in the next one to three years—and how much you need this year in order to accomplish or start that project.

From that (sub)total, subtract annual revenues excluding fundraising.  By annual revenues, I mean those streams of income you can pretty well count on year after year.  A rolling three-to-five year average is a good method of figuring.

The number you end up with there is how much you need to raise from charitable giving.  But you are not finished yet.

Remember those averages?  Do the same with fundraising—what can you depend on every year from your regular fundraising efforts.  For some, that number will be zero or pretty close to.  Never mind—lots of room for improvement.

The number you are left with, is the additional funds you need to raise.  Your fundraising plan, then, would start with what you are already doing and add new techniques, more prospects, more hours spent in fundraising to reach this new goal.

Here’s a simple chart you can use to figure out your fundraising goals.

 

Posted in fundraising | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

Can’t Fundraise–I’m Buried Alive

Posted on May 2, 2012 by

“I need to reschedule,” the email read.  “I am buried.”

All right.  I understand that.  I know what it’s like to have too much on your plate and the sense that you’ll never get it all done.

Except.  Except that the meeting was to help him prioritize—something he has been having problems with.  He tends to do what is in front of his face, instead of what is really important.  Occasionally, those two things are the same; but rarely.

Typically, the work he does is good; it’s just not the work on which he should be focusing.  He is, after all, the development director.  The focus, therefore, should be on things that will identify prospects; actions that will turn them into donors; steps that will keep them as donors and—with work—move them up the giving pyramid.  But it is not this that has him buried.

I have and have had a lot of clients like this.  Good, hard-working people.  But all too often they are working hard at the wrong things.  It’s not always their fault—often it is their boss, the head of the Board, the program director, who misdirects them.

One of my clients lost 6 months of fundraising because she was filling in for the program director.  Important work, yes.  But it was  a solution that almost caused the agency to close its doors.

“In retrospect,” the Executive Director now says, “we should have hired an interim program director and let our development director do her job.”

I’d say it all worked out all right—they learned their lesson.  But they haven’t.  There’s been no time for the board fundraising training, and so the major gift initiative that was going to kick off in January is still just a plan and a lot of tools that could be helpful when there is enough time to focus on major gifts.

Right now, of course, there is no time; payroll has to be met somehow which means crisis fundraising of the crash and burn type, so they are burning out their usual suspects without taking steps to bring more donors to the table, or to ask the usual suspects to support the organization in ways more sustainable and, probably, more interesting and exciting to them.

It’s frustrating.  I see how organizations that commit to increasing their fundraising capacity grow stronger, more supportable.  Their mission comes back into focus—clients are better served.  Instead of being strangled by the here and now, they are energized by the possibilities of tomorrow.

The key, of course, is that commitment.  Fundraising must be what you do, not what gets buried underneath all the other must-do things that somehow land up on your plate.

The easiest way to do that is to create a very specific plan—one that spells out the action items that will be required for you to reach your goals.  And then—well, as that old saying goes:  Plan your work and work your plan.

 

Janet Levine works with nonprofits and educational organizations, helping them to increase their fundraising capacity and keep on top of the work they need to do.  Find out more at http://janetlevineconsulting.com

Posted in fundraising, planning, time management | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

It’s Not About You

Posted on April 25, 2012 by

It was an exercise in communications and my partner and I were not doing well.  It was obvious, we used language differently and those differences created an atmosphere of irritation and distrust.

At a distance, I realize I should have clarified my terms; asked her what I wasn’t making clear.  In the moment, I was too frustrated and too trapped in my feelings of failure.

I don’t like failure even though I recognize that often it is the best teacher.  The lesson, alas, only came later.  At the time, I kept on, using the words that made me comfortable; words that had meaning to me.

The fundraiser in me recognizes that trap.  We develop our case; hone our elevator speech—in short, we think about what we need and what resonates with us.  Oftentimes, that works.  Our passions match the passions of others; what matters to us, matters to someone else; the words we use are the words of others.  But sometimes, we end up as I did in that communication exercise, talking but not communicating.  My partner and I both got frustrated and didn’t much like each other.  Remembering to define terms, clarify intentions, check that we were in sync—and if we weren’t, finding out what I could do to help get us in sync—would have gone a long way to making an unpleasant situation more palatable.  On the plus side, it was only an exercise.  When you are fundraising, the stakes can be far higher.

Miscommunication can be devastating.  Forgetting that communicating is a two-way street can be somewhat more disastrous. As that old chestnut about us having two ears and only one mouth should serve to remind us, good communication is as much about listening as it is about talking.  Too often, we tell our prospects about our needs and forget to find out about theirs.

An ED was telling me of a meeting she had had with a long-time supporter who made a verbal commitment of a rather large gift.  “I was so excited—and relieved—to get this gift,” the ED confided, “that I didn’t talk with her about what the gift meant to her.  I had simply told her of our need and was grateful that she was willing to help us.”

That turned out to be quite unfortunate.  Another of the donor’s philanthropic interests DID ask, and then crafted a proposal asking for an extremely large gift that responded to the donor’s stated vision.    The result?  The first organization ended up with a heartfelt “sorry, but…” while the second not only got a very large gift but made their donor very, very happy.  And that will have ramifications for both organizations in the future.

Successful fundraising, like effective communication, focuses on the other, or—to quote my husband—it’s not about you.  It is about ensuring you are speaking in a way the other person can understand, asking for a gift that means something to the donor, putting the other person’s needs and wants and desires at the forefront.

 

Janet Levine works with nonprofits and educational organizations, helping them to increase their fundraising capacity.  Learn more at http://janetlevineconsulting.com

Posted in communication, fundraising | Tagged , | Leave a comment