Fundraising That Works
- Make fundraising somebody’s #1 priority.
- If a lack of funding prevents you from expanding your programs or delivering on your mission, you must prioritize capacity-building. This seems like a no-brainer, but surprisingly, organizations in different stages of development are guilty of pushing fundraising to the side.
- If you are starting a new organization, fundraising must be a priority for the key leadership. That doesn’t mean that your Executive Director must put everything aside and get involved in fundraising planning and management themselves. They can delegate the strategy and the implementation to a colleague or a consultant and then prioritize the calls, meetings, or other fundraising activities arranged for them. A frequent mistake Executive Directors make is that they think they will have time to handle all that strategic fundraising involves. They will often prioritize programming or other organizational objectives unless they come from a fundraising background and enjoy this line of work.
- Even well-established organizations with Development Departments and fundraising staff can underestimate the work involved in engaging their leadership in fundraising activities. This can be very risky, especially in times of an organizational financial crisis when fundraising should be everyone’s business, and at least temporarily, the function should be prioritized in the work of the entire leadership. But even during the good times, engaging the top leadership across all functions in fundraising activities builds the organization’s resiliency, deepens relationships with key stakeholders, and prevents financial crises.
- Organize your communications and programmatic assets.
- Invest time and resources to ensure your organization will make the best first impression.
- Is your organization’s story and theory of change well-articulated and internalized by all who will interact with prospective funders?
- Review all your fundraising assets (including your pitch deck and prospectus), but don’t neglect those outside your fundraising team’s purview, including your website, social media accounts, strategic plan, program reports, and other high-level assets.
- All your public-facing assets and key strategic documents should tell a coherent story. Your visual brand should reflect the organization you are presenting in your fundraising materials.
- Before you approach prospective funders, test your fundraising assets on advisors and friends outside of the organization to identify potentially confusing language and gauge the level of excitement your organizational story generates.
- Stick to a process. Adjust. Repeat.
- Even the best fundraising strategy will fail if you don’t invest your time and energy in the process, which, we admit, may sometimes feel tedious.
- Organizational strengths and capacities vary, and external context can also differ from organization to organization. A good fundraising strategist will consider all factors and propose a fundraising process. After agreeing on the process, persist in executing the tasks diligently while tracking the effectiveness of the individual fundraising program elements. Over time, the data will tell you what works and what needs adjustment.
- Avoid shifting your fundraising strategy too quickly before you have enough historical data and time to analyze them properly. Well-performing organizations optimize their fundraising strategies to reflect new internal and external conditions, but discipline and consistency in their fundraising processes are largely responsible for their fundraising success.