Knowing When to Take and When to Ignore Fundraising Advice
There’s a lot of fundraising advice floating around out there.
Fundraise for specific projects or campaigns.
Grow or start your direct mail strategy.
Diversify your donor portfolio with small and major gift donors.
Start fundraising on social media.
Figuring out what advice to take and what to ignore can seem exhausting.
Much of the fundraising advice you hear isn’t necessarily bad. However, many of the tips and tricks floating around worked at one point but have become outdated. A lot of fundraising advice is like a jug of milk; it has an expiration date. The landscape, technology, and major donors themselves are always changing. The rules that worked ten years ago don’t necessarily work today. Or, some advice might only work for nonprofits much bigger or smaller than our own.
Implementing strategies that don’t account for your organization’s unique size and scope, can hold back and even derail your nonprofit’s growth.
Take, for instance, the tactic project fundraising. Are there wildly successful instances of project fundraising? Absolutely. However, when you lead a nonprofit, you need to take a different approach.
Past donors from projects did not buy into your organization’s vision. If you want these single-gift donors to give again, you’ll have to think of a new and even more exciting project to pitch them on.
It’s like if you own a restaurant and have a customer who only comes to your restaurant because they like one special dish you’re serving for a few months. The customer hasn’t bought into the fact that you have a great restaurant with great food. They just like a particular dish. When the special stops, you are going to lose the customer. You can afford to have a few customers like that, but you can’t build your business around them.
In fundraising, focusing on short-term tactics will kill your organization. Instead, sell your vision to donors and focus on getting them to renew and increase their gifts year after year.
Another common piece of advice is to diversify your donor portfolio with both small and major gifts.
The reality is that fundraising is extraordinarily concentrated. While the total amount given yearly in America continues to rise, the number of people giving is decreasing. For many nonprofits, the top 5 percent of donors account for 95 percent of donations. So instead of diversifying your donor portfolio as much as possible, spend most of your time focusing on retaining and growing the top 5 percent of your donors. For many nonprofits, this will be your top 10 to 12 donors. We refer to them as your organization’s “Dynamic Dozen.”
Other problems arise when small nonprofits try to use the same tactics as large nonprofits.
Fundraising trainings often have small nonprofits employing tactics that only large organizations with a big staff can execute. This approach keeps small nonprofits small and prevents them from focusing on the right development strategies to grow.
Take the child sponsorship strategy, for example, which requires consistent communication and updates between donors and sponsor children. This strategy might work exceptionally well for large nonprofits, such as Children’s International, that have the infrastructure to support all the hours of administrative work required. A small orphanage with only a few employees and volunteers is not going to have the resources to implement this model successfully. Attempting to do so would hurt the orphanage’s fundraising efforts more than help. Instead, remain highly focused on big donors that are passionate about your vision. Small and medium-sized nonprofits will grow faster by focusing on bringing in and developing their major gift donors.
The bottom line--fundraising advice needs to fit your size and timing. Wrong fundraising advice can distract you and your nonprofit’s focus from the fundamentals in favor of shiny new tips and tricks. Consistently executing simple fundamentals in your development shop is the best and fastest way to grow your nonprofit sustainably. A simple plan you stick to will always be better than a complex one you try out for a few months. Focus on strategies that will help you grow no matter the size or structure of your nonprofit. Build out other tactics and strategies around what has been proven to be wildly effective.
Before implementing a particular piece of fundraising advice, ask yourself:
Will this help me to build long-term partnerships with major donors?
Is this helping to grow my nonprofit in a sustainable way?
Does my nonprofit have the staff hours to implement and manage this?
Is this tactic going to distract me from other strategies that have a higher return on investment?
If I’m saying yes to this particular strategy, what am I going to have to say no to?