Living On The Edge

My friend is, like me, a consultant who works with nonprofits on fund development.  And, like me, has found that since January, things in this area are slower than they’ve been for a very long time. While I also do planning, training, coaching, she does not and finds herself after many years on her own, considering finding a full time job.

What, she wondered, was causing this?  Why were so many organizations just not fundraising?

Truth to tell, I think many small nonprofits have never really embraced fundraising. They might have an event, maybe send out a mass appeal, perhaps put an envelope or, more recently, a link to their donation page, in their newsletter.  But actually working a fundraising program?  Nope.

However, before January, most foundations were interested in capacity building.  And fundraising is definitely a way to build capacity.  Most of my clients over the years who have hired me to help develop a fundraising plan; introduce a planned giving or major gift component; work with them to create an end of year giving campaign with many elements and ways to give, did so because they had grants to pay for my services.  Today those same funders are way more interested in community collaborations.

“Whew!” I imagine so many nonprofit leaders thinking, “don’t have to diddle with that annoying fundraising.  We can stop pretending that we are going to ask the people the board says they are going to introduce us to for support.”

In fairness, many of these nonprofits are currently awash in government funding.  But what is going to happen when that funding dries up?  I As it will much sooner than we’d like.  Now would be the ideal time to create a fundraising program and learn how to work it effectively.  Now would also be a great time to spend some of that money and hire appropriate staff and to understand that staff in this case must be plural.

This would also be the ideal time to be thinking about your case for support.  What is it that you do that would make someone (or some organization) say yes?  A good case is quantifiable.  So now would be a good time to also make sure that you are collecting the right data, analyzing it, and…and this is critical..acting upon what that data shows.  In the grants class I teach online, students frequently tell me that they cannot show that what they do has an impact because they are not tracking those sorts of things.  I’m not sure what sorts of things they are tracking, but that is probably a different class.

Above all, this would be a fabulous time to truly learn about fundraising—what it is and what it is not.  Train your staff and your board about how they can participate and what they can do to make your organization stronger and more able to advocate for your cause and/or provide needed services.

This is a time not to sit on your laurels, feelings good that you are flush, but rather, a time to consider what needs to be done to always be flush.  Time to stop living on the edge and start ensuring that the safety net you rely on is the one you have created.