The New Normal
Getting back to normal seems…well, not quite normal. While I’ve been meeting friends for outdoor things—dining, hiking—and I’ve done indoor things, like museums, exhibits, I’ve been slow on getting back to the theater (live or film) or indoor concerts. Tomorrow night will be my first foray, and I’m both excited about it and not exactly looking forward to it!
Clients, mercifully, seem fine with meetings over zoom, and I’ll be honest, I am not willing to go back to the days of driving driving driving. I do suspect retreats and trainings will become more and more in person. That’s fine. I’ve done a few of those already. Traveling for a half or full day gathering makes sense. It doesn’t for an hour meeting. Especially not here in LA where traffic is definitely back to a constant rush hour crowd.
It does make me think, however, what normal is going to be for nonprofits and fundraising.
Of course, normal fundraising before the pandemic depended so much on the size of your development department. If you been had one. For many organizations, fundraising meant grants and events. Some also included an end of year appeal and maybe an envelope stuck in a bi-annual or quarterly newsletter.
During the pandemic (and yes, I know I’m talking as if it is over and who knows! But I have hopes), many events took a back seat. Yes, there were those organizations who did virtual events, and others who stopped events completely. Most discovered that by not having in person events, costs went way down, and while revenue may not have risen, even if it went down a bit, net results were way higher. I’d love to think that this means the death knell for fundraising events.
But no. Even as I wrote that, I knew it was a lost cause. Organizations (well, ok, the people at the organizations) insist that it is great PR, brings in new donors, allows them to showcase what they do. To be honest, that may happen in a handful of cases, but mainly I think these people are lying to themselves.
Don’t believe me? Take a look at your last 5 years of ticket and table buyers, or entrants into your walk/run, or golfers for your golf tournament. How many new donors will you find? Few. Mainly you’ll see it is the same crowd, paying the same amount—and as I note in the article below, if you are raising the same amount you did last year, you are backsliding. Funds today are worth a lot less than they were in the past.
As for PR, most of that is self-generated. Think how much PR you could get if instead of hyping an event, you spent the same amount of effort showcasing your programs, your clients, your donors, your volunteers, and yes, your staff. And these are stories that just might have legs. Others, outside your usual audiences, may care about what you are promoting.
Beyond events, what I’m really hoping stays is the outreach many organizations did during lockup. I received emails telling me what was going on at the organization when before I only heard from them when they wanted money. I also got a lot of thanks not just for current gifts but also for what I had done in the past—and connecting my generosity to what the organization was accomplishing.
Some organizations even asked how I was doing and generally treated me like a person instead of an ATM. It was refreshing, compelling. I hope they continue seeing their donors as more than revenue.
Beyond that, I think a lot of organizations saw that being personal didn’t necessarily mean a meal in an expensive restaurant, but could be a call—on phone or video conferencing—a personal letter, a video that was shot specifically for them. And I loved that many organization recognized that conversations were better as dialog and not just us telling them about all the good we do! Learning about your donors and your volunteers is such a critical thing to do.
Mainly I hope that the new normal allows fundraisers to be creative; to think about how they can best engage, involve, educate those who do or might support them. How we can look to our better selves and try to create the kind of world we would prefer to live in.