Category: fundraising

More than a dollar

~ Sasha ~ 1 Comment

It’s a myth that money is fungible.

Ok, not really.  Money itself is, strictly speaking, fungible, but that doesn’t mean all money is equal.  Who it comes from speaks volumes about your organization, its worldview, and what you stand for.

Some of the pieces of the equation are obvious: money with a lot of strings attached is worth less than unrestricted money.  Money that will take you off mission is money you shouldn’t take in the first place.

But it goes deeper than that.  A few weeks ago I was in Ghana – we opened our Acumen West Africa office earlier this year.  One of our top priorities from the outset has been to raise significant philanthropic funding from West Africans, and by far the most humbling part of the trip was the chance to spend time with the three Ghanaian Acumen Partners who have already stepped up significantly to support our work.  Theirs is not just a vote of confidence from some of the most amazing business leaders in the country.  It also creates a completely different level of accountability, a completely different conversation what we mean when we talk about “our” work in West Africa.   It is truly ours, it is truly shared.

Recently, the UK government made headlines when it announced that it would stop giving aid to India after 2015.  In our lifetimes, the bright lines around which countries are rich and which are poor will fade.  By 2025 India could easily have 500 million people in its middle class and 500 million people in poverty.  Brazil’s GDP per capita could easily pass the $15,000 mark with 10 million or more people living in urban slums.

The time to start cultivating a truly global corps of philanthropists, philanthropists who support both local and global causes, is now.    There’s no doubt that today it is easier and cheaper for your organization to raise a dollar in New York or San Francisco or London than it is to raise it in Mumbai, Lagos or São Paulo.  But if you keep doing that, you’ll miss the boat.

Remember, all money isn’t equal.

Not transactional

~ Sasha ~ 1 Comment

Of course no one says that they have a transactional approach to fundraising. How could you admit to such a thing?

But to get beyond transactions means that donors are not numbers to you. It means that after people give you feel more enthusiastic, not less, to talk with them, to plan with them, to dig in with them. It means full emotional investment in the relationship, not looking over your shoulder at the clock. It means taking the notion of “partnership” seriously.

No one will ever say that they believe relationships should be transactional, but it takes guts to fully invest. You can’t fake it.

Finding the line

~ Sasha ~ Leave a comment

A friend of mine, a great salesman, was giving advice to a colleague of mine who was new to fundraising.

His suggestion: if you don’t get thrown out of at least one meeting in your first year you’re not being bold enough in your asks.

This wasn’t conceptual advice – it meant actually physically being shown the door.

Now I admit in nearly six years of fundraising I haven’t actually been thrown out, but I’ve definitely made some pretty outrageous asks.  At the same time, until I actually find the line I don’t fully know where it is.

You could be fundraising, you could be a freelancer, you could be selling just about anything – 9 times out of 10 we all are less bold than we could be and should be.

Yes be respectful, always, but find the line.

Mailing it in

~ Sasha ~ Leave a comment

Today I received emails from class representatives from both my high school and graduate school asking me to give as part of an annual campaign.

Both asks were identical: our participation rates are low, please give so we can increase that number (one of them said that if we got to 40% our class could get a free dinner…we were at 13% and have a few days to go.  Good luck with that).

It’s such a dismal approach that I can’t dignify it by calling it fundraising.  It feels like a bill collector aiming for the lowest level of shame (“give us something”) in the hopes that if you pester people enough with a safe, familiar approach you’ll create enough miniscule annuity streams that it will somehow pay off in the end (it doesn’t – the math doesn’t work).

It would take so little to tell one – just one – very short story:

Dear Sasha,

I know how busy you are and how many emails you receive.  I also know how important [school] was to you, and I wanted to tell you one story that caught my attention last year, and I hope that reading this will encourage you to give as part of our annual campaign [LINK].

When we were students, only 15% of our class received scholarships.  Now that number has jumped to 65%.  Just last year, [name] who was on a full scholarship to [school] was accepted to a [great school], also on a full scholarship.  She is aiming to be an engineer and is already part of an incredible research lab working on bioinformatics.  [Name] was always a leader in the [school] community, and while we aren’t surprised at her success couldn’t be prouder – and it’s a success we can all share in.

We’re hoping you will join your classmates and give this year to support this kind of success.  We all share the sense that the education we received was the foundation of so much we’ve accomplished in our lives.  Let’s do what we can to share that success with others.  Even just $10 to show your participation would mean a lot.

[nice big button – click to give]

– Class representative

This letter I’ve written isn’t even that good, but it’s a start.  It shows respect to the recipient.  It takes a stab at creating an emotional connection and allows the alumnus to ascribe meaning to the action you’re asking him to take.  It reinforces the connection he already feels to the institution.

“That’s the way we’ve always done it” is no excuse for doing something without an ounce of heart, soul, or courage.  Give all of us the respect of showing us why you’re asking, and (if you dare) take the added step of helping us understand that we already are part of something that was hugely important in our lives.

You’re contacting people anyway.  Why not try to make it good?  Lord knows it couldn’t be any worse.

Fundraising problem

~ Sasha ~ Leave a comment

Here’s the conundrum: transactions happen today, relationships build over months, even years.   Real relationship-building doesn’t conform to rules of thumb or your annual targets.  Also, if you’re building from scratch, it could take years to get from here to there.

Meanwhile, you feel like you have a fundraising problem today.  Your real problem is that you’re the only person who has that problem.  Your potential funder does not have a fundraising problem.  Or a giving problem.  She has, we hope, a “getting something done in the world” problem.

The paradox is that doing this right is a long term build and you have to be clear about what success looks like.  The seemingly contradictory mistakes you must avoid are: 1. Walking around and just seeing your short term needs; and 2. Never being ready with a real, crisp, compelling ask at the right time and the right way.

When is that right time?  It’s kind of a Goldilocks question, but if you’re not sure what your answer is my bet is that it’s sooner than you think (better to ask too soon and fail a few times than to wait too long).  Through it all, you need to experience and communicate a sense of urgency about your mission, clarity about what you’re doing, and readiness to articulate what you are trying to accomplish and how a funder can be a part of it.

But people, like dogs, can smell fear and desperation a mile away.

Generosity partnership

~ Sasha ~ 4 Comments

Yesterday I had the pleasure to spend a few hours at one of Seth Godin’s seminars.  If you believe in making a ruckus, if you’d benefit from a day of real conversation (and inspiration, and stories, and plenty of laughs) about why it’s up to you to make a ruckus, then you have to find a way to get one of these seminars.  The day will challenge you AND give you tons of tools to speed you on your way (plus great giveaways!).  It costs as little as $300 a person if you bring a group which is an amazing deal.

One guy I met there, who will soon be running a school, told me that he couldn’t get his old school to pay for the seminar (“they felt like the couldn’t quantify the value of it”).  So a trustee who is a fan of Seth’s sponsored him instead.  I love the notion of not being able to quantify the value of day that could accelerate someone’s journey to becoming a transformational leader.  Kind of a “it’s warmer in the summer than it is in the country” analysis.  (Value of becoming a transformational leader = more or less infinite, right?)

Anyhow….

Seth did a session on nonprofit fundraising, which he led off with a riff that began “Fundraising is a generosity partnership for both people.”

Let’s pause get our heads around that for a minute.

A while ago I succeeded in creating a ruckus by writing a manifesto for nonprofit CEOs.  In it I argued that we have to reinvent fundraising, first and foremost by discarding the notion that what we do as fundraisers and nonprofit leaders doesn’t have value.  Of course it does, and when we realize that, when we really own that, we change everything – power dynamics, the sense of our own worth, our motivation and courage to get out there and tell our story, everything.

I still think this is all right, and nearly four years later I’ve also figured out that it’s not the whole story.

“Fundraising is a generosity partnership for both people.”

For both people?  That means we have the chance to be generous. Us.  The fundraisers  Wait, isn’t this about someone else giving?

If fundraising is a generosity partnership, that means we have something real to give, something of value.  That means it’s not just that we need the courage to get to the starting line and recognize that we’re doing something worth paying attention to.  We need to go a whole lot further and recognize the true value of what we are offering:  the chance to make a change in the world; the chance to be part of a group of like-minded people who won’t accept the status quo and who wake up every morning to fight for change; the chance to create meaning and healing and hope and possibility.

When you say it like that it becomes obvious that these things are worth the same or more than the philanthropist ends up giving – they have to be, or why would she give in the first place?  The philanthropists knows this, that’s why she cares and that’s why she gives.  We are the ones who forget it.

“Fundraising is a generosity partnership.”

So when you lack courage, when you’re hiding, when you’re doing everything but getting out there and telling your story, when you’re doing everything but building your tribe and raising the resources to do what you’re here to do, your mantra is:

I have something to give.  I have something to give.  I have something to give.

Something that’s really worth something.  Something that’s worth everything.

Take a cue from the gym

~ Sasha ~ 4 Comments

I used to have a 45 minute (or longer) drive to work, and NPR saved my life.  90 minutes of intelligent programming a day made the drive almost bearable.

So it was with some nostalgia that I listened last week to the WNYC spring fundraiser, to an interview with Mark Bittman and an offer to get his new cookbook for free if you donated “$180, or became a sustaining member for just $15 a month.”

I can’t figure out why you’d focus on $180.  $15 a month is the pitch.

Think about your gym membership which, in New York, will run you about $100 a month.  There’s a reason why New York Sports Club doesn’t advertise that you can join for “just $1,400 a year.”  It’s the same reason that I never think about the fact that having two iPhones costs me and my wife nearly $2,000 a year, that DirecTV costs about $600 a year…and on and on.

Take a cue from the gym – pitch monthly recurring donations every time.

Fundraising math and electoral politics

~ Sasha ~ 2 Comments

When I first joined Acumen Fund in January 2007, our goal was to raise $100 million in philanthropy in 24 months.  Like lots of things in life, a little ignorance goes a long way – I didn’t have direct fundraising experience and basically had no idea what it meant to raise $100 million in philanthropy.

We split things down the middle and set a $50 million target for 2007, and it was my job to lead the team to hit this goal.  Most of my energy in the early days was on building the fundraising pitch, figuring out the systems we would use, putting in place the building blocks that would set us up for success.

But, as I said, I didn’t have direct fundraising experience and a big part of what I needed to do was to get out there and fundraise.

What I remember like it was yesterday was when, in the spring of 2007, I personally closed my first $100,000 donation.  This is a lot of money, and I felt pretty chuffed that I had pulled this off.  I got the confirmation of the donation in an email while I was heading home, and I recall thinking, kind of vaguely and absentmindedly: how many of these would I have to pull off for us to hit our $50 million goal?

It sort of seemed like the answer to that question should have been 50, but of course it wasn’t, it was 500.  I would need, in the coming 8 months, to get 500 people to commit to give $100,000 each to reach a $50 million goal.

This is elementary math, but as anyone with fundraising experience will tell you, with a small team and a small organization, getting 500 people to commit to giving $100,000 is nearly impossible – the only way you’re going to hit a $50 million goal is either by creating a machine that can raise, say, five-hundred thousand $100 donations OR you focus your greatest effort on getting a very small number of $1 million, $5 million, even $10 million donations.  (We did the latter).

While I’m positive that I could have successfully divided $50 million by $100,000 long before I had my job at Acumen (in second grade, say) until you’ve sat in a fundraising seat (CEO, head of development, Board member, political candidate, etc.) you won’t feel the reality of this math in your gut.

This brings me over to the Presidential election and Super PACs.   Until recently the most you could give was $2,300 to a candidate, $30,800 to the national party, $46,200 to all candidates and $70,800 to all PACs and parties.  Under the new rules, Harold Simmons, who was described yesterday by the NY Times as “a wealthy Texas businessman,” has personally given $14 million to a revolving door of Super PACs supporting various Republican presidential contenders (Perry, Gingrich and Romney).  Simmons and another two dozen individuals have given more than $1 million to Republican Super PACs – their collective contributions total more than $50 million so far making them “easily the most influential and powerful political donors in politics today.”

So let’s be totally clear: what the fundraising math tells us is that these 7- and 8-figure donors are the entire center of gravity, they are dominating the US political system, they will end up having undue influence over both over the outcome of the electoral process AND the future decisions of our elected officials.  The gravitational force of this group, on both the Republican and Democratic side, is a black hole in the democratic process, sucking up whatever light was left in a system that was already mostly broken.

My real hope is that what is going on today with Super PACs is so beyond the pale that it could actually create a whiplash effect and give momentum to campaign finance reform…but I color myself skeptical on that count.  Less outlandishly improbable, 2012 will be an aberration and we will soon revert back to the old, still-broken system we used to have that, at least, was better than this one.

20 questions every fundraiser must be able to answer

~ Sasha ~ 12 Comments

(subtitle: this is why I can’t for the life of me understand how “fundraiser” became synonymous with “not totally integrated with the core work of the organization”)

  1. What are your top three priorities right now?
  2. Where will the organization be in 5 years?
  3. What’s your annual operating budget?  Walk me through it.
  4. What does success look like for the organization?
  5. How will my donation make an impact?
  6. How much do you spend on overhead?
  7. What’s your long-term vision for sustainability?
  8. How much cash do you have on hand?  Is it too much or too little?
  9. What is your organization’s theory of change?
  10. What are your biggest challenges?
  11. How much cumulative funding has your organization raised since inception?
  12. Help me understand social impact and how you measure it?
  13. What else can I do to help you – I want to give more than money?
  14. Who are your competitors and how do you compare to them?
  15. Can I meet your CEO?
  16. How much did you grant/fund last year? How and why did that differ from prior years?
  17. If I support you, I’d like your organization to do ___________ [this project/in this geography/with these partners].  Will you?
  18. How can our organizations work together?
  19. Why are you passionate about this work?
  20. [ADD YOURS HERE]

[UPDATE: thanks to a copy-paste slip-up, two of the items on the list were the same.  So #20 is now blank so you can add your “best question” in the comments section!]

How do you find a great Head of Development?

~ Sasha ~ 7 Comments

I’ve been asked this question a lot, and was asked it again the other day by the CEO of a growing, successful nonprofit, so here are some thoughts.

First, let’s clarify who’s asking the question and what this means about what they’re looking for.

For a long time I’ve argued on this blog that the nonprofit sector has radically misunderstood what fundraising means, what fundraising jobs are, and, consequently, how to staff the fundraising (“development,” whatever) department.  To recap: it’s not separate from “the real work.”   It is core to your strategy, to who you are, and to how you deliver on your promise to the world.

There’s a lot of talk about what “traditional fundraising” is and isn’t, and whether in the brave new nonprofit world in which we live, we need to re-imagine fundraising (yes) and what a fundraiser looks like and does (probably).

I think part of the reason we’ve ended up walking down the wrong path is because professional fundraising was born in a university setting – which unfortunately is a poor model of what most nonprofit fundraising is really like.  Referring to the 2-by-2 matrix below, I’d describe university fundraising squarely in the bottom-left corner: “existing constituency” and “primarily execution.”  That is, there is an established constituency (alumni) with an existing ties to and strong relationships with the university, and the role of the professional university fundraiser is largely to execute on a set of giving targets for this constituency.  University fundraising for really big donations can certainly drift to the top left corner of the matrix – think new chairs, new fields of study, new departments – but by and large the ability of the Development team to regularly and significantly impact the overall university strategy in the short- to medium-term will, in most cases, be limited because of the sheer size and scope of the institution.

Contrast this with the world of the startup / growing nonprofit: it has no constituency and its strategy and aspirations are evolving, expanding, taking sharp turns.

Suddenly it’s obvious that you’re looking for a different set of skills than what’s needed in a big, established institution.  An organization in the top-right corner is mobilizing resources against an idea with no defined constituency in place, and it is going through a period of its evolution in which there will be a constant interplay between the financial resources that can be mobilized, the promises made to funders and the overall organizational strategy.

So how do you find a successful top-right corner fundraiser?  There are no simple answers, but I think that this role is different enough from the traditional nonprofit fundraising path that you don’t need to put “demonstrated track record” on the top three list of things you have to see (great if it’s on the list, but you have to decide in advance if the absence of that disqualifies folks.  I’d say it doesn’t).

This is a terrifying notion if you don’t know what you are looking for, so I put together this list of things I’d be on the lookout for when scouring those non-traditional resumes:

  • You want someone you want to be with, someone who has both the gumption and drive to get the first meeting and who is consistently interesting, personable and engaged enough that he’ll consistently get the second meeting.
  • You want someone who cares deeply about your organization’s mission, who has a personal reason for being there
  • You want someone who can tell the whole story of the organization, who can dive in and across the organization and get into the weeds with folks, but who naturally thinks in and talks in terms of narrative.  The person absolutely doesn’t need to be (and won’t be) an expert in everything you do, but they have to have the intellectual facility and curiosity to get their hands dirty.
  • Inevitably you will want someone systematic, because when you have a few people (your team) managing a lot of donor relationships, you’ll need to build some sort of systems to make the whole thing work.  The level of sophistication of these systems will vary, but if you want to build something lasting for your organization, you’ll need to build more than your funding base and your funds raised – you’ll need to build out HOW you do this in the long term.
  • Gumption (whoops I’ve said that twice now…maybe I should say it a third time), fearlessness, drive and passion go a long way
  • Obviously they have to be articulate
  • And finally, if you’re looking for nontraditional cues that might indicate success, you might look for people who have an element of performance / “it’s showtime” in their background.  This could be artistic, athletic or even military, but some element of: “the lights are on…now go!”