Has your fundraising ground to a halt?

Has your fundraising income plateaued or started to decrease? Are you failing to attract new donors? Are you concerned that your current donors are losing interest? Do you feel like you are putting in maximum effort, but are far short of your targets?

Put any of these into the context of having to juggle time constraints, budget, and organisational politics, and those who are responsible for sourcing philanthropic support for a charity can be left feeling stressed and disheartened.

What can you do?

To address these issues, one needs time - and often a fresh set of eyes - to assess what’s happening across the operation, and what can be done to transform weaker areas. This is when a consultant can help: analysing data and activity to date, pin-pointing the key issues, and then providing realistic recommendations and a sensible and structured implementation plan to improve performance across the board.

The common problems with fundraising operations

I have carried out many evaluations of fundraising operations for clients over the years, so I thought it would be helpful to share my experience and list the main concerns I consistently find across the charity sector, affecting an organisation’s ability to fundraise. Of course, there are often more than ten, although many of these tend to be pertinent to a specific organisation, so for the purpose of this blog post, I have only featured the following key themes:

A lack of…

1.      …STRATEGY. Without a clear idea of an organisation’s ambition, and what it wants to achieve over the medium- to long-term, it is hard to build a fundraising strategy to support the aims of the charity. This results in a lack of direction, purpose, and meaningful projects with which to engage prospective supporters.

2.      …IDENTITY AND PURPOSE. Without a vision for the organisation and an understanding of what sets it apart from every other charity in a specific sector – its ‘USPs’ if you like - it is hard to create a strong case for support, which resonates with target audiences.

3.      …DATA ANALYSIS. Not investing in regular and forensic analysis of your engagement and fundraising data can lead to a highly ineffective fundraising operation, which can include (among other things): continuing with unnecessary activity, an inability to report on, or see strengths and weaknesses, and not being able to set realistic targets and goals.

4.      …THANKING/SHARING IMPACT. Without thanking people for their generosity and telling people what you are doing/have done with their support, you will start to see a plateauing, or even an attrition of your donors at all levels, alongside a failure to attract new donors, as they become disengaged, and worse, start to challenge the charity’s credibility and worth.

5.      …INNOVATION. Doing the same thing, year in, year out, not embracing new ideas or creativity, and relying on what’s been done before becomes stale, resulting in supporters losing interest due to an obvious lack of effort, and being in receipt of the same old literature, invitations, cycle of activity etc.

6.      …EFFECTIVE STEWARDSHIP. Many existing benefactor schemes and stewardship programmes in organisations lack structure, dynamism, personalisation, or any incentive for people to belong, and also fail to reflect the unique donor profile of that specific charity. Getting the stewardship approach wrong can damage the all-important relationship piece, which is the bedrock of successful fundraising, as well as overly-rewarding those who have given a relatively small amount, or haven’t supported the charity in decades.

7.      …INTERNAL PHILANTHROPIC CULTURE. Having to deal with challenging internal beliefs about fundraising can be severely detrimental to an organisation’s ability to raise money, without careful management and a lot of effort. These can be wide-ranging views held by senior management, trustees, board members, volunteers or colleagues in other departments, and include old-fashioned ideas, a lack of trust in fundraising (like it’s a dark art!), unrealistic targets, failure to be ‘on-message’, or thinking money floods in at the wave of a magic wand.

8.      …PROFESSIONALISM. Successful fundraising, like any other skilled profession in a non-profit organisation requires a team with relevant abilities, skills and experience. When organisations possess the misnomer that ‘anyone can fundraise’ it can be a major obstacle to philanthropic success.

9.      …REALISTIC EXPECTATIONS. Trustees, boards, senior management etc. can often have unrealistic expectations about what a fundraiser can achieve in a set timeframe, which can lead to stress, friction, and in some cases, inevitable recruitment churn.

10.  …SEGMENTATION. Treating every supporter in the same way regardless of their relationship with the organisation, communication preferences, geographical location, propensity to give, donation level etc. can cause people to disengage with an organisation, which is turn affects fundraising potential.

Obviously, lots of these issues are interlinked. For example, it will be hard to manage the expectations of trustees and senior management if you haven’t analysed your data in order to report on key fundraising achievements and data trends specific to your organisation. Alternatively, if you haven’t worked on your segmentation, you are missing a vital element to feed into the planning of an effective stewardship programme.

Don’t panic, but don’t ignore

Many of the above issues are easy enough to remedy, although most take a while to action, and then to start showing positive results. It’s worth spending a bit of time with a consultant, and/or organising a team away-day, to help identify which ones are likely to be having the most negative impact on your operation, and then ranking them in order of severity, so that issues can be tackled sensibly and in order of priority. That way, this body of work can be done alongside the everyday tasks in a manageable and realistic way, with a gradual implementation over time.

However, if ignored or left to fester, any one of these common problems can continue - or indeed start to have a greater detrimental effect - on your ability to fundraise successfully, strategically, and sustainably. They can also lead to a higher turnover of staff in a fundraising or development team, which will create another blow to the operation, because (as mentioned above) at the heart of every successful fundraising programme is building relationships. [More on that in a future blog!]

End note

Every non-profit is slightly different, but ostensibly the basic remit of their fundraisers remains the same: to effectively generate as much philanthropic income as possible for the charity concerned. Many organisations have realised incredible results over the recent past, but even with successful operations, there may still be one or two of these common problems listed above, which may be worth actioning either by the team itself, or with the support of a consultant, to help build resilience and sustain income growth in the future.

Ali James is an independent fundraising consultant, with 30 years experience in the non-profit sector.
www.flexible-mindset.com