philanthropissed

Every so often I google “fundraising masters” to see what the state of grad programs in fundraising is. Don’t get me wrong, I love my current job, but I like to keep updated on what’s going on in that arena in case I do eventually want to go back to school.

Sometime in the last year or so, Columbia added a Master of Science in Fundraising. It’s a 4-year night program that allows you to work full-time. As a Stanford grad who was not happy with the other options were (University of Indiana, NYU) I was excited to see a great school like Columbia offer a master’s in fundraising. I was even more excited to see that one of the mandatory classes was BUSI  K4010. Managing Human Behavior in the Organization.

It’s no secret that nonprofit organizations have a dearth of great managers. Fundraising in particular has this structure where, once you’re really good at raising money, your next promotion tends to be one where you manage people. But nonprofits rarely have the money to train good fundraisers in how to be good managers. So people who really have no business managing people wind up doing it, all the time.

My current manager is a good manager, and I tell her that a lot because I’m so grateful that I can’t help but gush about it. I think it actually embarrasses her. But to me it’s worth recognizing, because I and many of my friends raising money for different types of nonprofits have all experienced the misery of working for a bad manager. Most of these people aren’t purposefully awful; but they don’t know how to identify with and motivate their employees, have no people skills, and are generally afraid of change and content with the status quo. It doesn’t matter that they don’t intend to suck, the net result is the same – bad management, unhappy and unfulfilled employees, high turnover. And turnover is so common (the average lifespan of a fundraiser is 18 months per nonprofit) and such a hindrance to fundraising programs, especially in small development departments, that this is something we should be worried about.

So I am very excited to see Columbia cognizant of this problem and making a management class mandatory. I hope it has a hands-on component so that each student gets a chance to see good management in action. Of course it’s not going to solve the current industry-wide problems in funding that make management training impossible, but at least the future fundraisers will be schooled in it a bit before they can make someone else’s job a crappy one. Every master’s program in fundraising should include a similar course.

Columbia is making me rethink my “never move to New York” outlook on life….

I have a lot of money to raise from individual donors before the end of the fiscal year on June 30. There’s too many prospects to really be able to focus intensely on all of them while juggling grantwriting and event planning. Ah, the perils of being a one-woman DIY development department.

So which group do I focus on?

• Subscribers?
• Individual ticket buyers?
• Prospects suggested by the board?
• The segment with the highest dollar value out in asks from the last appeal?
• The segment where we have the deepest relationships?
• How do we judge that last one anyway?

I think the answer is obvious: I shouldn’t guess.

For context, I began this job a couple months ago. I don’t have important institutional knowledge that longtime development directors do yet. But I still have to do the job and raise the money.

I should not guess at which segments to focus on.

If I had more time, I would interview my organization’s best, longtime donors – and my organization’s best new donors. I want to know how they became donors. Is there a common pattern or two that will emerge and help me figure out the most successful methods of identifying and developing donors for this theater – and in tough times, choose who to focus on and how to make the approaches?

I want to know:  Did they subscribe or buy tickets before donating? What was the vehicle for their first gift?  Their most recent gift?  How have they been involved since donating that first time?

I don’t have time to do interviews, analyze the results, and implement a course of action between now and June 30. But I can ask my other resource – my executive/managing director, who is a fount of institutional knowledge, to brief me on the answers to the questions above for 15-20 major or longtime donors, and make sure I’m not missing anything huge. I can’t get stuck in analysis paralysis right now. It’s too costly, especially for fundraisers, where time literally is money. I must do.

But interviewing my donors is now something I plan to embark on as a long-term project – and now that I have time to flesh out the concept of the donor interview, there’s so much more that I want to ask. Like:

What angles or marketing approaches that we use appeal to them? Is it the ones that staff and board think are appealing, or is it something else – something that we’re too close to the organization to see? Do they respond to our messaging about the art, or weathering the financial storm, or neither? Do they even care what we’re doing to fight the downturn? Are they annoyed when we ask for money by email if they usually write checks?

I think the answers to these questions could have implications for our fundraising far beyond the current economic crisis. I spend so much time trying to figure out how to motivate donors that sometimes I forget that some of them like us enough to let me flat out ask.

And you know that old fundraising adage…”If you want advice, ask for money. If you want money, ask for advice.” So maybe my long-term strategy will pay off in the short-term after all?

Fundraisers: what would you ask your donors in an interview about their giving – and how would you choose which donors to ask?

I had a brilliant idea while watching a Quark-centric episode of Star Trek: DS9 the other day. I’m going to do an integrated blog & Twitter commentary series on the Ferengi Rules of Acquisition and fundraising.

Here’s the first one: “Once you have their money…”

(answer after the jump, silly!)

I am big on authenticity. Part of that is just me hating the moments in my career when I was forced to be something other than myself because it was difficult, or felt uncomfortable. I used to feel so boxed in all the time, this perfect little suit-wearing representative of the nonprofit that is worth donors’ money. I would hesitate to let my guard down in case one of my IMPORTANT RICH BOARD MEMBERS™ might be around.

But I also believe being authentic is the right thing to do – no one wants to live in a world where the one thing they can trust others to do is put on a false front because it’s WORK. Like work is this thing that you need to stop being yourself to do. On the contrary, I think your work will be at its best when you are true to yourself, your personality, your patterns, and the way you build your environment to create success for yourself.

So I try to blog authentically too.  I almost did this blog anonymously, practically salivating over the potential opportunity to write about former asshole bosses and clueless foundations with as much snark and scathitude (I made it up, deal with it) as I wanted. But then I realized that wouldn’t help me connect with anyone. And after all, why I am I writing, if not to reach out and connect with other nonprofit workers and leaders slogging it out in the trenches/cubicles?

But the perils of putting your true self out there are many. I woke up this morning, opened up my Google Reader and followed a link to a shitstorm over at Penelope Trunk’s blog, Brazen Careerist.

Penelope (or Adrienne) is my inspiration when it comes to being authentic in my work and in my writing. I’ve written before how she’s been the cause of certain realizations of mine and how I think we’re very similar. She’s been a champion of letting go of the walls we build between us in the workplace, and of honesty and realism in work and relationships. I love her Twitter feed and Facebook updates and all the embarrassing minutiae she posts that most people would try to keep from others. She is a wildly successful person who lets it all hang out, for good and for bad, and I have the urge to do that in the worst way.

You can read the post and the comments and make your own judgment. I think she overreacted to @DavidDellifield’s comment about her kids, but I also know I would have done something similar, if not an exact reproduction of her response. It reminds me of the time I came home from spending the holidays with my parents to a handwritten proselytizing note in the mail from someone in a local evangelist Christian group and I went on a giant tear where I was going to write an anonymous note back to them and make them feel shitty for pushing their religion on me and invading my space. I had to be talked down from the ledge on that one, mostly by people on an internet community for Boston, where I used to live. Yikes.

Anyway, some people in the comments support Penelope, and some of them rip her to shreds and say they’re never going to read her blog again. They would be doing themselves a disservice, I think. Because she is just being herself. She doesn’t pretend that she is perfect, that life is perfect, that all children are angels who can do no wrong, or that your actual skills and competence in the workplace are more important than whether or not people like you. Penelope lives and writes in the real world, where people have difficult choices to make, way too much going on to always be able to prioritize well, or JUST CAN’T FUCKING DEAL RIGHT NOW for whatever reason. The people who are shitting themselves in the comments and unsubscribing must be perfect themselves, as they only seem to want to read posts or advice from a perfect person.

I posit that it doesn’t do us any good to live in “the should.” We live in “the what is,” not “the should,” and no one is perfect. That’s why I left fuck in the sentence in the last paragraph. In caps. Because, in real life, I swear. A lot. And swearing is fun, and it’s almost as fun to write fuck as it is to say it.

I wish I could email my past self Penelope’s current blog entry and frame it with a note to her. “Look at this,” it would say. “You don’t have to be a perfect little tabula rasa at work all the time, editing out all the best parts of yourself. Successful people don’t try to whittle away their personality or work around it. They find a way to harness it and be themselves. Do that and you’ll be golden.” I think I could have saved myself a lot of trouble then.

But I still have a lot to learn. I’m not perfect, and I’d rather seek sources of encouragement and wisdom from people who don’t operate under the assumption that we all are or even should be. I’d rather learn from someone like Penelope. Her imperfection is my inspiration.

I’m taking a moment to file some acknowledgments (I use a binder for fiscal years; anyone else got a better system?) and I smiled when I saw a recent stack. The top acknowledgment was to a board member who is universally adored by our staff. One of our leaders who signed the acknowledgment not only signed it in a colored pen, but drew a hot sauce bottle on the letter and wrote “Tabasco cuz u r hot, baby.” Other letters go out with smiley faces, hearts, and exclamation points.

Maybe it’s just a function of working at a theater with a really playful brand, but it makes for a happy development gal when the leadership uses their authenticity so naturally like that. That’s how you build relationships – it starts with being real and accessible.

While it sounds like a big “DUH,” personalizing solicitations or acknowledgments can be a harder than it seems, and I’m glad that it comes easily to my current leadership.

More importantly, problems in effective personalization often point to more systemic problems at the organization. Let me end with an example or two.

Example #1: A former boss at a past organization would agonize over what he/she wrote on the acknowledgment letters and try to be really strategic, referencing life events or that their kids went to the same school, etc. He/she spent too much time trying to engineer relationships where they didn’t exist yet – and because he/she wasn’t being authentic, I thought many of the “personalizations” fell flat  or otherwise felt faux. It was too much, too soon for most of the donors – which was the story of our development efforts.

Example #2: Another former manager who was chief development officer thought he/she ran a tight development ship – but acknowledgments were never hand-signed, much less personalized by anyone in staff or volunteer leadership. It was a matter of volume – an organization with thousands of annual donors. But if volume keeps  you from being effective or taking minimal strides to create good relationships, then you know what? You don’t have enough development staff. And if you asked anyone in development at that organization, where the development staff numbered in the teens (versus four at the org above and just me at my current job), 80% of them or more would have told you they felt overwhelmed by their workloads.

I received a solicitation letter in the mail today that was pretty well done – well executed, easy to read direct mail format and great storytelling. Except, it way, way overused the italic and bold and underline. Sometimes even bold, italic  and underline at once.

I like what the organization does. I’ve given to them before (in fact I still have a balance on a pledge I’m supposed to be paying). But when I stepped back from my knowledge of direct mail tactics and shed the fundraiser identity, and just looked at it as a donor – I felt insulted. Yes, I have limited time, and you want to use bold and italics to call my attention to THE MOST IMPORTANT STUFF in case I decide to skim. I get it.

But the letter made me feel like they didn’t trust me to read it – or care. Now, trust is the single most important thing an organization can establish with its donors. But it has to start with the organization – showing that you’re trustworthy, but also that you can extend trust right back.

Donors are your investors, not playground kids who you can condescend and trick into giving you money with strategic bolding. We don’t blithely throw money at you, especially in this economy. So treat us with respect. If I have enough affinity towards your organization that I opened the letter, trust that I will read it and make an informed choice.

I live in Seattle, and I love the alternative news weekly The Stranger. Mostly because I have a penchant for mouthy liberals who openly acknowledge and cherish their slant. Their blog the Slog is my #1 most read feed in my RSS reader.

Right now,  the Slog is doing  a series call Notes from the Unemployment Line, following the experiences of several individuals in different fields who have been laid off and are trying to stay afloat. Today’s installment rang a bell in my head about a potential upside to this down economy.

Sophia, the focus of the article, wrote about her interaction with a homeless pregnant teen living in her car.

Yesterday I limped my oil-hungry car past a teenage homeless girl, her hood pulled down low against the rain, her hand holding the requisite cardboard sign. The sign said: “Pregnant. Live in car. Need money for food and gas.” I couldn’t give her anything besides my Trader Joe’s Mixed Nuts, but I did feel blessed that I’m not in a situation like hers. And why is she not getting help somewhere?! Being unemployed and seeing all this stuff makes me want to go into social services.

Come to think of it, I see two potential upsides. First, the recession means that many people are accessing social services for the first time, or like Sophia, finally able to put themselves in the shoes of social service recipients. When they get back on their feet 6 months or a year or two years from now, they’ll have a much greater empathy for these folks, which is the starting point for them becoming a donor or a volunteer.

Secondly, people like Sophia are beginning to think about working in the nonprofit sector. There are so many barriers to being a happy nonprofit worker – low pay, long hours, minimal resources, the uncertainty of funding – that anything that motivates people to consider working at a nonprofit is a huge win for the sector – even if right now, we’re all complaining because our funding has gone down the toilet.

Keep it up, Slog. I hope someone else saw Sophia’s quote and thought about volunteering or donating to a social service organization because of it. I know I did. But then, I always am….

Today I submitted a grant application to the National Endowment for the Arts for my organization’s hopeful chunk of the $50 million American Recovery and Reinvestment Act funding for the arts. The NEA will make grants of $25,000 or $50,000, which means that only 1,000 – 2,000 organizations will receive funding. Not that many if you think about it, especially considering that industry insiders believe that 10,000 American nonprofit arts organizations may close in the next year.

The purpose of this funding is to preserve jobs in the arts sector. Great. So why did the sentence below appear in the application instructions?

REMINDER: Salaries, wages, fringe benefits, and fees that are incurred in connection with fund raising (e.g., development staff) are not allowable project expenses.

This is really short-sighted. For many organizations, the only thing that will help them create jobs in the future is money raised from the community. You need fundraising staff to be able to raise this money in any kind of intentional, sustained way. A short-term infusion of cash for artistic staff will help in the immediate, in the RIGHT NOW, but refusing to fund development staff at all means that organizations who want to use the arts stimulus money to insulate themselves from even greater future economic damage are shit out of luck.

Part of me thinks that it’s related to the general stigma around fundraising. But if the current economic crisis has taught us anything, it’s that our society as a whole can’t continue to function through models that are unsustainable in the long run. We have to have foresight, and we have to use it. This applies to the nonprofit sector as much as the finance, banking, insurance and auto manufacturing sectors.

Shame on the NEA. I know that because it’s a Federal agency, it would take an act of Congress to change this little point that taunts me so,  and there was no time to do that before the application process needed to start. But it’s short-sighted, and provides disincentives for organizations that actually have their act in gear and have a sustainable fundraising program to keep them growing.

You know you’re really engaged with your nonprofit when the angle for your next grant proposal strikes you after midnight, and you are in bed, and you get up and go out and wake your computer up and spend 20 minutes emailing yourself the structure of your argument and fleshing out the details.While your fiance waits patiently.

When I feel this way, it makes me think I may never have been fully and truly engaged at past organizations. I always did the work. But I really, really care about this place.

And it’s up to me to keep it open. That’s a scary, but ultimately empowering thought.

I signed up for a NYTimes online account last week. It takes you through one of those generic demographic quizzes before allowing you to sign up, ostensibly (hopefully!) so the NYTimes can better cater to its audience if it knows them better. Who are you? How old are you? What is your income? What is your occupation? I have no problem answering any of those questions until the last one.

That’s because these kind of information gathering forms rarely seem to include nonprofit occupation options. Usually there will be a “nonprofit” option under industry, but that’s about as far as it goes. You won’t see Board Liaison or Program Assistant or Development Director as an option on most of them. Perhaps you’ll see Executive Director.

This points to the larger issue the square-peg for-profit world and the round-hole non-profit world. There are many parallels – sure, we both need accountants – but you can’t stuff for-profit perspective on the social capital sector. It’s frustrating that no one seems to be willing to to take the time to capture accurate, segmented data about nonprofit workers in these marketing surveys. Given that nonprofit workers make up 10% of the United States’ non-agricultural workforce, I hope that they get their acts in gear.

I want the right to be harassed and annoyed by companies I give my information to in a way that will genuinely harass and annoy me, not in a way that would harass and annoy a business development professional at a for-profit company. God. Get it right, people.