philanthropissed

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 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.