Bust out of the campaign-to-campaign cycle by going sustainable.

The statistics coming out of The Chronicle of Philanthropy (“Desperately Seeking Fundraisers,” November 2022) have shown a growing crisis in the fundraising sector. 48% of fundraisers say they are likely to leave their current organization and 28% say they are likely to leave the field entirely within the next two years. That’s because 82% of us feel unappreciated and burnt out. That’s a staggering number, and a real threat to the nonprofit industry.

When I talk to fundraisers about WHY they feel so burnt out and done with the sector, I get a variety of answers: 

• Board/leadership set fundraising goals based on unachievable dreams, not reality.

• The endless hustle of events and campaigns.

• Lack of support from board/leadership/colleagues, but tremendous pressure to succeed.

• Vacant jobs within the department increasing workloads (related: unable to hire the support we need to reduce workloads).

• Not enough time to focus on priorities and better, bigger opportunities.

• Feeling undervalued and overworked.

What I see beneath all of this is a frustration around the inability to build sustainable programs. And I’m not blaming fundraisers. Too often board members–with no fundraising experience–look at another organization’s successful event/campaign/raffle/whatever and decide “if they can do it, why not us?” and they demand their fundraiser add yet another item to the calendar. And exhausted fundraisers just nod and accept this is the status quo for our industry.

But I want to tell you something really hopeful: You don’t have to say yes. In fact, you need to say no. Because effort-to-effort fundraising is the reason you’re burning out AND it’s the reason your fundraising program isn’t growing the way you want it to.

There’s a better way; I promise. I know, because I’ve built programs where fundraisers feel empowered, supported, and successful. It’s what I did as an on-staff fundraiser, and it’s why I started FIT Strategic Consulting…to teach others how to do it themselves.

Here’s how you get out effort-to-effort fundraising and move into a program that is long-term, sustainable, and will actually grow:

1. Hit the breaks…hard!

When you go from spring drive to summer 5K to fall gala to year-end fundraising, you’re moving too fast to stop and think. You’re also so busy with getting the next donation that you’re not cultivating the donors who gave you the last donation. When your fundraising calendar has events every month or two, you’re too deep in it to get the 10,000 foot view. If your program isn’t getting the results you want, adding another event/campaign is unlikely to get you where you need to be. Because here’s the thing, if you’re tired of asking, your supporter base is probably tired of being asked. You need to stop, clear your calendar for at least a quarter, focus on gratitude for your current donors, and re-think your fundraising framework.

2. Review your data.

I speak to fundraisers all the time that don’t use a donor database or say that it’s so out of date it’s not reliable. Others say they keep it up-to-date well, but they’ve never stopped to analyze data. I’ve written a lot about why you need to review your data and how to do it, and that’s because it’s absolutely critical. When you review your data, you see patterns.

I had a client who swore they couldn’t sustain their mission without their annual gala. After we reviewed their data, we discovered that in fact their gala was COSTING them more than it was GAINING them. Their gala, after expenses were deducted from revenue, only netted $2,000. On top of that, their donor retention rate was 12%! Because they’d relied on a gala, they’d trained all of their supporters to expect something from them in exchange for their donation, and after establishing that expectation for years they couldn’t pivot those donors to mission-driven giving easily, and once donors tired of their annual event, they didn’t care enough about the mission to donate without the exchange. In fact, in a call campaign to most of their donors we discovered that their donors didn’t even remember the nonprofit’s name until they were reminded of the event. YIKES! Even a very top-level review of their data revealed that they were headed in the wrong direction, when they had previously been really proud of the “quality” of their annual event. It was a fun time, but it wasn’t a money maker.

3. Learn about relationship-based, mission-centered fundraising.

Too much of fundraising is transactional–tickets for events, tote bags for donations. It’s no wonder we can’t get donors to come back. They aren’t actually donors, they are consumers. We have to pivot to relationship-based, mission-centered fundraising.

Let’s take that client you learned about with the under-performing gala. We dropped the gala (brave, bold, amazing!), and we created a new peer-to-peer fundraising campaign that was mission-aligned and promoted the work of the young artists the organization mentored. The Campaign, Bucks for Beats, asked the organization’s donors to listen to songs created by young artists in their program, every song written to talk about what the organization had meant to these young people. The campaign raised as much as their gala, in a quarter of the time, while promoting the young people they were serving and elevating their voices. The “expenses” for the campaign were program-based expenses because they were providing professional development to their young artists. The funds raised helped fuel the organization, and, best of all, their young artists got a lot of publicity. The first campaign didn’t raise much…but it did net as much as their gala. At the end of the day, everyone on staff was so much happier with this campaign because it didn’t seem like a distraction. Best of all, the development manager called every donor who gave to the campaign, and they were so excited to learn more about the organization and 50% wanted to be more involved.

(Contrast that to their gala where most donors didn’t remember who the organization was.) Getting creative and thinking outside the box yields results. And you’re never going to learn how to do that for your organization by looking at other organizations–because nobody’s mission and community is quite like yours. Being mission-centered and relationship-based means creating campaigns that work for you, and you alone.

4. Go on a listening campaign.

One of the first things I do as a new development director is to call every single donor to the organization I’m working for. Every. Single. One. I ask them why they’ve supported the organization in the past. If they are lapsed, I ask why. I ask them what they love about the organization; I ask them what they don’t love. I ask them who else they support and why. This data allows me to build those mission-centered, relationship-based fundraising programs I talk about. When I talk about this on webinars, so many people treat this concept like a revelation…but why is it such a unique idea to call donors and get to know them? I think because so much fundraising wisdom out there is based on “trending tactics” and “best practice.” Honestly, I don’t believe in best practice (beyond some clear ethical guidelines, like trauma-informed storytelling and AFP’s Code of Ethics). I believe you find what works best for your nonprofit based on your mission and your community. The best fundraising campaigns I’ve ever been a part of were crazy outside the norm, but worked because they reflected the community of the nonprofit. You can’t do that if you don’t know your community inside and out.

5. Create your ideal donor persona.

In for-profit marketing, campaigns are crafted around customer personas. Marketing big-wigs put a lot of time and effort into thinking about the demographics of the people they are trying to sell a product to, and they craft campaigns based on how they can reach them and what messages will resonate. In non-profit marketing, we’re trying to “build awareness” and “educate the public” about our nonprofit by being everywhere and anywhere. No wonder we are overextended and seeing small results! When someone says “we’re build awareness,” I hear “we’re lacking focus.”

We can’t be everywhere at the same time, and no message is going to resonate with everyone. So you need to take a page out of the for-profit book here…understand who your donor is. Older donors don’t give in the same ways as younger donors, and they don’t hang out in the same places. An 80 year old donor is very unlikely to be hanging out on TikTok ready to give you money via Venmo. Now, if you’re trying to reach a new, younger audience, by all means, go build out your TikTok. But if you are trying to draw your 80 year old donor into a legacy gift…TikTok isn’t where you need to be spending your time.

Start with building some donor personas (and you should have more than one). But think about who out there would care about what you’re doing. Really think about it:

• How old are they?

• What gender are they (it’s okay if it’s all of them, but often in my experience donor bases have percentages that don’t reflect the broader public)?

• What’s the household dynamic (married, children, caregivers)?

• What job are they more likely to have?

• Where do they go for fun on the weekend?

  All of these questions help you paint a picture.

  Try this exercise: Write an email appeal to your generic donor base. Then write up your donor persona…give the persona a name, a gender, a life story, a job, a hobby…heck, go to a stock photo website and find a picture of this imaginary person. Now write another email appeal to that person. Compare your two appeals.
  I have my clients do this all the time, and they are constantly startled at the difference in the two. You want to guess which one is more powerful?

6. Write a new fundraising plan based on donor retention and sustainability.

I’ve written about this a lot…but donor retention is absolutely critical. I see too many organizations going after new donors when their retention rates are in the teens and twenties. That means of 100 donors they bring in, tops 20 of them give again the following year. That means you put time and effort into 80 other donors that don’t come back. The next year, let’s say you bring in 100 more donors. You’ve only got 120 donors…and if only 20% of them come back again…that’s a painstakingly long time to grow a program.

Now let’s say you get your donor retention up to 60%, that’s 60 of 100 donors coming back. Next year, you bring in another 100 donors, you’ve got 160 donors…and 60% of them come back. Now we’re talking much more growth.

The only way to do that is to de-prioritize new giving and focus much more energy on stewardship programs. The great news is that once you do your listening campaign and build your donor persona, you’ll likely have some really great ideas on how to keep your donors engaged. Pick a donor engagement schedule (I do a high-impact touch quarterly, and a low-impact touch monthly…so like an open house quarterly with a personal update monthly); and you can automate the heck out of your stewardship program. (Join my group coaching program, and we’ll get your stewardship program up, running, and automated so you can grow in your first quarter in the program.)

7. Time box your program so that you have time for everything (and so you can push back on additional demands).

I love time boxing. I learned it from Nir Eyal and his book Indistractable; here’s his article on how to do it. As a development director, I time boxed everything that was important to growing my program so that I knew I had time for it every week. Time for calling donors, for copywriting, for forcing my ED to make calls, for coffee chats with major donors. This both helped me maintain focus where it needed to be every week (and I scheduled each for the times I was best at these things…copywriting first thing in the morning, coffee chats at 3 pm when I hit the afternoon slump). It also helped me push back on meeting requests; I treat my time boxes like meetings. No moving them unless it’s critical. If that additional staff meeting is important enough to move a donor meeting, then I move it. If it’s not, then my appeal writing appointment takes precedence.

Did I ruffle some feathers when I did this at first at each organization? For sure. Were people following my lead with in a few months? Always. Be the change…right? Make the time, and keep to the time. That’s how we make sure we build high-performing programs.

8. Learn to say no…and use data to back you up.

Once you’ve analyzed your data and figure out what campaigns are and aren’t worth keeping; once you’ve written out your goals and your plans, you absolutely must learn to push back on requests from your board and leadership that will take you off course. This is in fact why I advocate having a clear plan and a month-by-month calendar on pulling off the plan: you get so much clarity on what your priorities are.

When I had a clear plan and monthly calendar, when my executive director or board chair came to me with yet another idea that would take me off course, I would just pull out the plan. “Here are the goals, here is how I will achieve them, here’s what I’m working on this month to make it happen. Which of these goals do you not want me to hit so that I can add that this month?” Usually, the answer was “oh, right, sorry to bother you.” Occasionally, they would think it was a high enough priority to reduce one of the goals…but we would agree on it, understand that expectations were changing, and know what that meant for the organization. This is how you say no and stand your ground. When it’s opinion vs. opinion, you’re fighting a losing battle because the ED or board chair will pull rank. When you have data, goals, and plans, you’re in a much stronger negotiating position.

9. Prioritize your time building relationships: it’s about the slow build not the tomorrow gift.

So when you time box, make sure to add time every week for donor calls and donor meetings. Building relationships with your donors is an activity you absolutely can’t delegate or automate (or leverage ChatGPT for). And honestly, in an age where so many nonprofits feel like donor engagement is clicks, your donors will find you endlessly refreshing for engaging them IRL.

I know, it’s so hard to prioritize that when you have a massive revenue target you have to hit. But I promise you the long-term payoff is worth it. Make sure you’re thinking about next year’s gift as much as this year’s gift. When you think about lifetime giving over this campaign’s giving, you think really differently about your donor program.

10. Build relationships with other fundraisers in the trenches.

This job is HARD and this job is isolating. So often we are the sole fundraisers at an organization, and we’ve been locked in our little silo and only get to look out a tiny window into the program work. (A) If that sounds like your organization, let’s have a chat. Fundraisers fundraise better when we’re incorporated into program…but that’s another blog post for another day. (B) Chatting with other fundraisers and seeing what’s working and not for others is so helpful.

Need help with that? We’ve got you! Schedule a discovery call today to see if we can bake up a better fundraising recipe for your nonprofit so this year’s bake can rise to new heights!