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Where did the week go? Time management help for fundraisers

Fundraising | Tom Eeles | 20 Aug 2010

Ever catch yourself wondering what you do with your time? Tom Eeles has found a new app which can help perenially multi-tasking fundraisers.

So how exactly are you spending your time? Ever had that conversation with your boss? Your board? Your team? Yourself? Fundraising is a multi-skilled and multi-tasking discipline.

I’m writing this after a week of intensive donor research for a few clients. The week has gone in a whizz of Google searches, interviews and spreadsheets. Fundraisers are project managers, interviewers, investigators, reporters, salesmen, researchers, financial wizards and contract experts. To put together a donor appeal, a grant application or a black tie dinner can require thousands of small and big tasks to be done. If you are a sole fundraiser or a chief executive in a small charity wearing many hats then you can probably relate to this even more.

So if you have ever asked yourself that question or been asked by your boss, your board or your spouse then you might well have had several hacks at time recording. Do you have a dusty folder on your PC full of aborted time management and project plan excel sheets? Or a long abandoned and now befuddling colour coding flag system in your inbox or calendar or task pane? Time management; what a pain.

There are a million different methods out there for prioritising time, with Steven Covey’s book “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People” being my salvation in times of need. But until now I have never seen a genuinely easy to use time management app. And in fact I have seen two. 2Do Lite available in the Apple App Store for free is great if, like me, you rely on to do lists to get domestic and work chores out of the way.

But the real revelation for me has been FreshBooks Time Tracking. It’s designed for freelancers who need to bill project time to clients. But it works really well as a simple time management/recording/analysis tool for fundraisers. You can set it up with projects and tasks, for instance a particular fundraising project and the various tasks you’ll need to work through to get the money the project needs. You can see a report of a week or a month at a glance and pivot it any way you want. You can even set a stopwatch so that your hour long research task doesn’t mushroom into a two hour, three hour, OK just until lunchtime...kind of task. It sits nicely on your desktop and can be used on your iPhone too for when you’re away from your desk. Check it out and consign the spreadsheets to history.

P.S. The image is a classic here in Switzerland, it’s the clock used in every signal train station in Switzerland and it’s such a popular icon that the watch and domestic versions are very popular (and pricey).

P.P.S If you have a better time management/recording/analysis app please do comment below...

Tom Eeles is a fundraising consultant based in Switzerland

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