I’m asked this almost daily. As an Aussie who has fundraised in Australia, the UK and now North America, I feel I can answer this question reasonably well. So grab a coffee, arm yourself with pencil and notepad and prepare for some real gems, the answers to all your fundraising prayers from across the pond, the ‘next big thing’ that will revolutionize your organization.
Actually you can probably sense my sarcasm. For the answer is ‘not bloody much’. In reality, donors behave the same, people (and I include fundraiser’s) don’t like face to face (also know as direct dialogue – basically signing up monthly donors on the street and door to door), I hear the same myths, barriers, and excuses and, as I have found out several times recently, fundraisers universally generally aren’t sure why they need more money and what direction the organization is planning to take.
Though fundraisers world-wide seem to have an energetic passion for their cause they are often the poor cousin in the charity family. In my first few months in Canada, I met with over 100 fundraisers in different situations; in new business meetings, when delivering training and at conferences. When I meet with a fundraiser for the first time, I ask two key questions. Firstly what seems a fairly simple question: why do you need more money? Secondly, what are the organizations growth plans? Invariably I get blank stares to both questions – and often not for lack of asking on the fundraisers part.When I go onto probe them about the makeup of their fundraising program, income levels, number of donors etc, again I get lots of confused and embarrassed murmurs and a raft of reasons why they don’t have the information with them.
We need this data to make informed and sensible decisions about where we are headed and how we are going to get there. These things are intrinsically linked. It’s no wonder we struggle to articulate why we need more money if we aren’t even sure how much money we raise and how many people support us!
Can you imagine a lawyer trying to defend a client without the evidence (data) and precedents to support their case, or a surgeon about to operate on a patient without their medical history and summary of previous operations of that kind?
The answer is they wouldn’t. And why should we, as fundraisers, allow ourselves to make decisions affecting out beneficiaries without having access to this information? This is not a Canadian issue, it is an international one. So let’s stop making excuses and start arming ourselves with real data that allows us to take stock of where we are, understand where we want to go and how we are going to get there. What data do you use to base your decisions on?
