KNOWLEDGE

Making big gifts is most often a function of age. The older you are, the more capable you tend to be of making a major gift. It’s perhaps one of the few areas where it’s more beneficial to be older rather than younger.

Giving is local. While there are exceptions to the rule, the vast majority of contributed dollars from Americans stay within a 25-mile radius of their home.

What gets measured gets movement. If there is accountability against a goal and the moves taken to get there are evaluated, fundraising success is significantly greater.

You can’t make a poor person wealthy, but you can make someone with capacity more connected and passionate about your organization. Focus on those with the gift of capacity and drive their affinity higher!

The best fundraisers know that 80-90% of success is just showing up. Not to dismiss the value of expertise, but consistently and intentionally showing up makes a huge difference. Even Mother Theresa knew it, saying “Just show up and things will happen.”

Fundraising is a blend of both art and science. While analytics can help identify capacity and affinity, the fundraiser connects the dots on the emotional appeal of an ask, the timing of the request, the proper amount, the recognition to be offered, and the relationship to the solicitor.

Your current donors are your best prospects for future gifts. Proper stewardship assures that donors remain active prospective donors in the pipeline. While acquiring new donors is always necessary and important…donor retention is critical.

A challenge for many fundraisers is often not producing sufficient philanthropic revenue (exceeding fundraising goals) across the entire team. While hitting personal fundraising goals might prove more simple, It can be difficult for the fundraiser to manage other fundraisers and people within a development department. Managing “down” isn’t always a strength for hard-charging, goal-oriented, fast-paced, no-nonsense, high-expectation people, which is how I describe a lot of top performing solicitors.

Many people assume fundraising is all about the ask. If you’re good at asking, you’re a good fundraiser, right? Not necessarily. While it does help to be an effective solicitor, in reality, the art of fundraising is dominated more by relationship-building activities that include education, volunteerism, stewardship, listening, and sharing.

Developing a matching gift and/or challenge gift strategy is often an effective path toward creating necessary urgency and momentum toward achieving a particular fundraising goal. The donor creating the match and the participating donors in the match both feel like their gift is levered and maximized.

While the rest of the world sees challenges and problems, the best fundraisers see solutions. If you ever want good advice, seek the counsel of a good fundraiser because they spend their professional lives contemplating solutions and finding opportunities where most find none.

Effective fundraisers are the chameleons of the nonprofit world. They blend in. They adapt to their surroundings. They thrive no matter the environment. When your success hinges on relationships with people that couldn’t be more different – donors, staff, volunteers, Board members, etc. – thank goodness for the capacity of the fundraiser to adapt.

Fundraising is often not cookie-cutter or templated work. The popular word of the day is “bespoke”. Talented development professionals are capable of personalizing, customizing, tailoring the approach so that it appears to be the perfect fit for the prospective donor.

Specific requests to prospective donors more often produce positive outcomes. These specific requests help create a vision in the mind of a prospective donor and help define the specific solution you propose to meet. Often the word “specific” is interpreted to mean a specific dollar amount. This can be true, but it can also be “specific” in terms of funding a well-defined opportunity, initiative, or item. Either way, prospective donors are often highly motivated by the specificity of a request.

The ask itself is but one piece of a much larger puzzle that must be all put together with a prospective donor. The ask piece is important but is sometimes a piece that is overemphasized to the neglect of other pieces that play an equally critical role.

Creating and sustaining a culture of philanthropy within an organization, where every single member of the organization is taught continually to value philanthropy, and where active participation in philanthropy is encouraged and rewarded, is rarely prioritized. Because of this, so many amazing opportunities are regularly missed.