How to Manage Fundraising Challenges in 3 Main Areas of Your Nonprofit
Posted by [email protected] on Apr. 13, 2022 / Subscribe 0
By now, nonprofit organizations across all sectors are no stranger to overcoming adversity in its many forms. Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, 38% of fundraisers reported planning around a potential recession; 29% reported planning around a presidential election; and 42% said changes in staffing will affect their annual planning, according to a 2019 Nonprofit Research Collaborative study.
While you can never truly know what’s next, you can be intentional about your goals, create contingency plans, and nurture your organization from within. It can help to compartmentalize your nonprofit into three main areas.
Your organization’s culture
Nancy Koehn, Chair of Business Administration at Harvard Business School, studied how social-change leaders have dealt with challenges since March 2020. In a recent online briefing - called Leading Courageously in Unparalleled Times - Koehn offered nonprofit executives advice on how to maintain momentum:
- There’s no separation between home and work anymore. Nonprofit managers have to gain a much deeper understanding of how things that happen in the home affect their employees’ work.
- Your role as a leader has never been more important. And that role is suddenly more complicated. Nonprofit employees are thirsting for guidance and integrity, says Koehn.
- Strike a balance between supporting and motivating your staff. AFP IDEA Survey Reveals an Urgent Need for Inclusion, Diversity, Equity & Access in the Nonprofit Workplace >>
- Err on the side of communicating too much. “If there isn’t there isn’t credible evidence that you mean what you say, people will desert you,” she says.
- Nurture your own needs, too. You can’t pour from an empty cup. Koehn recommends that each week, you should focus on no more than three mission-critical things that you can realistically achieve.
Your donor journey
LinkedIn Top Voice in Philanthropy, Robin Cabral (CFRE) says it is imperative that you begin to move your efforts digitally in the aftermath of the pandemic, and that you focus on how you acquire and retain donors. “Once your prospective donors have traded their email for your lead magnet, it’s time to enter them into an online and offline cultivation stream,” she says.
Cabral’s 5 steps to a strong digital acquisition program:
- Develop online donor personas. Identify past online donors, identify website visitors and their behavior, and develop an ideal constituent profile to become much more personalized in your approach. Spend time learning about donor preferences.
- Understand lead magnets. Lead magnets are incentives that offer up a specific reward in exchange for a user’s email address. Leads can be e-books, webinars, cheat sheets, discounts, quizzes, or a course.
- Identify all of the different touchpoints that you will use. These touchpoints don’t all have to be digital. They can include both offline and online strategies, i.e., emails, text messages, video, telephone, in-person visits, etc.
- Align each step with a goal just as you would be designing strategy moves for each of your major donors. Each phase or level should aim to increase the donor’s engagement and interest in your organization and help them to feel good about possibly becoming greater involved in your efforts.
- Develop a system in your CRM and its integrated communication tools. The method you use should allow you to build out each segment of your journey using things such as automated emails, calls, etc., and then set your system free and let it do its job.
Your operational workflows
Inter-department collaboration is necessary for your operational tasks, so wires don’t get crossed when doing your donor acquisition and cultivation work. On any given day, you need to see who talked to which donor, about what, and how recently.
Each employee who communicates with your donors will need access to this information, ideally via desktop, mobile, and tablet. You want to ensure that your fundraising CRM allows you to send and schedule reports that keep everyone on the same page, view your high-level metrics and upcoming appointments on a real-time dashboard, and if needed, customize your security settings to restrict access to sensitive information.
As a nonprofit professional, managing the many challenges you face will always be part of your job. Fortunately, as an industry, we see dark times as an opportunity to roll up our sleeves, and the last few years have shown us a resiliency we didn’t know we had.
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