Every foundation wants to see its grantees succeed in raising the resources they need to carry out their work, so when an organization requests money to hire a fundraiser, it’s tempting to jump at the chance to help.
But, at the Evelyn and Walter Haas Jr. Fund, we’ve found that grants to bring on a development director or a consultant often fall short of the kinds of transformations that both we and our grantees had envisioned. Sure, there were organizations that benefited and saw some positive changes, but most were disheartened to find that their daunting fundraising challenges stubbornly persisted.
Foundations can play an important part in helping grantees recognize that smart fundraising is about more than having the right person in the development-director job or the right consultant at your side. Providing fundraising support for nonprofits will take more than quick fixes. As grant makers, we need to help organizations move fundraising from a technical or administrative function to a central leadership priority.
We have learned some of these lessons in the past seven years in a program we offer to provide flexible, multiyear grants to strengthen the leadership of almost 50 grantees. And last year, we joined with CompassPoint to conduct a survey of more than 2,700 nonprofit executive directors and development directors. The report underscored the frustrations of development directors as well as the high levels of turnover and churn in the field of nonprofit fundraising.
So what have we learned about what foundations can do to help?
Start by considering the grantee’s readiness for fundraising support. While our grantees often identified fundraising as their most urgent leadership challenge, we found that many simply were not ready to flip the switch on a new campaign. In those cases when we started helping an organization with fundraising too soon, it showed.
This led us to ask ourselves a question: Just what are the building blocks for fundraising success? Here’s what our experience so far tells us are the critical elements that help ensure that nonprofit fundraising efforts can be successful over time:
- A well-articulated long-term vision and goals. Organizations need to be able to tell their story in ways that are compelling to donors.
- A sound set of strategic priorities. You cannot develop a credible fundraising plan if you do not have a clear sense of strategic priorities. Period.
- A committed executive director and senior team. A significant number of executive directors simply are not engaged in fundraising or don’t like to do it. That’s a surefire formula for failure. Executives and other senior staff members need to be champions of this work.
- An engaged board. The study we did with CompassPoint confirmed what many of us already knew: Too many boards are essentially tuning out when it comes to fundraising.
- A realistic analysis of potential revenue sources. Not all organizations should try mass fundraising campaigns online or seek to attract major gifts from individuals, despite the popularity of these strategies.
We now evaluate organizations seeking fundraising money based on these criteria. If an organization isn’t ready for fundraising help, we start by helping it strengthen its leadership and capacity to seek donations first.
Help nonprofits find the right consultants. For groups that are ready for dedicated fundraising support, hiring a consultant is wise. But after years of helping grantees hire consultants, we’re convinced that nonprofits often need assistance choosing the right kind of help at the right time.
The array of choices can be dizzying. Some consultants offer specialized technical knowledge in one specific aspect of fundraising (such as special events, proposal writing, or online fundraising).
Others provide high-level strategic guidance to boards and executive directors without getting into the nitty-gritty of translating plans to action. In the worst case, there are a few consultants who recommend their own “patented” approach to every development problem, no matter how different the organization or situation.
The result of this confounding array of options is that many nonprofits end up working with the wrong consultants. For example, we’ve seen grantees engage consultants with deep technical skills when they would have been better served by working with someone with expertise on broader fundraising strategy.
This raises obvious questions for grant makers: How can we better help organizations figure out what type of assistance they need and when?
For our grantees, we’ve found that the most effective consultants are usually those who do two things: First, they bring the right technical expertise for the organization’s needs; and second, they work alongside the organization’s leaders as a coach to help them develop their fundraising skills.
It’s not often easy to find someone like this, so a deeper question for foundations and nonprofits may be this: What can we do to increase the supply of talented fundraising consultants who bring that combination of technical skills and coaching expertise?
Provide support for new development directors. Even when consultants provide the right kind of help, they can’t overcome one of the biggest challenges facing nonprofits today: The demand for strong development directors outstrips the talent pool.
Many nonprofits simply cannot find or afford a development director with the experience they seek. So they end up bringing on someone with more passion and promise than actual experience and hope they’ll learn the ropes as they go.
This sink-or-swim approach usually isn’t successful, so we’ve helped grantees design on-the-job training and support for new development directors as they grow into the position.
Sometimes this means pairing new development directors with consultants who coach them during their initial months on the job and assist them in identifying priorities for strengthening their organizations’ fundraising capacity and setting up basic fundraising systems.
In other cases, the consultants help the new development directors forge close working partnerships with board members and senior managers.
For example, where appropriate, the consultants advocate that fundraisers be included in meetings of the nonprofit’s entire management team and get involved in key strategy and budget decisions.
Chronic fundraising problems are a major source of stress and anxiety for nonprofit leaders and are only exacerbated when well-intentioned efforts by foundations don’t produce results. If grant makers can get smarter about how to help grantees gain more fundraising traction, it will not only relieve that frustration but, more important, fuel powerful advances for the causes we all care about.