Fundraising Directors – How to Find, Connect & Engage New Funders More Consistently

Even though, I raised millions of pounds for various causes since 1994…. like many fundraisers I could not help but notice, my job of growing the income year on year kept on getting tougher and tougher.  And definitely, much more pressured as the years went on.

I and my fellow fundraisers throughout the sector seemed to be stuck on our own “fundraising hamster wheels” – get the money in as quickly and as cheaply as possible, reach target, grow the income.  All and any money is good, as long as it comes in with no or very limited strings attached (stewardship will be granted within the charity’s rules – the less we need to do/can get away with the better).

And although I could see it was getting harder to connect with prospective donors, the only answer seemed to be increase the existing effort, so my team (like the rest of the sector) hired more staff to increase our “more of the same”  efforts.

In short, if we wanted to grow our fundraising income we grew our fundraising staff base, so we could do more of the same, even if what we were doing was proving to be less effective as the years went on. 

BUT the odd hard-fought win (because despite it all we still manged to pull in the wins) kept our fundraising noses to the grindstone.

I sensed for a long time the “old ways of fundraising” – the stuff that had served me so incredibly well was either already out of date or becoming so rapidly.  My fundraising tactics of old were aging in dog years.  But the problem was I (like the rest of the sector) didn’t have an alternative approach.

I still wanted to raise money to grow my charity’s income year on year, retain and grow our donor base, develop the relationships and grow the networks.  I wanted my team to have the rewarding jobs they signed up for, I wanted the donors to enjoy and benefit from our relationship, I wanted for all of us to learn and develop professionally. 

But more than anything, what I really wanted - and truth be told what I really really needed, was to stop THE CONSTANT worry about:

• Staff wellbeing and how much I knew this was way more stressful than what my team expected when they joined.
• The severe lack of networks and how hard it was to “open doors” to connect with enough prospects. GDPR and closed application processes were wreaking havoc with the old school directories and internet research. Getting leads and chasing people who did not want to be chased was (as one of my Trust Fundraisers put it) “a joyless drudgery”.
• The odd big win was great but how could we make them replicable? Far too often they were one off or unique in some way or another.

Mentally, carrying around a constant laundry lists of nagging doubts is far from healthy, especially when I struggled to turn it off outside work. 

Even the most confident and experienced fundraiser can be forgiven for letting, self-doubt and the worry of “am I good enough” take up residence, in the back of the mind - it’s never a helpful tenant to have hanging around.

Everyone else was in the same boat as me – stuck on their own hamster wheel.  In fact, 20 plus years in fundraising meant I was not short of going for fundraising coffees, lunches or drinks after work (remember those) with experienced and talented fundraisers. 

Relatively speaking, all the teams I led were doing well, we were still raising money, landing the odd big fish and meeting target (even if it was by the skin of our teeth).  

BUT fundraising was getting harder.  Mainly because we were constantly trying to connect with prospects who did not want to give us advice over coffee, come to an event, have a meeting or whatever excuse we were trying to conjure up to get in front of them.

In fact, our prospect list had proactively set up systems, processes and hired staff to keep fundraisers from doing the exact thing we wanted to do – connect.

I now know the main reason I was constantly worrying was because:

The old ways of fundraising were then and are now the HARD ways to fundraise. 

Much of the old style of fundraising is out of date, because the external funding world has changed but the internal world of fundraising has not adapted enough, mainly due to the sheer and relentless pressure to deliver income as quickly and as cheaply as possible. 

But the fundraisers pay the price.  The constant worry and need to come up with excuses to connect with your prospective audiences is no longer the fun job it used to be when we were more aligned with our external audiences’ needs. 

And then it hit me.

If donors do not want to be chased anymore stop chasing.

If donors are now proactively looking and want to find their own charities to support – our fundraising job needs to include a proactive strategy of being FOUND.

Fundraising now needs to evolve into a mix of connecting with those who are still happy to be approached and for all those (in growing numbers) who prefer to seek, our fundraising job is to make sure we are putting ourselves in the places they are looking – and starting the relationship by getting someone’s attention in the manner in which they wish to play this new game.

We need to work with the external funding environment and stop the “joyless drudgery” of trying to find excuses to make closed doors open. 

In 2019, I decided to embark on my own personal mission.  How to find a way to consistently put a charity/project/brand out into the world, so your best fit prospective donors (or major donors’ philanthropy advisors) who are already proactively looking can find you, and would want to connect.  And then how to create a system ready to respond even if you have a small/zero staff team, so you can repeat the process over and over to make what you do scalable.

And in doing so…….(and this was the big one), would that then rid fundraising jobs of the constant worry, joyless drudgery and restore the levels of fun and love that seemed to have buggered off somewhere around 2009 ish. 

Well the first thing was no one in a full-time fundraising job can pop off on a mission of discovery. 

There were three major roadblocks that stopped me from trying to figure out how to adapt fundraising to be much more fit for purpose and NOT hardwired for the wrong century, while in an actual fundraising job:

ONE: the pressure to deliver is obviously turned up to the max, and as you know, you’re already going like the clappers on your own fundraising hamster wheel of choice, making anyone in fundraising far too time poor and stressed rich to really do anything at the depth I wanted to.

TWO:  you’re part of an internal team with all sorts of brand rules and regulations, which is fair enough but doesn’t help if you want to throw caution to the wind and really test what works and what doesn’t work.  Not being able to fail ironically massively reduces your chances of success.

THREE: charities want everything to be low risk, new really means copying what someone else has already proven works so you can start to integrate it into your own fundraising mix, but I could not find anyone doing anything I had not done before, or solving the key problems that I suspected  were the ones causing the much more stubborn symptoms I wanted to tackle.

A much better option for me was to go solo.  Set up as a one-person shop, research and try stuff. 

Try all the stuff I was curious might or might not work, to really have the freedom to suck it and see.  If I go solo, I have no rules, no brand to risk, no fear of failure – I could just experiment to try and figure out:

How do I match the internal needs of an organisation (the ability to get in front of decision makers quickly and effectively), with the external requirements of the donors/customers (so I could open those otherwise closed doors) to reach an income target. 

And much more importantly, could I sus out how to do it only using a process I could repeat over and over again, so I would have a worry-free plan of action to follow. 

I spent months, researching which industries were doing well and how they were doing it.  Once, I got under the skin of what they were doing, the next steps were to take all the different elements and adapt them to fundraising.  It was not possible (for far too many reasons to list here) to just copy what works in various industries, so I modelled it.

Finally, after months of research and testing individual elements of the process (and learning a boat load of what works and what doesn’t work).  I manage to boil everything down into a simple plan.

I know how to fundraise and how to fundraise well.  The timeless bits are the “human bits”, because even if all the tools in the toolkit change – fundraising is human to human and good old human nature is still our reliable friend.  For simplicity I stripped my new fundraising/getting customers approach right back to basics:

• The ability to generate enough good, qualified prospects – if you cannot actually connect and engage with enough potential donors you cannot convert enough people into donors – the top of the pipeline is and always has been the most crucial. So step one; the ability to ensure you have enough qualified prospects coming into the top of the pipeline in a consistent, GDPR friendly and reliable manner- which means you can stop struggling and worrying about actually having enough people to ask in order to reach your target.
• A good strong case of support – one you do not need to keep tweaking to get your audience to resonate with, a good case of support does the heavy lifting, bad ones close doors. Step two; a clear framework spelling out everything that should be in the case of support and how to position your messaging – so you can put your value proposition out into the world without a human (be found remember).

Repeat donations and upsells – to grow your income you first have to hang onto what you have and be able to trade up a decent proportion of it. If half your donors are coming in the front door and running out the back, you now have a replace and stand still strategy NOT a growth one. Step three; make all stewardship plans fit for purpose, stewardship sows the seeds to the next donation, stewardship done well is new business, but only if you set it up right in the first place.

Then the trick was to make the whole thing digital for any and all income streams, especially the hardest to connect with ones.  

I took all the things I had research and learned and started to implement them for my own business, I was my own guinea pig.  It worked.  I then repeated the process and it worked again.  I have since turned everything I learned into a simple framework that any charity of any size can follow.

If you find fundraising hard because you cannot engage enough prospects, or you are constantly reinventing yourself for every ask – your fundraising tactics need an update rather than doing more of the same.

You don’t have to stop what you are doing obviously, but you can add another string to your bow, in order to connect with all the people who will not respond to a direct approach.

With the benefit of hindsight, I now know I was constantly worrying about how to connect to enough prospects, because what we were doing was out of date for a growing number of donors. 

I had not figured out that what I really needed was to be found by those people who were looking, and the worry was caused by my lack of knowledge about how to get found consistently, and in a manner that I could control.

When you know what to do and your actions repeatably get the results you need, the fun absolutely comes back and kicks the worry and stress into touch.

Fundamentally, fundraising is human to human, if you serve your donors well and engage with them how they wish to engage you can develop more relationships (go figure).  The biggest problem with the “coming up with an excuse to open a door”, is firstly they see you coming…secondly starting a new relationship where someone is trying to pull a fast one is never a great starting point.

For anyone reading this who thinks the hardest part about fundraising is getting in front of enough of the right people, knows if what you are doing is not working for enough prospects, you need an updated plan more than - more closed doors to knock on.

I managed to pull in business as one person with zero brand, zero staff and absolutely zero IT skills just a decent plan that matched how people wish to engage rather than trying to approach anyone cold, which is great.  BUT more importantly, it was fun and people were happy to contact me.

I am still on a mission to help fundraisers update their fundraising strategy, so all fundraisers can grow their income.  BUT I’m even on more of a mission to help you take the worry out of your job, and have much more fun by having a solid process to follow.

If you would like a free copy of the process I follow as A Fundraising Strategy on a Page it’s HERE

Here’s to your success.