Fundraising Directors - Are you paying through the nose by agreeing to unrealistic targets?

So, you are the Fundraising Director or Head of a Department.  You’re sitting in yet another Board/Senior Management meeting discussing the need for more money fast.  There is not enough income to meet this year’s target and the discussion as always is starting to descend into the Trustees/Senior Management team “making suggestions”. Like many Fundraisers you know exactly what’s coming next and are ready to “close this conversation and the resulting action points down”, because what’s coming is:

• Let’s just ask more people for money, especially rich people – find them and ask.
• The income streams we have are not working. Let’s introduce a new income stream and allocate a large target to this untested, un-resourced and unknown income stream.  And, let’s hire the most junior/cheapest/inexperienced person to set it up from scratch.
• Let’s stop raising restricted income and make all our asks unrestricted.
• Let’s put on a golf day, ball, fun run or some type of low income but labour-intensive event. We can get a sponsor to cover the costs and make this part of someone’s role on top of their existing remit.
• Let’s pile the pressure onto the strongest income stream to help the weaker ones out (so we can drag that one down too). Or worse, lets focus on the weakest income stream to build it up and stop raising money from the stronger one (that seriously happened to me).

What is notable by its absence is:

1. You are in fact, fundraising to stand-still as fast as new donors are coming in existing donors are walking out, but all conversations are still based on the false premise the more new donors you secure the more you build/grow. For many charities, churn is never recognised or discussed at Board or Senior Management Team meetings.
2. All these conversations are about your charity, your needs, your timeline. These conversations never discuss - the donors and what they want and why, or your fundraisers’ need to create the ask, keep their belief in the charity and personal motivation high, despite the donor and the person asking being “the fundraising”.

But you are painfully aware of the above, you spend your life trying to shield your team from unrealistic targets or the ever-changing goal posts.  And you certainly know the needs and wants of your donors, and you know why you have churn.

That said, Trustees/colleagues are not purposely trying to make your life a misery (and you know that too) they are trying to make the books balance.  The clock is ticking on this financial year and income is short, they are trying to help.  Even if their help is to pick a destination only - and you’re left organising the transportation to get everyone there.

Except, this is not your first rodeo.  You were once new to your role (either here or at another charity) and tried to work with your colleagues’ suggestions.  You did not want to be obstinate, so you did compromise on some of the suggestions and inflated targets even though you knew it was far from a good idea.  And boy did that bite you on the arse!

You are not going back to the “yes let’s compromise” days.  The days when you agreed to things, you made your reservations clear, you raised your concerns verbally and in emails.  Everyone recognised your concerns but agreed the charity needed to do it anyway.  Then bingo, as soon as you said yes, it was yours.  Your responsibility, your target and your job to absolutely deliver it.  The next thing you knew, you were in meetings being quizzed by the very same people as to why something you said you could do was not happening fast enough or not at all.  Their tone soon changed to “you agreed to this so now you must deliver it, or at least justify to us why you cannot”.  Arse - well and truly chewed.  Nope you and your arse are not going back there.

It is, however, a genuine problem if the Board/Senior Management team do not understand fundraising, because they get to set the culture that fundraising operates in.  And the culture is what really sets the whole fundraising team up for success or failure.  As a senior fundraiser you need to be able to work effectively with your non-fundraising colleagues and BE the internal donor advocate, being so is how you best serve your charity.  You need an effective way to get colleagues to understand how fundraising works, what sets it up to succeed and what sets it up to fail.  Setting goals with a bunch of tactics attached or making up “uninformed” suggestions at Board meetings which then becomes someone’s reality in the fundraising team is not a strategy.  

Setting unrealistic goals which is usually the outcome of the “oh God it’s all about to hit the fan” Board or Senior Management meeting described above, is of course THE worse thing you can do or allow to be done at any point.

You do not need to read this article to know setting unrealistic fundraising targets is a bad idea for several reasons.  So, lets skip the obvious reasons and jump to the “pretty obvious but never articulated, and not followed as a golden rule which it should be” reason instead.

Goal Setting for Humans

In order to meet a fundraising goal, there needs to be a consistent effort expended over a period of time.  The effort must be on-going, it is this on-going effort (or the lack of it) that has a direct impact on results.

Most goals are achievable – it is the time restraints that change the whole achievability.  Raise £30K in however long it takes versus raise £30K within a month are two very different asks.  Salaries are your biggest expense making your team’s time your most precious resource.  Setting goals boils down to judging and managing time.  Do you have a clear process? In other words, do you know what is high value/productive work and what is not for each income stream? Is your team consistently focusing on high value work?

Personal belief/conviction/confidence in being able to accomplish a goal directly sets a person’s energy and motivation levels.   

If a fundraiser strongly believes they can accomplish a goal their energy and motivation is high (which is a great and very real feeling) – their goal pulls them. 

If a fundraiser believes their goal is unrealistic their energy and motivation is low (which is a horrid and very real feeling) – their goal pushes them back towards inaction, they must muster willpower to push themselves.  Willpower is never on tap nor is it sustainable. 

If a fundraiser believes they can accomplish their goal, when a donor says no – it is part of the learning, it helps to inform who to target and who not to, it refines the case of support and it confirms conversion numbers.  This fundraiser believes in their ability to accomplish a goal – success is learning applied and that learning needs to know what works and what doesn’t work in equal measures.  This fundraiser cannot fail as a no adds equal value to their learning as a yes.  They are not fundraising one donor at a time.  They are out to discover how to best fundraise for their charity. Who is most likely to support us, repeat give, gain most value out of this relationship and who is not and why not etc.? 

This fundraiser is not only fundraising this fundraising is learning how to accomplish this goal, reinforcing their belief they can achieve it and therefore setting their motivation levels on high and setting their goal pull to max. 

Success is likely, and with success comes proof they are capable of fundraising for your charity.  Belief is now confirmed which feeds motivation rocket fuel.  Next time you set this fundraiser a goal this is the new jumping off point.

If a fundraiser believes they cannot accomplish their goal, when a donor says no – it is demotivating, it’s a setback, it is also confirmation that they were right not to believe in this goal.  If belief goes down drive and motivation go down, so now willpower must work even harder (willpower is unsustainable and usually doesn’t show up when you most need it).  Remember a key ingredient to success is consistent effort over a period of time, this fundraiser is going to struggle with the consistency, the lack of success further confirms their beliefs that this is not achievable.  A win will lift their spirits but unless the win is going to wipe out the whole target and put this fundraiser at the finish line, one win will not be enough. 

This fundraiser is fundraising one donor at a time, it is not part of a wider learning curve as the focus is to get in any money. 

“Cold spray and prey” is usually their key if not only tactic (which is why they thought the goal was dead on arrival in the first place).  A no is not equal to a yes, a no is a kick in the teeth.  This fundraiser also has the added issue of being outside their comfort zone, because they are doing something they think is going to fail (given their skillset or the charity’s lack of network, case of support, decent budget, impact evidence etc).  This is not comfortable or sustainable, so their protective self-talk comes to the rescue with “I believe I am going to fail, so it is better to give up now”.  Belief is still in charge of motivation, so they are now highly motivated to quit – even if that is just mentally.  They will still turn up to work every day (for now).  Being outside their comfort zone also comes with fear of failure and fear of public humiliation.  This fear can push them into doing “busy” work because “busy” work is within their comfort zone but it is not the high productive consistent work needed and it is still costing you time (your most expensive and precious resource).  Sadly, most charities then react by throwing in micro-management for this fundraiser too, which confirms their manager doesn’t believe they are capable of this goal either.  The very goal the manager set/agreed to themselves.

Now take these two scenarios and image a whole team, department or charity……

Externally, fundraising has become more competitive than ever and we are in the attention economy (everyone is highly distracted).  The cost of acquisition is therefore on the up and set to get higher.  Your fundraising must be driven by applied learning, you cannot afford for your fundraisers not to be your eyes and ears testing everything, why not let this logic also feed their motivation and drive. Reframe your goal setting.  Make your goals as much about learning/testing/motivating and energising, as they are about raising funds. Think more like this:

“We must set goals that our fundraisers/people truly believe are achievable, this will allow them to apply consistent effort over an extended period. Personal energy and motivation are critical to our success and must be protected.  Belief and motivation are one of the same and cannot be separated, we must respect this.  All goals should energise. We as a charity need to learn how to best serve our donors (not all donors just the donors that best suit this charity).  To do so we need to know what works for us, and equally what does not in order to truly focus our efforts and clarify our messaging.  Understanding and knowing how to best win in our marketplace requires a process of testing and learning, we must give our people the space and time to seek this knowledge.  Knowledge is needed if we are to achieve our ultimate goal of financial stability”.

By setting this as a wider rule BEFORE you set any goals your people cannot fail, because a no is still a win.  If you cannot fail, you cannot fear failure or be outside your comfort zone.  You enable belief to work for you, to create goal pull.  But above all you enable people to become the people capable of accomplishing fundraising goals for your charity – affirming their belief in their ability to win – feeding their motivation and energy.

How do you make this part of your wider strategy?

Having worked as a Development Director for organisations with strong abundant cultures to moving to one with a shocking scarcity mindset (and all the problems that came with it). I created a one-page framework which I intend to share as a series of on-line webinars as of 20th June for 5 weeks followed by a one to one coaching call, Registration will open on 11th June and close on 14th June. 

I developed the framework to help Fundraisers make “human friendly” fundraising plans. In short, I think we need to put the human firmly back into our planning. Let’s set goals people believe in, let’s set schedules people can consciously commit to – as much for themselves and their own development as the charity’s ability to fundraise. After years of fundraising, for big, medium and small charities I have seen the same “bolt on” fundraising approach over and over. Frustrated leadership that keep asking where the money is while creating the very internal spaghetti that keeps its fundraising bogged down. But in recent years, something new started to happen, the internal spaghetti went digital, and the more digital it has become the more the human in our “planning” and conscious thinking has been squeezed out. But as the plans are still implemented by humans for humans – our interactions with them just got messy and sometimes even nasty. So, 20 years of fundraising with some high performing teams and Boards, a few dud ones and one so dysfunctional it gets its own category. I have stepped back and created a framework that can help fundraisers plan their fundraising using all the advantages of digital but putting the humans firmly back in the driving seat. But this time, lets also really pull in all our colleagues (Trustees, staff, donors, volunteers) and tools to genuinely bring everyone onto the fundraising bus with us and for us. The framework is simple, zoom out to see the big picture, zoom in for the detail BUT make it human friendly first. You are making plans for real people to interact with, understand (inside and outside the Development Dept) and breathe life into.

I am opening registration for my training webinars on 11th June and closing it on 14th June to limit the numbers. 

The webinars will be an hour a week for 5 weeks from 20th June, all participants will be sent a recording of the live webinar (so don’t worry if you miss the live versions).  The webinars will be followed up by a one to one coaching telephone call with myself to help further tailor your plans (hence the limited numbers). 

You can JOIN THE COURSE HERE

Helping you and your un-chewed arse move towards financial stability 😉