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...

So, you are the Development Director or Head of a Department. The person the charity has hired to bring in the money. Your job is to grow the income, grow the donor base and either get the charity out of financial trouble or keep it from getting into it. You may be like the majority of Development Directors who have been hired to save the day, the person the rest of the senior management team and the Board can now hide behind as its your job to generate the cash. In fact, when they say it’s your job – what they really mean is it is NOT theirs, they have hired their way out of trouble. Hello you.

If the charity is in trouble or just simply needs “fast” cash generation, your sole job will NOT be to diagnose what put it in this situation in the first place. It will not be to spend time planning how to course correct or how to get your ducks in line to create a sustainable and donor focused fundraising entity. Your job WILL be to...