After hearing Dan Pallotta, author of Uncharitable, speak at the closing plenary at the International Fundraising Congress in the Netherlands in October, I know that his challenging and controversial ideas will be welcomed by fundraisers at FIA’s annual conference, Dare to Be Different on the Gold Coast in 2012.

Dan’s focus is on a big concept: are we, as a sector, able to respond to the big changes that we need to make – a cure for breast cancer, the elimination of hunger and poverty – in a reasonable timeframe? Not forty years from now, but perhaps seven? Dan’s question then, is if we’re not capable of that type of achievement, why?

Dan contends that the reason is that there are two rule books: one for charity and one for the rest of the economic world.
While much of the inequity may be caused by the for-profit sector, he argues that our society refuses to allow the nonprofit sector to use for-profit tools to bring about change.
Dan believes that the restrictions placed on charities are simply uncharitable. He looks at five main areas:

1. Compensation. We don’t like to see people make lots of money in charities. Conversely it is acceptable that people make a lot of money not helping other people or even hurting other people.
2. Advertising and marketing. We don’t like to see our charities spending money on fundraising. Imagine if we said this to a for profit company.
3. Risk taking. Taking risks to find new ways to increase donation levels. A Hollywood movie company can make a $150 million movie that flops. If a charity does a new fundraising activity that doesn’t make immediate profit in 12 months, then a fundraiser’s character is brought into question.
4. Time horizon – Amazon went for six years without returning profit to investors because there was a long term plan. Imagine if a charity suggested this?
5. Attract risk capital. ‘The nonprofit sector is starved for growth capital and risk capital, it simply can not access this.

Dan says that this view of charities is policed by the very simple but dangerous question: “What percentage of my donation goes to the cause rather than overheads?”
They key problems with this question, according to Dan, are:

1. It assumes that overhead is not part of the cause. In fact, many of the fundraisers at IFC started wearing signs that said, “I am an overhead.”
2. It means that charities don’t spend money on the things they need to solve the big problem. This is how we institutionalise the smallness of our organisations.
3. It gives donors really bad information. It tells nothing about the quality of the programs and the help that is given to the community.

The real challenge is what we do about it. Dan says there are two solutions:

1. Educate the public. Dan is working in the US to develop a charity defence council to counter bad reporting and to undertake public awareness campaign.
2. We need to prioritise our wildest dreams. We need to do everything we can to meet our big objective.

Dan’s final message was that we must speak our truth. “I am not in this to keep overhead low. I have not dedicated my life to this to meet some arbitary standard. I have dedicated my life to this because I want to see kids stop dying of diarrhea. I want to help people who are blind. I want to help all of them, not a few of them,” he said.
Dan’s message is both important and controversial. What do you think?

Thanks to the crew at xponential.com.au, Dan Pallotta is presenting the plenary session on Thursday 1 March at the Fundraising Institute of Australia Conference, and a panel session to discuss the key concepts will follow. Bring your board members, bring your CEO, bring your manager. Dan will dare you to be different and to be great. Click here to find out more or to register now.

Organisations that take up fundraising in a casual, half-hearted or even superficial way, I call ‘dabblers’.

Definition of dabble: to take part in an activity in a superficial or casual way.

Recently, I’ve come across a number of dedicated people who care about their organisations but have no fundraising experience. They dabble. And that’s fine if you’re a local sports club or community group with small funding needs, or you only need a couple of dozen donors, or $25k a year.

But dabbling in fundraising only gets you so far. If you require significant, strategic revenue for your work, dabbling in fundraising will not get you to where you want or need to be. In fact, it may even hinder you.

Nonprofit organisations that dabble in fundraising are usually doomed to a vicious cycle of fundraising ineffectively, never having enough money to get ahead and urgently needing to try and raise more. Eventually the organisation that dabbles gets to a point where they have to make serious decisions. I think that in such a situation there are two options. Fundraise properly. Or don’t fundraise at all.

Why might you say no to fundraising?

• Fundraising is not easy. There is a perception held by many organisations that don’t raise money from the public, or that ‘dabble’, that fundraising is the easy solution. It is not.
• Fundraising is not free, nor is it very cheap. Effective fundraising costs money. It requires investment and often for the long term. It is not a quick fix. Normally, money that is invested now may not see any return for at least an entire year.
• Fundraising can be scary. Effective fundraising strategies and tactics often require some level of risk, something to which boards and senior managers are usually averse. This is more the case for those who have relied on government funding for years on end. Now a change is terribly frightening.
• Fundraising is not fair. If you don’t have a cause that appeals to the broad public, or perhaps to many people at all, you’ll find it even harder than most to fundraise. Although, that in itself is not a barrier to fundraising; even if you don’t have a ’sexy’ cause, you might find that you have supporters that care strongly about what you do.

Here are just some of the options I think you could choose ahead of fundraising.

• Get a loan from a benefactor or the bank. Have a business plan to pay it back.
• If you’re running social businesses that are meant to make a profit and fund your charitable works, then make sure they are making the profit they should. Don’t fundraise to prop up unprofitable business activities.
• Invest your money wisely and use the interest you achieve (sometimes doing this will show more of a return then spending the same money ‘dabbling’ in fundraising).
• Don’t fundraise from the public. Spend more time and effort on your government grants and philanthropic trusts and foundations – these are two of the largest sources of income for the nonprofit sector. Work on becoming a sustainable organisation beyond these sources of funding. There are experts out there who specialise in this type of fundraising alone. This is often the most beneficial investment for organisations already dependent on such income.

Dabbling in fundraising is not a plan. In Mal Warwick’s The Five Strategies for Fundraising Success – the best book that I have read about fundraising planning – he argues that there are only five fundraising strategies: growth, involvement, visibility, efficiency and stability (GIVES). You can’t have a fundraising plan that does it all. You really need to choose only one or two of these and focus on them.

For example, right now, a few of the nonprofits I work with have a growth + involvement strategy. That is, their primary strategy is growth (lots more donors, giving lots more money), and a secondary strategy of involvement (more people involved in their cause and mission). The aim is that within five years they may be able to achieve a stability-driven plan (that they will one day know where most of the money they need is coming from each year).

Another important concept that Mal covers in his book is that of opportunity cost. This is the money you would have made if only you’d done things right. Dabbling in fundraising can result in you spending time on the wrong things and things that won’t lead to long-term sustainability. When considered carefully, opportunity cost may well drive you to outsource some areas of fundraising to established experts, such as those who specialise in grant funding or direct mail and concentrate your own efforts on ‘only doing what only you can do’.

If you want to fundraise, don’t dabble. Get serious about fundraising. Invest; plan for the long term. Plan for the day when your organisation knows, year after year, where most of your money will come from.

Now that would be a wonderful day.

This post was originally published on the www.sofii.org blog.

Like me, you may well subscribe to one of those cool ‘word a day’ type blogs. The other day in my inbox, the word of the day was sitzfleisch.

If you don’t speak German, you probably won’t know the meaning of this word. But then, at once, it reminded me of Ken Burnett’s recent presentations in Australia.

Ken is the author of the seminal fundraising text, Relationship Fundraising and, at the Fundraising Institute of Australia Conference, his five sessions were highly critical of the fundraising profession.

Ken lamented how bad fundraisers and nonprofit staff are at engaging with our kind and wonderful donors, how poorly many fundraisers treat our donors, and quite frankly, how inept and negligent so many individual fundraisers are.

If that sounds a little harsh, let me explain. Ken’s fundraising career has spanned more than thirty years – perhaps longer than many of the fundraising staff in your office have been alive. As he says, at his age (I won’t even guess) he’s got nothing to lose. I hope his presentation resonated with those who needed to hear most what he had to say about them. Unfortunately, I think many thought he was speaking about those ‘other’ fundraising professionals, not themselves.

Now, what on earth does sitzfleish (pronounced, SITZ-flaish) mean? Well www.wordsmith.com explained it thus:

sitzfleisch
noun:
1. The ability to sit through or tolerate something boring.
2. The ability to endure or persist in a task.

Now judging by the state of many fundraising and marketing materials, it would appear that many fundraising professionals and nonprofit managers expect their supporters, or potential supporters to have strong abilities in the sitzfleish department.

As a sector we’re just not doing well enough. Many nonprofit communications are boring, trite, arrogant and poorly thought through. Often, we make it harder, not easier, for people to support our causes. Whether it is our fundraising and marketing materials, the online donation area of our website, or thanking donors properly, there is a lot of work to be done.

Think of the tasks that you and your fundraising team do. How many of these tasks are done in a way passed down through the organisation, or just made up as people go along?

These are not unique tasks; lots of people have done them before, yet many fundraisers tend to just get on with them. They probably don’t refer to books or even research the best fundraising blogs. Driving a car is pretty simple, but we don’t just get in and do it – someone trains us first.

One antidote is to learn what works from those who invented it long before we came along. As a good start, there are a two books and two website resources that you can easily get your hands on:

Fifteen years ago, George Smith wrote a fabulous book, Asking Properly: The Art of Creative Fundraising. It looks at the process of asking, what donors want, what donors get, and fundraising creativity: from envelopes to copywriting to thinking visually.

It amazes me that so many fundraisers get on with these tasks without reading what the experts found out years ago.

Ken Burnett’s book Relationship Fundraising, first published in 1992, still remains a hugely important resource for fundraisers. As evidenced in his presentations last week, Ken remains hugely positive about the transformational power of good fundraising. He says, “Fundraising isn’t about asking for money. It’s about inspiring people to believe they can make a difference – then helping them to make it. So fundraising is the inspiration business.”

Both books are available through www.whitelionpress.com.

Then, there’s the fabulously inspirational website, the Showcase of Inspiration and Innovation. SOFII is building a timeless, online encyclopaedia that will provide future generations of fundraisers with the knowledge and inspiration they need to raise more funds for their important causes. SOFII website is bursting with hundreds of fundraising examples, tutorials and articles for you to learn from.

And the final resource is the new website I’ve been working on, www.fundraisingbooks.net. It is a brand new resource, which aims to provide excellent quality news, reviews and fundraising books for anyone who needs to raise more money for their important cause. Just pop over to the website and subscribe to the latest news at www.fundraisingbooks.net. (Scribbly Bark e-news subscribers, you will get your own personal invitation in your inbox soon).

Happy fundraising and happy learning.

A version of this article was originally published at www.empowered.org an interesting site working to build communities to take action for social change.

Wishing you health, happiness and some extra fundraising sparkle in whatever you celebrate at this time of year. Here is a fundraising books wish-list I thought I’d share – full of fab holiday reading.

Ten top books to make you a better fundraising copywriter

Whether you write fundraising letters, content for your website, donor newsletters, promotional brochures or anything else for your nonprofit organization, here is an essential fundraising books wish-list (in no particular order of excellence):

• Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, by Chip and Dan Heath. This book completely changed my thinking on how to create effective messages that ‘stick’.
• How to Write Successful Fundraising Letters and Revolution in the Mailbox: Your Guide to Successful Direct Mail Fundraising, by Mal Warwick. Time and time again, when I need inspiration for a fundraising letter, I turn to Mal and the many excellent letters and ideas he features in these two awesome books.
• Tiny Essentials of Writing for Fundraising and Asking Properly: The Art of Creative Fundraising, by George Smith. Brilliant, short and simple. George Smith is the George Orwell for fundraising writers.
• The Influential Fundraiser: Using the Psychology of Persuasion to Achieve Outstanding Results, by Bernard Ross and Clare Segal. This is a book that looks at any fundraising ask, whether written or verbal from the donor’s point of view. It also explains different communication preferences and explains the many ways people receive and process information.
• Ogilvy on Advertising, by David Ogilvy. Entertaining and excellent. If you are thinking of advertising, or already advertise, this might be the reality check you’ve been looking for.
• Tested Advertising Methods, by John Capels. David Ogilvy said Capels was the person from which he learned everything about copywriting. This book was first published in 1932 – but the currently available revised edition was published in 1998. Not a lot has changed!
• Seeing Through a Donor’s Eyes and How to Write Fundraising Materials That Raise More Money, by Tom Ahern. Tom’s books are worth their weight in gold.

What I’m planning on reading over my end of year break? The Networked Nonprofit: Connecting with Social Media to Drive Change, by Beth Kanter and Allison Fine. I’ve only read the intro so far, but I’m hooked. Here are two people who really understand the dilemma of many nonprofit staff trying to come to terms with social media and the online world. I can’t wait to finally have some time to read the rest.

Happy holiday reading, to you.

A version of this article was recently published in the Showcase of Fundraising Innovation and Inspiration blog – you can find out more here.

[note: links are Amazon affiliate links]

Tiny Essentials of Donor Loyalty may just give your organisation the good kick up the pants that it needs, and that’s just what author Adrian Sargeant thinks many in our sector need.

In the first sentence of Tiny Essentials of Donor Loyalty, Adrian says “building donor loyalty is the single biggest challenge facing our sector today”.

Can that really be true? Yes, says Adrian. There’s huge potential to increase fundraising when we get it right. “We are wasting potentially enormous sums of money by failing to address the issue,” he says.

Because building donor loyalty will mean that you raise more money. Here’s how Adrian explains:

Even small improvements in donor loyalty can have a huge impact on the returns an organisation is able to generate from its fundraising…

Typically a 10 per cent improvement in the level of loyalty now increases the lifetime value of the fundraising database by around 50 per cent… Over time the effect mounts up. Begin to look out over a five-year horizon and small improvements in loyalty achieved now can deliver real fundraising value tomorrow.

Well, what does getting it right entail? Firstly an understanding of what constitutes loyalty. And secondly, taking practical actions to improve donor loyalty.

Adrian defines the three key drivers of donor loyalty as satisfaction, commitment and trust. He clearly outlines why each of those factors is important and what actions fundraisers and organisations can take to improve them.

For example, Adrian includes an excellent outline on how to build trust, and each of the five points below are detailed further in the book.

1. Being seen to exercise role competence (Fundraisers need to demonstrate that the organisation has the requisite skills and abilities to achieve its mission.)
2. Drip feeding data on performance. (Is it using is resources wisely? And what outcome is it achieving?)
3. Being honest when things go wrong.
4. Being seen to exercise good judgment.
5. Adhering to appropriate standards of professional conduct.

Tiny Essentials of Donor Loyalty also includes findings from areas of the corporate sector that focus on customer loyalty. One of particular interest explores the concept of identity.

Research taking place in psychology, economics and marketing has recently explored how the essence of whom we are drives what we choose to support. Causes and organisations that more closely align with our sense of self-identity will tend to attract higher levels of loyalty from us than those that do not… When a person identifies with an organisation he or she perceives a sense of connectedness with it and begins to define him or herself (at least in part) in terms of the supported organisation.

Each chapter is filled with practical steps that organisations can take to ‘bolster’ loyalty. In just 65 tiny pages you can become an expert on donor loyalty in your lunch hour. But the smart fundraiser or an organisation that’s serious about improving its fundraising will take immediate action to significantly improve their efforts to build donor loyalty as a result of reading this book.

You can order your own copy from the lovely fundraising book publishers at White Lion Press.

Time to share one of my favourite fundraising resources:

Fundraising is Beautiful is a series of podcasts that are music to my ears. Orchestrated by the masterful Jeff Brooks and Steven Screen, Fundraising is Beautiful is a delight to listen to, and filled with brilliant fundraising advice and ideas.

Right now, Steven and Jeff are into the second of their three-part series about “How to tell if your fundraising is good”. Part one was about writing style, part two was about content, and I’m looking forward to part three.

If you’ve got a pod, or a pad, or a plain old computer, check out the Fundraising is Beautiful podcasts as soon as you can. And there are plenty of back issues that are all worth listening to.

No idea what a podcast is? Check out this plain English video by the awesome crew at commoncraft.com.