A collaborative capital campaign created an entire new arts and business district in Cleveland. Photo: Gordon Square Arts District
Collaborative fundraising takes time and trust. That’s what we heard over and again in our interviews with seven nonprofit executives in Rhode Island, Boston, Cleveland and Spokane, each of them successful collaborative fundraisers.
We looked into the topic at the prompting of our friends at New Roots Providence and presented our early findings at a New Roots workshop on January 19.
The short version of what we learned from our informants:
Successful collaborations flow from a deep process of trust-building among the partners. The right partners may take years to self-select, discover their shared goals and commit to combined action.
Detailed legal agreements help establish trust and smooth functioning by exploring and resolving the partners’ deepest worries in advance. (These also take time)
At the same time, good partners must be ready to make commonsense adjustments to agreements when they create unfair or unproductive results for some partners.
Long-term and permanent collaborations need to form an independent organization to fundraise and distribute revenues. (Another time-consuming process.)
The collaborative case must promise more than the sum of its partners: new funders respond to a transformative vision.
Truly successful collaborations can reach more and larger funders and generate more income at lower cost than the two partners could achieve separately.
Our cases covered five forms of joint fundraising: grants, workplace campaigns, events, capital campaigns, and, finally, our elusive ideal of truly integrated annual fundraising. We’ll tell you more about three very interesting cases in future posts:
The YWCA and YMCA in Spokane, Washington created a fully integrated capital campaign to build new shared buildings in two locations.
The Gordon Square Arts District in Cleveland, Ohio brought two theater companies together with a community development organization to build not just theaters, but a whole theater-oriented arts district with major economic benefits for the city.
The Central Square Theater in Cambridge, Massachusetts began by building new shared performance space for the the Nora Theater Company and the Underground Railway Theater. The partnership then went on to take on all fundraising, business and back office operations, leaving both groups free to focus on their artistic missions alone.
If you have had a good – or bad – experience with collaborative fundraising that you think could help others, please send me an email. We’d love to hear from you.
Did you know that the typical major gifts officer for a large institution has a portfolio of somewhere between 75-150 donors?
Did you know that the typical major gifts officer meets with 7-10 donors a month?
I’m just wondering how many donors or prospective donors your organization – whether that was your Executive Director, your fund development staff, or your leadership volunteers - visited last month?
For many small organizations I know, they’d be lucky to visit that many donors in a year!!
No wonder most of us aren’t raising the money we’d like to raise.
Want to see the metrics that universities use? Take a look at this slide deck presented by Eduventures at a 2011 CASE Conference in Vancouver.
We can create giving pyramids all day. We know that we need 4 or 5 qualified prospects to realize one gift. What those gift pyramids keep telling us is that we have to find, qualify, cultivate, solicit, and steward a heck of a lot of people to reach our fundraising goals.
It’s really hard to do that from your office chair. Or during a committee meeting.
So, let’s finish up the plans, polish up the case, and then get down to the really important work — those one-on-one conversations that are essential to our fundraising success.
Wondering where to start? Start with the people who already love you… your donors, your volunteers and your board members. I’ll bet that list will keep you busy for a while.
On this weekend celebrating the legacy of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., I was reminded again of the words of his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, The Quest for Peace and Justice, given in 1964.
“The well-off and the secure have too often become indifferent and oblivious to the poverty and deprivation in their midst. The poor in our countries have been shut out of our minds, and driven from the mainstream of our societies, because we have allowed them to become invisible. Ultimately a great nation is a compassionate nation. No individual or nation can be great if it does not have a concern for ‘the least of these.’ “
Since then, the gap between the rich and poor has only widened in the US.
The rich and poor rarely live in the same neighborhoods anymore. Heck, the well-off don’t even need to mingle with the less fortunate or use public services if they don’t desire, with private schools, private beach clubs and swimming pools, private country clubs, gated communities and isolated vacation enclaves.
So, if you are an affluent individual who never sees the poor or has no need to associate with the less-well-off, and if you are relatively immune from the cutback in government services, how do you come to understand the desperate lives most people live each day?
I worry about the impact of this social isolation on philanthropy.
Yes, as the sheer numbers of the affluent continue to grow, charitable giving grows. But where does the money go? Read More >>
As I was checking out a nonprofit profile on Guidestar.org, I noted that Guidestar now had a “Quick View” review for each nonprofit.
Notice those checks, stars and caution signs?
Clearly these are meant to serve as rating systems for viewers. Missing a check or star? The system implies that your organization may not be 100% up to snuff –or else it might be hiding something.
While I’ve done my ranting about rating systems (see my posts below), I’m afraid that your organization is stuck with this new configuration.
By now I’m sure you know that Guidestar is a go-to site for the media, funders, bloggers, benchmarkers like me or others individuals who are curious about your nonprofit. Online donation sites like Network for Good, Facebook Causes or Change.org link up and pull their data from Guidestar.
So, get thee to Guidestar.
Login (you’ll need to register if you haven’t, the basic edition is free), Read More >>
Now that you’ve mailed out your annual year end appeal, I’m hoping you are getting ready to mail many of your donors again in a few weeks.
Too soon, you say. Mustn’t bother our donors but once a year, you protest.
I’m with you that it might be too soon for those donors who always send you a generous gift at the end of the year. (Though many direct marketers would dispute that).
But what about the donors who haven’t responded to your annual appeal?
In our work, we often encounter small nonprofits or new fundraisers who believe that the “annual” appeal is just that, a once-a-year request for a donation.
These small organizations often don’t analyze the giving patterns of their donors. They may have no useful donor database, or haven’t thought about what just how much work it might take to get donors to give again.
If an “annual” appeal raises the same amount of money or even just a bit more than it did the year before, it’s considered a success. But what isn’t known Read More >>
One of my all-time favorite bumper stickers was this one: “I am an animal. I brake for no one.” (A cynical comeback to the once-common “I brake for animals.)
However, it looks like our basic animal nature actually includes a generous dollop of do-goodism, judging from this NPR Morning Edition report. Lab rats at the University of Chicago have now proven to the satisfaction of scientists that they will sacrifice themselves to spend hours of persistent effort to free another rat trapped inside a small tube within the larger cages.
Not only do helper rats selflessly devote themselves to comforting their stuck buddy, they also work urgently to find the hidden button that springs the trap. They’ll do this even when the other rat gets released to a different cage, removing any social benefit. They’ll even help a pal when they could be working on liberating chocolate instead!
The scientists were thrilled to have discovered such pure altruism in another species. (I guess they never read Old Yeller.)
Let’s take this as a reminder to give our left brains a break as we compose our year-end and other funding appeals. Before you start to pile up facts and arguments, seek out your organization’s deeper appeal to our basic natures as creatures on earth: ”Here’s another person in pain. Here’s how you can make it better.”
And then there’s this: Even though I really do brake for others, I am still an animal.
Flying on US Airways in 1997, I was reading the inflight magazine Attache, (remember those? inflight magazines?) when I stumbled on an article “Genius at work – How to Solve Almost Anything.” In it were 9 tips by inventor Stanley Mason, the holder of over 60 patents, including the peel open packaging of Band Aids, pinless disposable diapers and squeezable ketchup bottles.
Cleaning out my files the other day, I stumbled on those tips and realized just how influential they have been to my work in strategic planning.
“It’s really not that complicated. The creative process is trying really hard to solve a problem.”
Isn’t that the essence of strategic planning?
While our missions aren’t necessarily problems, the goal of getting from where we are today to realizing our mission can be seen as a big puzzle Read More >>
Use your “heart and instincts.” Think about what would move you to give money, and write accordingly.
Make your case succinctly right up front. Be very “crisp” right from the start by defining the problem and how you are planning to address it. Show why your organization has the credibility to address this problem. Don’t lead with a boilerplate mission and history.
“Use bullet points.” Explain the need, why the need is important and how it is not being met, whether anyone else is addressing this, and why the money should go to you.
In writing about your mission, explain why it is important. Would some other group have to come along to address this if you went away? Would anyone care?
Show your passion.
Explain your expertise, the commitment you’ve already demonstrated to this issue, and how it fits in with what you do.
Explain how many lives will be affected and the impact you seek to have, not just how many people you plan to “touch.”
Good advice for making your case to any donor, don’t you think?
Have any success stories of corporate grant seeking you’d like to share? I’d love to hear them.
P.S. Of course, if the funder has a specific format they want you to use, remember to follow that.
P.P.S. Formerly the President of Lesley University, Ms. McKenna talked about the lack of understanding about nonprofits she encountered when she moved into the corporate sector. She noted that of the foundation heads of the Fortune 100 companies, only 3% had nonprofit experience. And, that most had spent a good portion of their working lives within the corporation whose foundation they were now leading.
Overall, she felt our sector had a lot of work to do teaching the corporate sector about the nonprofit sector. (I agree. And government too.). Joking, she mentioned that PowerPoint presentations with lots of graphs and charts were very influential tools in corporate culture.
But never just assume lack of knowledge about your issues or the sector… make sure that you know who you are talking to. Remember to do your research on the background of your grants officer.
“The well-off and the secure have too often become indifferent and oblivious to the poverty and deprivation in their midst. The poor in our countries have been shut out of our minds, and driven from the mainstream of our societies, because we have allowed them to become invisible. Ultimately a great nation is a compassionate nation. No individual or nation can be great if it does not have a concern for ‘the least of these.’ “
