I know that their story is not unique, that each day there are millions, probably billions, of philanthropic acts across the globe.

But what made me smile over my morning tea was the way that Ram described his philanthropy:

“I get so much satisfaction, so much pleasure out of this — I can’t tell you in words. You have to experience this. This is full of life.”

Demonstrating again the principle of “giving till you feel good” that my departed colleague, Herb Kaplan, always espoused.

“Dear Jonathan and Gayle,

“In 1997 a man named Roger Whiting came to you with a story about a Tanzanian woman named Alice Mnaku, who dreamed of going to college but could not afford it. Thanks to your sage advice, Roger went on to found Growth Through Learning. It is lessons he learned from Cause & Effect that has enabled us to become the successful non-profit we are today. This year alone, GTL granted 317 scholarships to bright girls from poor families in East Africa….”

Roger Whiting was a retired insurance man from Worcester, Massachusetts. With no background in international development or education, Roger devised a simple and direct response to Africa’s poverty that has, in the years since 1997, also proven to be profoundly life-changing for hundreds of young women. We were sad to learn that Roger passed away in May of this year. But we are pleased and proud to know that we played a part in setting Growth Through Learning on the path to success.

Just like business start-ups, new nonprofits face an uphill struggle for survival and growth — and with far less access to start-up investment capital. Only yesterday, Gayle and I met a whole roomful of passionate volunteers and staff at the New Roots Providence consultant fair, many of them seeking guidance in their start-up processes.

What might this new generation  learn from a file we closed in 1997? We dug deep into Gayle’s hard drive and had a long talk with Alex Marthews to find out. Here are a few lessons in growth from Growth Through Learning:

1. Keep it simple. Growth Through Learning does one thing well: it pays fees at a few carefully selected secondary schools for girls from poor families in Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda. The organization has generally avoided expanding the scope of its program or geographic area . With tremendous population growth predicted for all three program countries, running out of work is the least of GTL’s problems.

2. Tell real stories. Two stories really matter here. One is the story of an African girl whose life is transformed by education. The other is the story of an American whose own life is changed by compassion. Alice and Roger were the first characters in this story, but there have been hundreds of girls and donors since then. GTL staff or volunteers personally collect the story of every single girl during annual visits. This story is both familiar and totally new each time it is told.

3. Keep it personal. Roger’s generosity of spirit  and his enthusiasm burned bright. By sharing his story face to face, starting from his personal network of friends, Roger patiently built a widening circle of loyal donors and board members that slowly but steadily enabled him to expand scholarships from just a handful of girls helped, to dozens, and now hundreds, every year.

4. Make your own luck. No one could have predicted two game-changing gifts that came to Growth Through Learning, including a $1 million bequest that has essentially solved the problem of paying GTL’s current very lean overhead. But we could easily predict that they would never have come about without Roger’s persistent effort at steps 1, 2 and 3 above.

Our thanks to Alex Marthews for taking the time to contact us and share those learnings and also for honoring Cause & Effect, with a link to the Growth Through Learning site.  I’ll revisit what Alex shared about the uses of stories in a later posting.

The study was compiled by consultant, author and trainer extraordinaire Andy Robinson (if you haven’t, you should check out Andy’s wonderful books through our mutual publisher Emerson & Church ).

Andy’s title cues us up for what’s inside: “Reality Check: How Grassroots Environmental Organizations are (or are not) raising money online.”

Some of the lessons learned by small organizations:

• “Personal contact and relationship-building trumps everything – and will become more valuable because fewer  people will be doing it.”
• “Websites are still essential for effective fundraising.”
• “Social networks like Facebook remain a lower -tier for fundraising strategy – at least for now.”
• “Many online strategies won’t pay off for awhile, but try them anyway as time and money are available.”

One particularly interesting finding came from the Ohio Environmental Council. While most of their membership giving came offline, those donors who had email and received ongoing contact through a robust online program gave twice as much annually as their no-email counterparts.

You can download a free copy of the report here from ICL, though you will need to register.

But the PS grabbed me.  (And yes, I read the PS first. I quickly see that the main message holds bad news for me).

“P.S. Have you heard the Bates parking meter story? It’s two minutes and guaranteed to make you smile…this was sent to alumni (who hadn’t made a Bates Fund gift or pledge) two weeks ago.”

I can’t imagine a parking meter on the leafy Bates quad of my memory, nor even on the surrounding streets of sleepy Lewiston, Maine, so “the parking meter story” monicker raises a question I can’t answer without clicking on the link, a classic teaser trope. Christina promises to answer the question in two minutes or less and amuse me in the process.

I like the quick and indirect way Christina clues me in that this is not just a funny story. She tells me this story was sent to non-contributing alums a couple of weeks ago. That truth-in-advertising builds vital trust and gently reminds me that I’m a delinquent, too. I click on the link.The promised story is delivered without flash in a warm, male voice. The tale is simple.(Spoiler alert!) Because she had a Bates sticker in her car window, a Bates alum is saved from an expiring parking meter by another anonymous alum who leaves a  note about sticking together. That little story is set inside another even tinier story. The narration begins, “The day we dropped our son off at Bates, the Associate Dean of students told us this story…”

In the first nine words, I’m time-traveled back to that quad, then I’m whisked off to Boston where the actual incident takes place (photos of Bates and a parking meter support the scene-setting).

At 45 seconds, the parking meter story ends. The narrator names a few critical values of the Bates education his son is getting, but quickly gets to the core message: Bates is a community that lasts a lifetime. “Batesies take care of each other. And now we need you to take care of Bates.” Professional-quality still images of students in interesting settings back up each new idea.

After a final dollop of urgency (“The Bates Fund ends of June 30th. The meter is running down.”) the narrator directs us to the link where we can give and the video ends. It’s engaging, on-point and efficient with my time. It creates an experience that feels simple and brief, but which uses complex narrative to draw me through it and move me to give. I’ll be imitating this one as soon as I get the chance.

Well done, Christina! And I’ll make good on the pledge if you’ll tell me what it was.

The Infrastructure Collaborative was a collaboration of grassroots land trusts, watershed organizations and technical assistance providers in Rhode Island that started in 2004 and is just wrapping up. With support from Third Sector New England, they formed a learning network to consider how they might pilot a model for sharing services that could improve the administrative and fundraising capacity of small conservation nonprofits.

Throughout, all of the members learned a lot about the challenges of building capacity in very small nonprofits. Rather than crafting a typical final report to a foundation, they decided instead to share their experiences in the form of a case study so that others could benefit as well.

Some of the lessons learned:

• In the smallest organizations, capacity is in individuals and their institutional knowledge, not organizational systems. When inevitable transitions occur, built capacity can quickly be lost. Attention must be paid to building sustained people capacity somewhere in the network. Transitions often occur at a rate that prohibits capacity building.

• Small groups need either a large organization with significant built capacity already on their team or they will need a much larger cash investment to buy what they lack.

• Small nonprofits live in the moment, focused on the urgent needs that caused their formation. Rarely planning for financial or operational sustainability, at the extremes they can be alternately overwhelmed by or overlook even key short-term administrative tasks.

• Leadership matters. They never would have moved forward without the steady guiding hand of their two lead organizers.  At the same time, leadership changes among the members shifted organizational commitments.

• Hiring staff and vendors is always risky, even with very diligent screening. A bad selection can thwart the best plans, undermine confidence in a project and create fatal delays in implementation.

• Research and development investments need to be much bigger to allow experimentation, buy better solutions, and include enough cash to fail, learn and recover. The investment needed for small nonprofits to launch back office services was much larger than they anticipated.

I think you’ll find their experience very interesting.

(I’ve been participating in the project on and off since its inception. In the early years, I was a volunteer representing the RI chapter of the Association of Fundraising Professionals, which was interested in improving the way it supported very small organizations. Later, I provided some training and technical assistance in fundraising and helped them reflect on what they learned — including helping them draft this final summary of their work.)

Yes, yes, we’d all agree that your programs are funded by the money you raise and thus are strengthened in that way.

But that’s not what I’m describing. I’m making a case that the fundraising process itself, in particular, donor relationship building, is program building, and not just the means to an ends.

7 Ways Fundraising Can Strengthen Your Programming

1. You get out the door and talk to your constituents — the best way to get feedback on the issues and concerns that matter to them.
2. You see the real life, real people impact of your work.
3. You can educate your constituents — and key influencers –  about the importance of your issues and your solutions.
4. You can build long-term, good faith relationships that help you weather short-term program storms.
5. You create powerful allies and an ready constituency for your public policy reform.
6. Over and over, you are forced to confront the quality, design and impact of your programs.
7. You continuously test your relevance to your community.

Here’s an example:

When I was development director at a regional environmental organization, my Executive Director and I set out to meet as many of our business donors as we could. Among our donors were many small businesses who gave $50-$250 annually.

This wasn’t surprising as the organization had successfully run a classic annual corporate giving campaign for many years (campaign chair, captains, teams, etc). As both of us were new in our positions, we were eager to meet these donors.

Many were manufacturers, including metal platers, as our region had historically been a big producer of costume jewelry. Metal platers had historically been notorious water polluters. Our organization had aggressively pushed for the toughest standards for industrial pretreatment to force these manufacturers to remove these metals and other toxins from their water discharges into our rivers and Bay.

(Aside: For those of you who get discouraged at the impact you are having, this has been one of the great success stories of environmental regulation. From 1981 to 2008, discharge of toxic metals and cyanide into the two main sewer systems had declined by 97%.”)

But at the time that we were visiting these manufacturers, the battles over industrial pretreatment were still fresh.  Cautiously they let us into their plants and shared their stories with us.

The two of us walked many a shop floor and looked at a lot of industrial pretreatment. What we found were business owners who loved the Bay as much as any environmentalist. They were boaters and swimmers and fishing enthusiasts who also loved our state. That’s why they contributed to our organization. While they didn’t always like the positions we took, most of these owners were working very hard to comply with environmental regulations. They were proud to show us their newly installed pretreatment systems and their continuing experiments to “be green” (long before that was a recognized business strategy).

What we also learned was that this wasn’t simple. Too often, as these business owners and their environmental compliance officers reported, the regulations that were supposed to push them along their path were holding them back. Promising innovations weren’t allowed. By complying with one set of regulations they often found themselves wading into a different quagmire with more onerous regulations and hugely costly paperwork.

After dozens of these conversations, my Executive Director emerged with a new perspective on the unintended local impact of what appeared to be well-crafted law and regulations. As a result of his knowledge, Carol Browner, the new Director of the Environmental Protection Agency, invited him to serve on the metal-finishing subcommittee of her aptly named “Common Sense Initiative,” a national project designed to cut paperwork and simplify environmental regulations at the same time advancing environmental protection and fostering industry innovation.

All of which started with our simple goal of wanting to get to know our donors a little bit better.

(By the way, many increased their gifts into the $500-$2,500 range. At least two of the manufacturers became major financial supporters of the organization, giving over $10,000 annually).

1. You have an inspirational vision of the community change you’d like to create.
2. You can connect the resources you seek to the societal change you’d like to create.
3. You have a strategic plan for least 3 years into the future.
4. You cherish results and measure the impact of your programs.
5. Your staff are passionate and evangelical leaders for your organization and its programs.
6. Your board members are passionate and evangelical leaders for your organization and its programs.
7. You are wise stewards of all of your resources.
8. You have many long-standing friends and partners.
9. You have created opportunities for people to be involved with you on many levels.
10. You have clear goals and objectives for how much money you need to raise and have done the “math” of fundraising.
11. You have a well-designed plan for raising resources.
12. You regularly communicate with your “stakeholders” about your activities, needs and accomplishments.
13. Staff (or volunteers) have been individually assigned responsibility and are held accountable for revenue goals.
14. You believe you can do it (failure is not an option).
15. You are not afraid to ask for what you need.
16. Your internal systems support fundraising (e.g. a well functioning and documented donor management database).
17. You know how to use and adapt proven fundraising techniques.
18. You invest the most resources where you receive the greatest fundraising return.
19. You insist on ethical fundraising.
20. You make an annual investment in professional development for fundraising.

You can find a copy of this quiz to share with your staff and board in our Toolbox.

Dear Gayle and Jon,
I just wanted to take a moment to thank you for the Workshop “Getting the Most from your Annual Appeal” that you gave on Oct. 8th for the Land and Water Partnership at the Audubon Society of RI.  I think that our letter was not as good as what you had presented, but it was a big improvement from previous ventures.

But the proof is in the pudding, right?!
So, the bottom line, proof of the pudding is that last year we raised $31,365 through 88 gifts with our single page, tear off and send back approach.

This year, we received 173 gifts for a total of $62,570 for our two page, bulleted, story telling approach to support stewardship with the envelope provided!

So, we are giving you a ’soft’ credit (as they say in our business!) for doubling our gifts!  We are so grateful!

I think Jon got me when he said he knew there were some people who just threw these letters in the trash, but for those who really care and want to know, give them something worth reading.  I know many of our members in the land trust are the latter types, and I appreciate so much that you brought this to my attention.

I truly appreciate a good teacher, and this deserves recognition all its own. Many heartfelt thanks from the South Kingstown Land Trust!

Ever,

Claudia E. Swain
Director of Development
South Kingstown Land Trust

*************************************************************************************

Claudia, We’re blushing! But how could anyone resist those gorgeous Scottish Highlander cattle!

Thank you so for sharing this with us and letting us share your letter with our readers. You can read the full letter here.

And continued good fundraising for the South Kingstown Land Trust. Local land trusts like yours absolutely prove the Margaret Mead quote:

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”

To quickly summarize:

The international child sponsorshop and development organization I worked for had tried and failed many times to receive a development education grant from the US Agency for International Development.

We learned that one of the reasons for this was that our donor-to-sponsored child and family communications were not taken seriously by the funder and undercut our credibility.

We initiated a process to explain the theory and practice behind our communications program to USAID.  As a result of that, the door opened a crack.

Our first three lessons learned:

1. Get involved with your colleagues
2. Find out what funders think about you
3. You have to have and discuss a theory of change

That’s were I left off. On to the next set of lessons.

So, I now had the task of designing a development education program that would win funding and achieve our desired mission impact.

Lesson Four: Build your new program on your existing assets

Because our experience showed that people-to-people contact helped North Americans care about other parts of the world, we knew our development education program could take advantage of our 50 year history of direct communications. Our office was rich with the stories, photos, drawings and reports from sponsored children, their families, our international staff and town or village leaders.Our staff routinely oooed and awed over  some dazzling art and images on 8 1/2 x 11 inch or A4 paper that serendipitously came through our doors en route to sponsors.

What if we did something with art produced by children in our program countries? Let our kids tell their own stories, through their art and through their descriptions of the scenes they were sending.

Oh yes, one more thing. Our development education program wouldn’t be built around an in your face story of poverty or helpless victims. We wanted to share the real stories of daily life, told by real children living those lives.

Lesson Five: Bring something new to your funder’s portfolio

One of the things that we had noticed about the development education projects that had been previously funded was that the majority were aimed at high school or middle school students. After a while, the projects sounded very similar.

We had also learned that USAID staff weren’t interested in continuing to fund projects that seemed to be duplicates … after all, once a high school lesson plan had been created by one organization, couldn’t it be used by others?

We took that to heart. We had this great art and these first hand stories of individual children, their families and their communities. So how could we use the art to reach a new audience? And who would appreciate it the most.

Duh! How about art teachers? Or elementary school kids? No one had developed a program for them yet.

But would it work?

Lesson Six: Consult the experts to ensure strong program design

Because we didn’t have experts on staff who were elementary school educators, curriculum designers, artists or art teachers, we sought out expertise locally and nationally to help us think about the program design and the use of artwork. What we came up with, with their advice, was a development education program for 4 and 6th graders (because that’s were they were studying international issues in our potential pilot schools), multi-disciplinary to fit the elementary school model, and based on the art and stories of children in our program countries.

We knew that we also had to build this expertise into our proposal design, so we included funding for a curriculum consultant who would also be the project manager and funding for an expert on art and teaching. We also added two advisory councils, one to select the art that included art teachers and an artist from Ghana who had recently relocated to our area, and a second teachers advisory group of those who would be interested in piloting the project and helping us test activities.  And of course, a few individual with international development expertise.

Lesson Seven: Build internal support and ownership

Of course, the program wouldn’t work without the buy in of a number of our field directors who had to secure the art work. We also had a few university professor board members who thought the whole idea was foolish because who could teach a subject so complicated as  international development through pretty pictures? (And they doubted our ‘teaching” ability)

We found at least six or seven field directors from different parts of the world who loved the idea and were willing to work with us to get children in their area producing work about our themes: family, school, work, food, fun, home. We offered to cover the cost of any art materials and shipping that they needed as we knew this wasn’t in their budgets. They sent us what turned out to be very modest expenses which we included in the project budget.

We weren’t able to convince our skeptical board members that this approach would work, but we were able to get them not to oppose our seeking out the grant. Whew.

Lesson Eight: A creative presentation sometimes helps

As we were pulling the project together, we needed to call it something. With some brainstorming by my staff and others in our office, my team finally decided on a name for the project that was both intriguing and captured its purpose. We decided to call it : See me, share my world.

(Yes, there were many in the office who felt the name was too long. But we came to love it anyway).

Because this was an art project, we knew we absolutely had to have some art in the proposal to help the reviewers understand what we were trying to do. So we found a wonderful drawing with a child’s explanation of what it was about and made that the cover of our proposal. We asked for $140,000 over two years, to be matched 100%, (largely through inkind).

And we sent the proposal off. And waited. And waited.

WE GOT THE GRANT.

Postscript:

The project was a great success all around. Our field staff told us that the art projects energized their schools and unleashed creativity they hadn’t seen. Teachers loved the project. Our local art museum featured the work from one of the countries in a small exhibit.

Two years later we were also awarded the next grant that we applied for. This one was designed for public libraries, highlighting literature art and artifacts from the countries we served, to spark a North-South dialogue on environmental issues (that was in 1990) called “Our Piece of Land is Small.”

Then I left to take a position at another organization.

Not too long after our second project completed,  USAID approached the organization directly and asked it to design a development education/research project that tested the impact of targeted education materials on its sponsors. The ultimate grant fantasy — have a funder approach you about a project. You can find a short article on that research published in 1998 by The International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy.

Keeping the advertising, invoicing, fundraising, and donor stewardship running was an expensive investment for an organization that relied primarily on monthly giving from tens of thousands of donors.

While that funding model was clearly our strength, it also lost us donors who determined which organization they chose to support solely on the basis of  overhead ratios. Because we didn’t have lots of low-fundraising-cost government grants and commodities passing through our books, our overhead costs were already slightly higher than our colleague agencies that did.

(Note: Why overhead ratios tell only a tiny part of the story).

In particular, we had our eye on “development education” grant funds awarded by the US Agency for International Development  (USAID). Those funds supported programs that taught US audiences about global issues, especially those facing the world’s most poor and vulnerable people. We wanted to expand our outreach in this area but those tight overhead ratios were stopping us.

We also saw that those agencies that received USAID development education grants seemed to have a “more favored” status than those of us who didn’t. We wanted to be in the “in crowd.”  Being “in” often led to more media exposure, more opportunity for partnerships with our colleagues, and, ultimately, more donors and more funding to support our programs overseas.

But year after year (before I arrived), our proposals kept getting rejected. And we couldn’t understand why.

And to put the frosting on the cake, we kept hearing the funder and our non-sponsorship colleagues talk about the need to personalize international development for US citizens by sharing the stories of communities and families overseas.

But but but… each and every day, we were sending very real and personalized stories about those very same communities and families to tens of thousands of donors in the US.

What were we doing wrong?

Lesson One: Get involved with your colleagues

Luckily, my boss was determined to shift the perception of our agency in the eyes of his international colleagues. So he became very active in the US international development community. He joined committees in strategic networks. He lobbied our  international program staff to participate in the US as well. He brought onto our Board of Directors  individuals with international development expertise and got them involved in those networks as well.

Through those activities, he also got to work with and come to know the staff in the development education division at USAID. And that’s how we learned what was wrong with us.

Lesson Two: Find out what funders think about you.

Without getting into too much detail, suffice it to say that child sponsorship organizations like ours — the  ones that invested in active communications between donors here in the US and their sponsored families overseas — were not seen by many of their colleagues as serious international development organizations.Yep. It didn’t matter so much about our programming on the ground.  Our donor communications were seen as purely “marketing” or “fundraising” and thus we not credible.

While this stung us terribly, finally, we had an opportunity for a breakthrough.

Lesson Three: You have to have and discuss a THEORY OF CHANGE

So, we decided we needed our USAID colleagues to understand better the what and why’s of our donor communications program. We were sure if they did, they would have a different opinion of us.

You see, one of the reasons that USAID was funding development education was to build more support for international aid. Leaving government aid aside, individual giving overseas rarely reaches 3% of all philanthropic dollars contributed in the US.

Yet, among the 400 largest US charities, you’ll find many child sponsorship organizations.

Why is that?

Remember that cliche that readers are only interested in local news? (Sadly, you only have to look at the very first news stories coming from the Haitian earthquake to find the truth in this).

Over 50 years of experience demonstrated the power of child sponsorship to motivate people to give by connecting them with images and stories of real people that they could learn about and maybe even communicate with.

So we had invested pretty heavily in our communications program. It included:

• an annual photo of the sponsored child and his or her family
• an annual profile of that child and family and their local community
• a description of the country, economy, and culture of the regional and country in which the family lived
• quarterly updates from our field staff describing their programs or interesting challenges in that community
• four to six updates from the child and/or family, written with the help of dedicated field staff, an offering a glimpse of daily life.  (This was the most controversial part, but a story for another forum)
• the ability of donors in the US to send correspondence back to their sponsored family, sharing a glimpse of life in the US.
• Specialty information, particularly about the world’s religions and their practices.

We had also just discovered academic research that outlined a five stage model of how individuals became more culturally aware.  That research supported many of our practices and offered a platform to explain our communications to our potential funders.

Which we did. We took a “dog and pony” show down to the development staff at USAID and walked them through our communications program step by step. We answered all of their questions. We presented our challenges very truthfully.

Did we completely convince them? No. But we could see the cracks in their skepticism.

Which was a significant step forward to winning the grant.

For next time … lessons we learned about program development, target audiences and donor portfolios.