Great fundraisers are also great thinkers

I’ve been preparing a workshop on how to conduct a fundraising audit. One of the themes running through the workshop, and the hardest to teach, is that a quality audit depends on a strong systems perspective.

What a coincidence that The Agitator blog just carried a story about a new analysis by Professors Adrian Sargeant and Jen Shang. The report is called Great Fundraising: What Makes Fundraising Truly Great, and is available for free from the UK consultancy Clayton Burnett which commissioned it.

An important finding: Great fundraisers are also great thinkers.

One element of being a great thinker is to have a systems perspective.

Successful fundraisers can’t be tucked away in a box in their organizations, thinking only about the next annual appeal. They need to understand and participate in all aspects of their organizations.

From the report:

The Executive Summary of the report is a good read. The full report gets a bit academic.

You can find a bit more about systems thinking in our blog post: Five elements of thinking strategically.

You can find the handouts from the workshop, “The Audit: Seeing your organization through your finding eyes,” in our toolbox.