By Askala Harris Calhoun, Director of Fundraising Training & Learning Partnerships
I came to fundraising in a roundabout way. I was familiar with nonprofits because my parents had always been civically engaged. Still, when I joined a nonprofit board in my late twenties, I was new to understanding how nonprofits operated. I was curious about fundraising, but I had a degree in sociology and was working for a law school. I did not plan my college degree or career path around fundraising for a living.
However, not long after I joined this board, an executive director took a chance on me, and I became the first development manager for a small youth-serving nonprofit in my community. While I probably had the skills to succeed in this new role, I needed a fundamental understanding of how to engage and care for donors. It took some things not going well for me to learn a different way.
I enthusiastically jumped right in, and one of the first projects I tackled was creating a fundraising packet. I took information about our organization, organized it as a letter alluding to an ask for a financial gift, and added a couple of pages of pictures of the kids in action. I excitedly mailed those packets to every foundation, corporation, business leader, and (potentially) wealthy person within a thirty-mile radius. After I put those letters in the mail, I only waited a few days before I ran to the mailbox daily to see what enormous checks, based on my masterful letter, would be waiting for me to deposit! After two weeks, I stopped checking the mail and wondered what went wrong.
Perhaps you can already see a few things I was missing. Much of what I’ve learned over the last fifteen years of fundraising can be summarized in the Taking Donors Seriously® principles that we base our work on at The FOCUS Group. If I could sit my twenty-something-year-old self down and explain a few things, I would probably start with the first principle: People give to people that they know and trust.
This first foundational principle of successful fundraising explains that good fundraising is relational, not transactional. When individuals and foundations opened my packets, they weren’t familiar with the organization or me. The nonprofit was doing great things with under-resourced youth in the community. I just didn’t take the time to cultivate any authentic relationships to help build connections between donors and the good work that we were doing. I didn’t know I needed to cultivate relationships instead of creating packets, which takes time and a high-touch approach. I was hoping for bigger gifts, but I employed a group strategy instead of an individual approach, not realizing that connecting with individuals is far more likely to lead to major donor engagement. I was rowing hard, but not in the right direction, or perhaps not even in the right body of water!
If you’re wondering how I kept that job, it’s because, after a very rocky start, I actually got better. When I finally began to land meetings with those who could be major donors, I was authentically myself, listened to their answers when I asked them questions, and learned about their affinity for the nonprofit. I’ve since seen how a comprehensive and strategic approach to relational fundraising is the most effective strategy for any nonprofit.
So here’s my message to my younger self: Let’s start with the basics. Effective fundraising is all about relationships.
We’ve been privileged to help many organizations be more effective in their fundraising through learning and implementing the principles of relational fundraising in their major donor work. Want to talk?