A recipe for sucessful fundraising

Howard Lake | 29 April 2010 | Blogs

Key ingredients:
Reduce the amounts of what your fundraising team finds fascinating
Add a dollop of listening to your donors
Add large amounts of donor input from observing and understanding your donors
Mix it well for breakthrough fundraising inovations
Here is a basic explanations for those looking to make the most of this basic recipe.
Reduce the amounts of what your fundraising team finds fascinating
Having attended my fair share of fundraising team meetings I have come to realise that the most dangerous words in fundraising are: ‘Here is something interesting we can use for our next appeal.’ Interesting to whom? To us or to donors?
Many of us in fundraising somehow get locked in our charity’s world and slowly become fascinated with our charity’s work. And we wrongly assume that donors will find our charity’s programmes fascinating too.
When we take a long hard look at why so many donors are not responding to our appeals you might be forced to accept the fact that we have not made that leap from thinking like we do to thinking like the donors do.
Add a dollop of listening to your donors
How can we think like a donor? Well, first of all by listening to donors to discover what motivates them and what makes them tick.
I am not talking here simply about data analysis or evaluation of different campaigns and appeal packages. But, about stepping out of our world to connect with real donors… to do interviews with major donors and regular givers alike asking them why do they support our cause? what prompted them to support our work in the first place? why do they keep giving to us? ….what are they trying to acomplish with their gifts to our work?
Listening to donors can help us focus our fundraising messages to what they find interesting and fascinating about our charity’s work.
Add large amounts of donor input from observing and understanding your donors Listening to donors is jut not enough to help you do sucessful fundraising …. An excellent fundraiser does more than listening … he or she tries to understand the core needs, motivations and desires of our donors.
Such understanding according to an excellent blog entry by Bruce Temkin (http://experiencematters.wordpress.com/2010/01/19/dont-listen-to-customers-understand-them/) can be achieved by engaging donors in conversations with charities and by observing the current trends that might impact a charity’s future fundraising offerings…
In short a recipe for sucessful fundraising requires us to step out of the world of charity employees and step into the shoes of our donors; to engage donors in conversations leaving our assumptions about them at the door of the focus group meeting room and to tap into donors interest and desires giving them a chance to do something they have not dreamt about doing before…
Redina Kolaneci
Senior Fundraising & Stewardship Consultant
www.mcconkey-johnston.co.uk

About Howard Lake
Howard Lake is consultant editor of UK Fundraising. He founded the site in 1994 and successfully sold it in 2022. As director of Giving X Ltd he is exploring growing giving on a massive scale. He is the founder of Fundraising Camp and co-founder of GoodJobs.