Fundraising – the ultimate team sport.

I have written several blog posts about fundraising, the important activity that will grease the wheels on any nonprofit worth its salt. I have also written about inconsistencies, outdated views, and direct anomalies that all hamper the ability to actually bring in some serious dough. 

This time, I am going to attack, to present something that might not be an accepted notion, that fundraising, in my humble opinion, is a team sport. 

What do I mean with fundraising as a team sport? That there is a ‘race to raise’ funds? Pardon the pun, but yes, it is. But that is not the whole the story. To be continued.

That fundraising is a kind of hunger games among nonprofits, as a kind of zero-sum game? It is not, although this is the game that many funders would like you to believe and buy in to. 

There are abundant funds lying around in foundations and other entities that are not granted, but instead are generating income to these potential donors. To access these funds present a serious circuitous road, including navigating many different mazes without maps or instructions, traverse gatekeepers of various kinds, and including getting a degree in organizational psychology, even majoring in gateway political science.

All this is fine and well, and something that I will return to later. For the purpose of this blog, the team sport I’m talking about is a simple notion: that every single individual working at a nonprofit is part of the fundraising team. 

Job ads regularly state in the qualifications section that you need a “proven track record of soliciting and securing 5, 6 and 7 figure funding commitments and large-scale foundation support.” (Quote from an advertisement currently online.)

I will put forth that nobody in fundraising is solely responsible for having brought in that kind of money; ON THEIR OWN. Every single piece that went in to soliciting the funds that was raised originated with contributions from a number of people, team efforts, communications and other outputs.  

It’s worth repeating, that outcomes of this magnitude are necessarily the result of many people, and many people’s efforts over time. 

The development team is the central hub that conceptualizes the ‘ask’ and sets the budget for what reasonably can be raised and from whom.

Development is supported by the financial team, to figure out how the funds are going to be part of overall income and expenses and supporting how and where to allocate donations.

Development is also supported by the content that Communications will put into words and visuals including for the Programming team, which handles grant making and M&E and other duties such as coordinating with the financial department on reporting – which is part of the year-end reporting to donors along with beautiful visuals that the Comms peoples put together.  

Communications will create posts, content, and copy for the website, newsletter, glossy pamphlets, and social media platforms, that together with campaigns, created together with the programming and development teams, will generate income. Grant writing goes through similar processes, collating information from all the different entities that make up the end results that are distributed to existing and new and potential donors.

All these twist and turns are supported by the another entity, the admins staff; not to be forgotten, as the glue that keeps it all together.

Adding another twist, the timing and long-term investments that go into soliciting funding is another prominent feature that is oftentimes misunderstood. When a fundraiser is hired as a staff, they automatically become part of the team, and will ideally to a large extent lead the scenario outlined above. But if a fundraiser is brought in as a consultant, an entirely different set of expectations is brought forward. I elaborated on this in a previous blog post (‘The Rolodex’; July 6, 2020), notably pointing out that the consultant is not only expected to bring in donors, but also deliver results in a very short amount of time. 

There is no truer truth in fundraising than that it takes a loooooonnggg time to raise funds. The ultimate bad deal for a fundraising consultant is to have not only a time-limited assignment, but also a set of dollars that they are expected to bring in during this limited amount of time,  which they then will get a percentage of, and a list of new donors to hand over when the assignment is completed. 

All of these scenarios are born out of expediency, ignorance and yes, hubris. All founders and executives in an NP know the 1st rule of fundraising – cultivation of contacts, which takes time. Being new, and expected to bring in money, in an expedient manner, is a non-starter. And this is also why performance-based fundraising is a no-no in the sector; if a fundraising contact is started by one consultant, whose assignment is it, who owns he contacts, when does it end, and when a new consultant is brought on, who is supposed to get the bonus, or performance pay? Confusing and to be avoided completely. 

The volatility in the sector, the fickleness of donors, changing circumstances at foundations, changes in staffing, and new priority-setting, all play a role in how not only consultants but employed development staff navigate their work – long-term, intensive, dedicated and ideally integrity-driven actions towards gaining that ultimate prize – a grant.

Being in a position where I managed development, communications, grantmaking, M&E and financial oversight, I know intimately how important all these pieces are, and how they need to work together seamlessly. In addition, it is imperative to bring staff from other departments on site visits, to equip them with personal stories from their own experience when creating content for the NP, be it online or IRL. Such investments is not a waste; it is an investment in not only the staff, but in institutional knowledge that will be passed on to new staff, to create a narrative that has history and relevance as the organization move forward. 

Teamwork in NPs is an undervalued, underfunded, underutilized and sometimes even an unsupported feature, that, if invested in, would yield larger benefits than the separate pieces on their own. I have always strived to see the team, to forge coherence, commonality, and common themes. 

In my experience, team collaboration and valuing the team members for their contributions are key to gaining consistent and sustainable funding.

Harking back to the original query, nobody is bringing in the big bucks alone; it is always (and I am not shying away from saying ‘always) the result of teamwork. 

It’s time to abolish the requirement, and illusion, that one single person is responsible, or lauded, for bringing in funds for an NP. 

Photo by Shane Rounce