Celebrating the Fundraising Life

There never seems to be enough time in the day to get everything done.

How many times have fundraisers been on conference calls, and simultaneously worked on an agenda for their next meeting, glanced at their to do list, and read and answered emails, all at the same time? Attention Deficit Disorder?  No; they are on fundraising time.

One of the chief complaints of the Development Officers is that they don't have enough time in the day, week, month to do all the data entries they need to do, make calls, send emails to donors, write proposals and think strategically about their fundraising work plans and priorities.  Yet, these daily tasks need to be done in order to record historical data, build pipelines, stay in touch with donors, move solicitations forward and plan for the future.

One email I read recently was from a woman named Elizabeth Abel, Assistant Vice President at CCS Fundraising, who wrote a short, practical list that suggests that summer is the time to think ahead to the fall and winter and plan out a fundraising calendar of upcoming donor activities and benchmarks, meetings, and events.  Her list also suggests that this is the time of year to develop donor engagement strategies and do some research on prospects, creating snapshots of people you want to contact for donors or volunteer activities, reviewing your pipeline of donors and revisiting solicitation dates and follow up moves marked for the fall.

The last thing on her list, but one that is very essential, is making time to celebrate recent accomplishments.

About three years ago, I developed something we have named "The Giftie Awards," which is basically a bedazzled, cut-out of a Marlett, our university's ficticious bird that has no feet.  The names of the awards have a sense of mirth with fun names, such as "You Had Me at Hello," and "Goodfellas," and "The Greatest Story Ever Told." These awards not only celebrate reaching our goals, but also recognize things like being the most helpful to our donors and to each other, being environmentally correct, being friendly, etc.  Wearing a boa, singing and making jokes, the host interjects the awards ceremony with an organizational-focused quiz, complete with prizes, to encourage people to learn about our institution, providing everyone with an educational opportunity and some year-end fundraising accomplishment statistics.  The event finishes with a door prize and long-term service awards.  This year, as we are over goal, we have a lot of reason to celebrate.  But hard work doesn't always pay off in annual dollars, as many times our programs need to grow.  People get recognized for the accomplishments that help them develop their pipelines, which will result in future dollars.  The Gifties started three years ago, when we didn't make our annual goal to encourage morale and congratulate people for a job well done; work that would build for the future.

The Gifties are based on the data stored in our Constituent Relationship Management database, The Raiser’s Edge.  It has helped me to instil why goal setting, metrics, recording in our database and other time-consuming necessities of fundraising are so important to gauge how we are doing, and how far we've come...and to recognize our successes, laugh and learn from our mistakes, commiserate and celebrate each other so we can do better in future to raise much-needed funds for our students, faculty, staff and university community who count on us day-in and day-out to help make their campus experience better for current and future generations.

No matter how fun the Gifties are, fundraisers should not wait for once a year to celebrate their achievements.  That’s because every day a fundraiser is at work, they are advancing a relationship; a relationship that will raise money one day to send someone to school, cure an illness, help a homeless person, save an animal, plant a tree, etc.  Together, hundreds of thousands of fundraisers are globally making our world a better place to live each and every day.  I’d say that’s a great reason to celebrate.   So, be sure to commend yourself each and every day before you make that first phone call or read that first email, or do both at the same time.  You deserve it. ​