Tired of trying to do more with less?

You can raise the

investment-level gifts

big visions require.

You can create a systemic fundraising model that drives revenue generation, demonstrates real return-on-investment, and scales to the size of the impact you need to make. The Fundraising Performance Imperatives (FPI) Framework combines art and science to enable you to at least double your production. We will provide whatever level of help you need to help create the overall long-term funding model, metric-based fundraising processes, technology and operational infrastructure, and staffing plan for growth. We’ll help you implement a model that propels growth. We’ll help you train your team and process partners to be high-ROI fundraisers.

Your vision is possible.

You just need to change the model.

You can look at the problem from a different angle.

You have a diversified portfolio of fundraising programs. But you are starting to wonder: Is the fundraising model broken?

Conventional thinking keeps organizations from reaching higher revenue goals.

Many organizations struggle to successfully engage prospects because they don’t have the staff and time to see things from the donor’s point of view. The biggest No-No in investment-level fundraising is to put your cause forward without connecting the dots between the cause and the prospect.

Fundraisers, not surprisingly, tend to look at gifts from their organization's point-of-view: We are a worthy cause; we need money to sustain the organization and advance the cause; we know of someone with money who can support this cause if we just can get in front of them.

By contrast, bigger donors tend to look at gifts from the opposite perspective: We have priorities based on our values; we have finite resources and want to maximize our impact from an investment; we need opportunities and information relevant to our objectives."

Marrying these somewhat disparate perspectives is the art of fundraising.

Just pitching your case more often won’t work when sector-wide annual decreases in the number of donors is dramatically shifting charitable giving.

FPI MKT How Much (Post graphic or Adv)_e

Unrealistic expectations and outdated metrics lead to less production and poor donor retention. A big part of the problem is the still lingering idea that it is “wrong” to spend significant money on fundraising or to have fundraising costs ever exceed a certain (always arbitrary) percentage of funds raised.

If the problem is the whole model, rearranging the individual pieces will never work.

Don’t feel alone. The world has changed but fundraising has not. Conventional wisdom traps fundraisers into putting time and energy into the wrong activities, while struggling to get by on less, while doing more and more.

Doing more with less leads to achieving less. Opportunity cost is when you raise less than you could because CPDR and one-year funding horizons keep you underfunded. Return-on-investment (ROI) is the business world way investments are made.

While a few fundraising organizations are overstaffed for what they are raising, most are understaffed for what they could be raising.

But scaling up an outdated broken model won’t yield a good fundraising ROI. Scaling up a flawed model just wastes money.

The key is creating pools of committed, investment-level individual donors. Instead, fundraisers usually depend on annual campaigns, events, various peer-to-peer “-athons,” direct mail, digital direct response and other low-return-on-investment work.

It’s frustrating because the amount raised every year is far from what could be your impact. The time and energy put into a successful event typically outweighs the financial reward. Direct mail and digital direct response may do better in the short term but across the board are yielding diminishing returns on investment.

All those “truths” about fundraising? The outdated fundraising model is the problem. When you have a ROI-based model that enables real relationships with investment-level donors, you find those “truths” don’t hold true at all. Donor concerns about spending to raise money? When your relationship-based donors are given a chance to understand what your organization needs to change the world in ways they care about, they understand why you need to invest in your people and processes.

Conventional fundraising models rely on transactions, limit growth, and never return the ROI you need to justify strategic investment in fundraising. When development teams put all their attention on a variety of transactional activities, they run out of time for the specific relational activities that have been proven to truly generate the revenue they seek.

You need a systemic ROI model that that propels the reliably predictable growth of your program, secures funding for growth, and attracts investment- level gifts from individuals. And transition to a long game that will at the very least double your fundraising production.

We know our message is radically different from other voices in the sector today. We came into the nonprofit sector from a for-profit business background, so this scarcity mindset never made sense to us. We knew you had to spend money to make money.

While nonprofits are certainly different from for-profit enterprises in many ways, the fundamental truths of how finance works remains the same—you can’t do more with less. Life-changing missions require a significant investment in resources, tools, and people.

What will adopting the Fundraising Performance Imperatives (FPI) Framework do for you?

You will identify what’s really blocking your overall revenue growth and keeping you from having the budget needed for a high ROI operation.

You will be on the path to steady, predictable revenue so you can grow your capabilities and capacity to build relationships with investment-level donors.

You will attract investment-level donors with whom you create truly authentic relationships.

You will turn your team and process partners into high-revenue generators.

You will create a step-by-step action plan that aligns hours with dollars, dictating which activities you must STOP doing and which you must START spending more time on for maximum ROI.

Here’s a step-by-step path to reach your goals.

First, you will pivot your organization, staff, and strategy from fragmented fundraising to process that engages investment-level donors. Securing the investment needed to finance that pivot and subsequent growth in staff starts with understanding how to speak the language of finance to a board and organization that does not understand the economics of high-performance fundraising.

Second, you will align your staff’s time within the FPI Framework to achieve a high-ROI model. Your fundraisers must think like and become like a high-performing business team. Stop spending time on things that don’t deliver. Every hour is valuable, so devote your precious time to the activities that offer the highest ROI.

Third, you will provide the infrastructure, training and ongoing coaching your newly integrated development team needs to maximize production. The result?

Your team will track their time to ensure their fundraising activities are focused on high-ROI results.

Your team will confidently follow well-defined and proven processes to reach and relate to high-potential donors.

Each of your full-time frontline fundraisers will have a clear and direct plan to secure 80-perent of their annual revenue goals from 30 to 40 individual donors.

You will be confident your staff is not leaving money on the table. They will be constantly engaging top-level donors through investment-level dialogues.

You will be certain your donors are all giving their best gift to you each year.

Investment-level gifts are secured by building long-term, mutual relationships with donors. You do that by serving their specific mission for giving while leading them into a deep understanding of what you need.

Break free from the activities that limit growth, create cash flow issues, and never secure the investment-level gifts needed to grow. Know what to stop doing so you can start spending time on attracting investment-level donors and securing larger gifts. ■

Our Mantra
Given the resources and freedom to do so, most fundraising shops could dramatically increase revenue, typically at least doubling production. But to do so, organizations will need to change the way they raise money. Fundraisers need to adopt tools, changes in structure, well-defined processes, and supporting technology—with emphasis on personalized individual giving strategies—that create high-performance development organizations. And—most importantly—we need to be willing to challenge the ways we think about, talk about, lead, manage, and do fundraising.

About the author

Steve Reed offers 30 years’ experience fundraising, the last 20 of which include the application of Lean 6-Sigma principles for performance improvement in healthcare and healthcare fundraising. He is president of Engage Performance Advantage (USA) and a partner in Engage Performance Advantage Canada, Inc.

About Engage Performance Advantage

We are performance improvement change agents offering nonprofit organizations a way to radically redesign how they raise money, with more emphasis on personalized strategies and larger gifts. Our process-based critical path major gifts framework is paired with supporting technology to help leadership create a top-level fundraising organization. It’s a complete solution that can be rapidly deployed with dramatic gains.

Questions for us before you answer the three questions?

sareed@mpicompanies.com 