The Imperatives
The Fundraising Performance Imperatives offer a systemic approach to developing highly productive, mutually beneficial donor relationships based on the Four C’s of fundraising—Culture, Case, Constituency and Capacity—as well as Lean Six Sigma thinking, advanced management theory, performance improvement, the quality movement and social psychology.
The six overarching Imperatives provide the framework for an advanced system continuously improved since 2003 to dramatically increase fundraising production.
By adopting the Fundraising Performance Imperatives as an execution framework, fundraising organizations are able to achieve the internal transformation necessary to succeed in an external environment of continuous disruptive change.
1 / Think Different
The first imperative requires changing the way senior management, the board and the rest of the organization think about fundraising. Investing in fundraising can pay off handsomely with the correct approach but restraint, risk avoidance and dated best practices dominate.
A change in customer needs, an innovation or a technological or managerial breakthrough can all invalidate your strategy and value proposition. Fundraising as it is currently practiced in many organizations is based on a theory that hasn’t changed in generations. Employee expectations and needs have changed, technology has changed, the needs of our beneficiaries have changed, donors have changed, management breakthroughs have occurred and a tremendous amount of new knowledge and capabilities have been developed.
The same old approach means the same old results. It is time to think big, big enough to make a real difference through investments in people, processes and technology. It is time to make fundraising more than a rounding error in beneficiary budgets. It’s time to integrate fundraising throughout the beneficiary. It’s time to radically improve results. It is time to Think Different.
2 / Vision & Values
Vision and Values choose your team, they decide how you spend your time, they create your habits, they set expectations and they guide your decisions. Making them clear allows others to align with them and thereby reduces the friction in your organization. They speed decisions and empower others to make decisions that align with them. Get everyone in your organization 100% on the same page with where you’re going and how you plan to get there. With your team, develop and communicate a noble purpose and the values that will drive everyone towards it.
Misaligned teams and processes are inefficient, costly and ineffective. Aligning employees, donors, beneficiaries and partners is essential for seamless integration and experiences of all stakeholders. Just as in sports, a collection of talented people working for themselves does not win championships. Considerable time and effort needs to be dedicated to ensuring clarity through transparency and engagement. It also helps people decide if they want to be part of the vision and it makes it easier when recruiting.
3/ Donor Motives
The donor is the customer. Not the organization. In our experience, this is a common misconception in fundraising today. Understanding donors’ motivations is essential, not only within the fundraising staff but throughout your organization.
At one time and potentially still with the silent generation of donors, the organization would tell donors what they needed and donors would respond. This is no longer the case. Today it is typical that the larger the gift, the more involved the donor will want to be. They see a problem they want solved and are willing to fund it but they want to be a partner in that solution. To some degree, that means that donors will set some priorities of the beneficiary and that is difficult for beneficiaries and fundraisers to adapt to.
In today’s reality, the role of the fundraiser has changed. No longer do fundraisers just ask for money. For principal gifts, they must develop the case with the donor and the beneficiary and all other stakeholders, striking a balance with all of them. To do this complex and challenging work a process is necessary to ensure that it is done with as little friction as possible. Building strong partnerships with all stakeholders is key to fundraising today.
4/ Radical Redesign
Incremental change produces, at best, incremental improvement—often short-lived. Given it is our opinion that the current paradigm of fundraising is out of touch with current realities, nothing short of radical change is required to make profound differences in performance. Every team member in every aspect of your organization will be affected, as will multiple facets of your beneficiary.
Changing one thing or another or bringing in trendy ideas rarely results in meaningful, long-standing improvement. Often these efforts are disjointed and don’t ensure the alignment of all aspects of your organization or lack the commitment to ensure results. An entire business model or operating system, along with a major shift in thinking is required to achieve true breakthrough performance.
Our operating system has been designed to align all aspects of your organization. The team structure, the processes, the technology, the focus and the partnerships drive impactful results. It is a complete system fully developed with proven results.
5/ Highest and Best Use
Given that resources are always scarce relative to need and that human beings are uniquely designed with certain gifts, talents, weaknesses and biases that equip them best for certain assignments or roles, it is critical to focus people on where they can make the most impact. By redesigning roles to partner with people who have complementary skills and transferring things traditionally included in a role, organizations can dramatically increase results and employee satisfaction. The design of your organization and its roles around these principles is critical to success.
In particular, the role of the Relationship Manager (Gift Officer) is often saddled with tasks that reduce focus on relationship building. It isn’t unusual that they are asked to do writing, enter data or plan events. Aligning those non-relationship tasks with someone who is proficient at them will free your Relationship Managers to do what they do best. They will be happier and more effective and your results will show it. Partnering the RM with a process expert who is an excellent planner has proven to be incredibly effective. Improve employee morale and lower your staff turnover while saving money by having writing, data entry and event work done with resources which are less costly.
Additionally, most organizations are overburdened by bureaucracy and are sluggish and timid. Laden by Top-down power structures and rule-choked management systems the staff are often disengaged, their creativity is crushed, and initiative and innovation are stifled. Clear processes, transparent communications and partnerships in the work environment can make a huge difference and enable self-management. Happy employees make happy donors and happy donors make big donations.
6/ Process
The FPI Core Process™ is the beating heart of high-performance fundraising. It is the core of an end-to-end process-based structure with 100% process documentation and crystal-clear primary accountabilities.
All too often the siloed functions of an organization are misaligned. A lack of clarity about the focus of the organization and the work that each team is doing causes tremendous waste and frustration. It is absolutely critical to ensure the vision is clear and how things are done are transparent, documented understood and followed. You need to ensure your organization has “One Best Way” to fundraise. It must be disciplined, methodical and repeated and there can’t be any exceptions. That said, by no means does that mean people aren’t empowered to make decisions. They most certainly are within the framework. It may sound that creativity is not allowed but that couldn’t be further from the truth. It is required. Relationship Managers actually love working in this framework despite it sounding draconian.
Beyond the fundraisers, you need to ensure all your processes are vision aligned and built on lean process improvement principles which focus on the stakeholders to eliminate waste. Identifying and tackling issues that customers and employees bring forward are critical to your success. Even the process improvement process needs a process and a cadence to addressing problems and should be well defined, monitored and measured.
Developing a case is a complex process and includes multiple partners but once the steps and roles are defined clearly it can move along quickly. Without the ability to create visionary “breakthrough” cases, it is very difficult to raise large sums of money.
Reducing process cycle time and ensuring they have as little friction as possible for employees to execute are keys to success. It doesn’t take much for one process that affects many others to produce less-than-desirable results and unnecessary frustration that affects the employee experience. This means that support teams need to integrate themselves with other processes and optimize, not their own outcomes, but the outcomes of everyone in balance. For example, IT systems should work for those using them as well as the IT administrators.
You need to know how your organization works and you need to listen to those on the front lines of the work in developing effective solutions that everyone follows. If you aren’t doing things the same way how can you learn if that way is working or not. Lone Ranger fundraisers don’t share information and if you aren’t sharing information you are going to be less effective. Again, a collection of star players doesn’t win championships, teams do.
7/ Metrics & Data
Metric-based management creates organizational alignment while dramatically reducing the overhead burden, allowing more time to be redeployed to actual fundraising. However, choosing the right metrics can be challenging. People respect what you inspect. As a result, you will get what you measure. If you choose a nonpredictive measurement, you will not get the results you might have hoped for. A simpler way of saying this is measure what matters.
Choosing leading metrics that can predict outcomes and making this information widely available and completely transparent enables both self-management and accountability that drives results. A rigorous tracking system is necessary. Fully integrating data and reporting systems that align with the needs of its customers (management and fundraisers) and the organization is critical as it enables data-based decision-making.
Measuring net promotor scores for donors and stakeholders as well as measuring the number of times a donor or stakeholder has to connect with your team to get something done is highly recommended to measure the customer experience (Cx). Additionally, you will need to measure a net promotor score for employees to measure the employee experience (Ex) and you should strive to keep both Cx and Ex in balance. These are strong leading metrics of your results. A study showed that organizations that have both high Cx and Ex had a three-year compound growth rate almost double those with low scores.
8/ Execution
Key to any endeavour is the commitment and grit required to see it through. Successful fundraising requires discipline. Without the commitment to consistently identify, qualify and engage with new prospects and to ensure opportunities and plans never fall through the cracks a robust system needs to be in place to see it through.
A series of regularly scheduled review sessions focused on the defined metrics is key to ensuring your success. Just as team members are to be held accountable to the approach, so must leadership. Leaders must demonstrate visibly their commitment to the processes, metrics and principles of the system.
While many organizations do make valiant efforts in this respect a lack of focus easily derails the effort. Strategy guru Michael Porter suggests that clarity about what you won’t do is the best way to succeed in what you will do. In other words, opportunities pop up frequently in fundraising but if they don’t align with what you are doing they will draw resources away from your focus and you will be less likely to succeed.
Continuity reinforces an identity, it builds a brand, a reputation and customer relationships. It helps outside parties to contribute. It fosters improvements in individual activities and fit; it allows an organization to build unique capabilities and skills tailored to its strategy. Too much flexibility causes an organization that doesn’t stand for anything, an organization needs direction.