Human Resources: The key to your strategy
The Fundraising Team
Every organization structures its revenue development team or office differently. Yes, I know some of you are laughing right now because there is no team and more likely it’s a line item in someone’s job description; other duties as required. Regardless, you still need to establish what resources and skillsets you have before you can really develop your strategy.
The organizational fundraising assessment is designed to help you to answer that question. Who do you have available and/or dedicated to stewardship and revenue development in your organization? Do you have staff who work directly on revenue development. Do your admin and/or communications staff support them?
Finding the Right People
It’s been hard to find employees lately for everyone, even churches, and the landscape of our work environments are changing. Many jobs now are work from home or some sort of hybrid working arrangement. Many employers offer flexible hours to accommodate people’s lives outside of work, such as dentist appointments, picking up kids or even maybe a quick nap to re-energize.
The list of perks being offered these days to attract job seekers is long and creative. So, traditional organizations are at an even greater disadvantage attracting talent when they are not offering some of these things.
Personality and Fundraising
You will also want to consider how personalities factor into the skills needed for specific strategies; it isn’t a one size fits all, and there’s a place and a strategy for everyone in fundraising and philanthropy. People often assume that fundraising is like sales, so ‘we need an aggressive go-getter’ to bring in the revenue. And this is not true. Sometimes the introvert is better at listening and identifying passions and commitment in the quiet conversations. Here is a good article by Emma Lewenzy, on why introverts make the best major gift fundraisers.
So, choose your staff and volunteers carefully. Have intentional conversations with them to make sure you have the right person for the role, and they understand what they are being asked to do. Provide a job description, training, regular opportunities for check-ins and evaluation.
Setting Goals and Managing Workload
It’s probably better to look at breaking down your human resources into the percentage of time spent on strategies and project management. So, for example, spending 50 per cent of your time cultivating higher capacity donors (your top donors) and on direct response strategies, 20 per cent on events and committee management, 20 per cent on communications and 10 per cent on admin and planning.
If you can move some of the admin or communications work to another person, that frees up more time for direct fundraising initiatives. This is where volunteers can also be very helpful. As you add more people to your fundraising team, paid or unpaid, you will be able to do more.
Volunteers
How we recruit and manage volunteers is a vast subject and I am not going to cover it here. You can read the article, Volunteer Recruitment: How to do it well, on my blog, to get some good tips and things to consider when recruiting.
What can volunteers best be utilized for in fundraising? That depends on your strategies and the available skill sets of your volunteers and your collective imaginations. You can utilize volunteers for just about anything.
Events lend themselves well to volunteer involvement, and on a few levels, from the planning committee, through to day-of event volunteers. In fact, this is often a great outreach opportunity to attract newcomers or new volunteers to get more involved. It’s a good way to meet people, maybe learn a new skill and have some fun at the same time.
Fundraising Committee
But there are certainly many other ways you can utilize the skills of your volunteers. If you don’t have a formalized fundraising committee, that’s the first place you should start. A lot of organizations will mandate that the chair of this committee be a member of the board. I’m not as convinced this is necessary. It’s certainly helpful, but with the prevailing incidence of reduced volunteers, if you can’t find someone to do both, don’t let that stop you from forming the fundraising (or stewardship) committee anyway. The committee is the goal. The chair can report back regularly to the board and attend meetings when required.
Once you have the committee, they then become the driving force to enact the fundraising strategy along with staff (if you have them). So, depending on your available resources, you need to build your strategy from there. Do you have people willing to work one on one or in small groups with some of your higher capacity donors? Do you have someone who can manage your fundraising communications? Or is there someone in that role you can utilize to help with your campaigns and engagement?
A lot of church communications are focused on announcements and broadcasting information, as opposed to extending your ministry throughout the week and driving engagement. You will have to do the latter if you want it to inspire generosity and your communications team will need to buy into that premise.
What can you do as a leader?
If you want to do it well and stick with it…it has to be something you are comfortable doing. Sometimes being grateful and saying thank you, or donor stewardship, is an easier place to start for many leaders. So, write a thank you letter, or at least sign them personally. You might be surprised at the response you’ll get.
Major gifts and asking people for money isn’t for everyone. You can read more about that in one of my previous articles, Fear of asking for money. For others, writing good fundraising communications is the challenge and if you don’t have someone to help it can be equally as distressing.
The key is, to find out what strategies you (and your staff and volunteers) are natural gifted to do well and focus in on those. When you become comfortable asking for financial support and being well received in one strategy, it gets easier to extrapolate that to other initiatives.
Or conversely, you can decide on certain strategies you think will be successful and look for people with the necessary skill set. I would recommend this strategy when you are reaching into a growth or new strategy space.
The other thing you can do is hire contractor or outside consultants to help you execute certain strategies or campaigns. You will find specialized industry professionals in just about every niche of fundraising…and most of them offer services at reasonable rates.
Thanking people is the number one reason why they give again.
Conclusion
If you are a small shop, you have limited time. So, you have to pick strategies you will actually make the time to do, and by that, I mean not put off because you have too much other work to do. It’s always easy to put off the things you don’t like doing.
In a small office, you have to work smarter to be efficient with your resources. You also must be willing to try new things and step out into unfamiliar territory. But I can promise you, nothing is more rewarding than witnessing the joy of giving and gratitude.
I am a firm believer that everyone can contribute to the culture of giving and gratitude in some way. You (and your team) can execute a meaningful and successful fundraising program if you implement the right strategies. Do the organizational fundraising assessment in your organization today and see where you can make some improvements. Download it for free on the main page of my website or click the link above.
Use the assessment data as a conversation starter with your leadership. When you have information gathered, trust me, you will find much to talk about.
If you need help with the evaluation or want to take it to the next step, give me a call, set up a meeting here, or email me at michelleharderinc@gmail.com.
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