Tell me if you’ve heard this . . .
“Best practice tells us you need wobbly widgets to effectively wrangle wombats!”
Well, not the widgets/wombats part, but the “best practice” part. It’s a term that gets kicked around a fair amount in fundraising, but what does it mean?
The National Institute of Standards and Technology defines it thusly:
“A procedure that has been shown by research and experience to produce optimal results and that is established or proposed as a standard suitable for widespread adoption.”
Sounds pretty spot on, right? It’s something we as a profession have learned, researched, and proven to be the “best” way to accomplish something for the most optimal results.
Here’s the problem:
“Best” for whom? The staggering number of variables in the nonprofit sectors point to vastly different experiences, communities, styles, approaches . . . An annual fund campaign at a large state university is very, very, very different than one for a local food bank, for example.
It leaves little room for flexibility, testing, innovation, and iteration - lean on best practices too hard and it’s a slippery slope into “this is the way we’ve always done it.”
How do you know that the best practice being followed is actually the right best practice?
It’s that last one that can really impact fundraising. Let me give you a couple of examples:
Best practice shows that a longer direct mail letter gets better results!”
That’s a fairly true statement. Except in this case, the letter in question was four pages, single spaced, in 11 point font, back-to-back on business letterhead. There was no bolding, italics, underlines, bullet points, images, or anything to lighten the visual appeal. Paragraphs were CHONKS of text, minimum five sentences each. And the vast majority of the copy was all about the things “we” (i.e. the organization) had done. There was nothing at all for the donor in there.
Yes, a longer letter will generally yield stronger fundraising results than a shorter one - but with short/one-line paragraphs, plenty of visuals and a whole lot of “you” in the letter for the donor to connect to. (If you'd like to explore more on this, connect with Lisa Sargent on LinkedIn and while you're there subscribe to her newsletter, you will not regret it.)
So, this wasn’t “best practice” . . . But it also was. At a surface level.
Best practice is that you should focus primarily on wealthy donors to get the best fundraising results.
No. No, it absolutely does not. Nobody nowhere ever said to focus so much on potentially wealthy donors that you leave out entire communities and exclude people from giving.
This perception is what’s led us to where we are today - declining number of households giving to charities, plummeting retention rates, and a whole host of other challenges we’ve created ourselves. The "best" fundraising is built on a wide variety of donors giving at multiple levels and in multiple ways.
These are just two examples; there are, I'm sure, MANY more. It's left me puzzling on what exactly is "best practice" and can we state, definitively, what it is in relation to fundraising?
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So. Toss out "best practice" and what are you left with?
Anarchy. Chaos. Dogs & cats living together. In the distance . . . sirens.
Not really. That's a bit hyperbolic - mostly. 'Cause without best practice, without some experience to guide us or help focus our efforts, it's just . . . well . . . . asking people for money.
And there are good ways to do that and there are bad ways. Positive ways and unethical ways. Ways that are more effective than others and ways that can end really, really badly. Where does that leave us?
I think it leaves us with Proven Principles.
The principles of fundraising that stand the test of time, that have been proven over-and-over again, the things we do as fundraisers that are immutable and guide every action we take or every plan we make. (Cue Sting. Gen X reference. Also ear worm. I digress.) The problem with Proven Principles is that they're even harder to define, tougher to pinpoint and, indeed, create questions of their own.
Like, for example:
"Fundraising is about relationships." It's true. Absolutely true. Stronger fundraising, more successful, ethical fundraising is built not on transactions but on relationships. What does that mean, though? 'Cause I've known some amazing relationship builders that are lousy fundraisers. And I've met some amazing raisers-of-funds who are lousy relationship builders.
Principles can be defined as a set of guidelines that help guide decisions and actions.
Principles are also the foundation that practice is built on. Let's go back to that example of the longer direct mail letter . . . the goal is, yes, to raise more money. And let's assume it's also to create or further a longer-term 'relationship' with a donor - we'd like for them to become long-term supporters. So, then, we want to be sure that our practice does everything possible to further those goals. And that means knowing and understanding the ways the structure of an appeal will do that - which mean getting opened, read, and acted upon i.e. short paragraphs, lots of visuals, more 'you' than 'we', etc.
Let's take "Fundraising is about relationships" as a principle - through that lens, if we're allowing relationships to guide our decisions in how we fundraise, it changes the nature of the work. We're focused less on the dollars, more on the transformation.
What are the core principles of fundraising?
That's the question.
That's the question we need to be asking. Yes, let's investigate "best practice" i.e. methodology that works to raise money, sure, but what are the proven principles that support that work.
I don't know that there is a list, somewhere, of the definitive core principles of fundraising. That's what we're going to explore here and what the work of Next River Fundraising Strategies is built on.
I do know that this particular time in fundraising, development, and advancement is telling us our communities need more from us in how we engage them in our missions and the work that will uplift us all.
And I'm tremendously curious as to what you might think a proven principle is vs. a best practice.
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