Avoid the Fundraising Dead Ends

Last week at the Bridge to Excellence conference hosted by the Center for Nonprofit Excellence, myself and a colleague, Liz Dunn, spoke to a big crowd of enthusiastic non-profiteers about avoiding dead ends, and focusing on six best practice fundraising tips.

Our program was titled "Bridge to Nowhere: Avoiding fundraising Dead Ends, and Charting a Path to Success.” Our goal was to encourage the audience to recognize their own barriers around fundraising so that they can avoid going down personal and professional dead ends in their work.

Here is a good example: Recognizing that individual giving and face-to-face solicitation is something that makes you anxious. But we fundraisers know that the importance of building in-person relationships with donors is one of the highest value returns on investment that you can do in this work.

So the task then becomes HOW DO YOU GET OUT OF YOUR OWN WAY by building a support group of folks who can encourage you, or hiring someone who can keep your team accountable on these tasks, or lean into the skill sets of others so that you can focus on what your strength is - instead of spending your energy being anxious about what makes you uncomfortable.

After we had a group therapy session. We started talking about our own dead ends, and how we flipped those to be best practice fundraising attributes in our work.

Here's the list.

• Think like an entrepreneur

• Simplify operations

• Lean into your relationships

• Ask for help

• Create a positive culture

• Build and maintain a support system

Over the next few months, I will dive into each one of these practices to give you my experience about how they make the work stronger and easier for your fundraising efforts.