Several hundred new Agitator readers have come on board since I first launched the ‘Barriers to Growth’ series back in May. And many long-time readers have suggested we put the series in an eBook compilation.

While Tom and our Chief Global Financial Officer debate the eBook, I’ve decided to simply list and summarize the 10 Barriers to Growth in hopes that it will benefit new readers, remind longer-term readers and agitate all.

Here’s a summary of all 10 Barriers along with a link for those particular barriers in which you’re most interested.

Part 1 – Overcoming Barriers To Growth. Provocative insights from Adrian Sargeant and Kevin Schulman on what makes for great fundraising and why most organizations are stuck in the foothills and will never reach the peaks.

Part 2 – The Investment Paradox. Most organizations ignore a principal source of investment funds for growth. Take this to your board!

Part 3 – Lousy Boards. Sadly, too many nonprofits are willing to tolerate the disease of ‘congenial dysfunctional politeness’ when it comes to governing boards.

Part 4 – Clueless CEO’s. Stagnant organizations are generally marked by lousy boards and clueless, or worse, arrogant CEOs. Without the leadership of an engaged, aware and willing-to-learn CEO you might as well forget about growth.

Part 5 – Fundraising Agencies. The time has come not to cast stones, but to engage in the search for workable alternatives admitting that the so-called ‘full-service agency’ model as we once knew it has largely passed its prime.

Part 6 – Poor Research and Undocumented Best Practices. You’d think a $300 billion industry like ours would have empirically based standards and practices readily available and accessible to all. After all, most sectors — ranging from apple growers to doctors and hospitals, and even zoos — have them. Fundraising doesn’t.

Part 7 – Easy Excuses and Low Expectations. I’m convinced that a major barrier to most nonprofits’ growth is that there is little understanding of an organization’s true potential. As a result, far too many organizations and their consultants set their sights far too low, settling for the average given in a benchmark like Giving USA, which year after year, for the past 20 years, has estimated the growth of giving at 2% of GDP.

Part 8 – Insufficient Collaboration. All nonprofits, but particularly the smaller ones, need to get far better at cooperation and collaboration when it comes building scale in the use of technology, data and analytics.

There are many reasons why this isn’t happening. Some fear an imaginary ‘competitive disadvantage’ will spring from information sharing and collaboration. Others can’t envision what it would look like. And still others are too short of staff and too pressed for time to get the ball rolling.

Part 9 – Poor or No Strategy. For the nonprofits unlikely to ever grow, strategy is often thought of as a spreadsheet exercise. Somehow, the larger the spreadsheet the more confident the organization is in its ‘strategy’.

AND NOW … Barrier #10. Mindset.

Go back and read — I mean really read — Adrian’s and Kevin’s papers included in Part 1. Then, as you roll through the other 9 Barriers you’ll quickly see that the willingness to grow — which in truth means the willingness to change — is entirely dependent on mindset. Not fear of change. Not respect for the status quo. Not ‘meeting the numbers’. Not protecting idle and mindless colleagues.

Strong and growing organizations challenge those who work there. Aren’t afraid to fire the whole under-performing crew. Inspiration, growth and excitement comes from wanting to be the best you can be. Unless that’s your organization’s mantra, you will forever live in the foothills and never reach the peak.

Roger

P.S. On the ‘Mindset’ issue I have a practical suggestion. Buy some popcorn and devote the next board meeting, retreat, staff conference or wherever folks are gathered to discuss your organization’s future to watching the movie Moneyball.

Eliminate 2 hours, 13 minutes of ‘done this, heard that’ sessions from the agenda, and serve the popcorn. 

I’m serious.

Moneyball, which is an effective study in counterproductive behaviors, deals not only with wins and losses, but also with a man’s quest to revolutionize a sport; someone who, in Lewis’ words, was willing “to rethink baseball: how it is managed . . . how it is played. . . and who is best suited to play it, and why”.

That man was Billy Beane, the provocative general manager of the Oakland A’s, who has unconventional ideas about what a team with limited resources can do to compete with such wealthy powerhouses as the New York Yankees.

Bean takes on the system by challenging the fundamental tenets of the game. He looks outside baseball’s cherished dependence on the intuition of scouts and hires a brainy young number-crunching Harvard-educated economist to help him figure out a better way.

Armed with computer-driven statistical analysis long ignored by the baseball establishment, they go after players overlooked and dismissed by the business-as-usual baseball world for being too old, injured, or too much trouble, but all of whom have key skills that are universally undervalued.

And just as in every other specialized field of human endeavor, the detractors, the old-guard, and the high priests argue that this focus on numbers dehumanizes the game and ignores the intangibles that only trained scouts can see.

Although data analytics is an element in the story, that’s not really what Moneyball is about. Instead, it’s a real-life story of innovating, of changing your mindset to succeed. Or as Billy Beane puts it in the movie, “Adapt or die”.

It took some time, but eventually most of baseball adopted the Moneyball mindset and strategy. And that’s exactly what’s going to happen in the world of fundraising.

As the Agitator Sees It….

,,,here are additional links on other essential foundations you might wish to explore:

Heroic Incrementalism. The problem isn’t that we need new and exciting things. It’s that the term “game changing needs to be focused on harnessing the vast donor potential that already exists. We’d all do far better if we simply invested the time, money, patience and skill in rearranging priorities and focusing on activities that make a huge difference for the future.

Premature Exoneration. It’s simply amazing how many millions are lost each year for the simple reason that organization’s fail to keep their donors’ addressed and other contact information up-to-date.  Pay attention to this most fundamental of fundamentals and don’t assume “someone else” is taking care of it.

Testing: Best Practices—Part 1 and Part 2.  Sadly, much of testing in fundraising is worthless because it leads to no conclusions, costs a lot of money, and yields little when it comes to effecting significant change and valuable insights.  Lots of “how to properly test” in these posts with guidance for acquisition, house files, message testing and checklists.