The Only Fundraising Question You Should Ask
Two of the biggest technological curses infecting fundraising are Word and Excel. Microsoft might be the archenemy of intelligent fundraising.
Word, with its copy and paste function has demeaned and degraded copy to the point where we’ve convinced ourselves that the homogenized gruel we serve our donors is truly good copy. Heaven help us. [I’ve warned about ‘copy & paste’ in a broader context before!]
But the greatest sins of all in fundraising – not thinking, and not truly understanding – spring from Excel. Let me explain.
There’s not a ‘full service’ consulting firm who doesn’t employ some ‘planner/analyst’ who’s proficient with Excel. They can deal out pivot tables and plans faster than their firm’s account execs throw out business cards at an AFP conference. The result is mediocrity unchallenged.
Of course the problem isn’t with the technology itself, it’s with the unthinking, copy & paste mentality by which it’s used. Want a new plan for 2012? Well, we’ll copy 2011’s plan and results, add a few decimals here and there for inflation, stick our fingers to the wind to factor in the dwindling economy, a presidential election year, the increased lapse rate, fewer new donors — and voila! There’s your plan! Complete with bar charts and a range of other color graphics all designed to add credibility to this unthinking and lazy fraud.
Count me out.
Just one of the reasons Tom and I are starting in on our Flat Earth Fundraising series. To ask the “Why?” question and to point out who those who are navigating better, smarter and not stuck in the past.
Now, if ever, all of us need to demand of ourselves and our consultants some real, unfettered and fresh thinking. What is the true reality behind those spreadsheet numbers? Did anyone even bother to question the assumptions? Why do we just expect and tolerate last year’s poor retention rates? What specifically has been planned to deal with them? What’s our competition doing? And are they doing it better?
Life has so many questions; so few answers. But frankly, the most important fundraising question you’d better be asking your consultants and yourself when the glorified spreadsheets come spinning out in anticipation of 2012 is “Why?” “Why?” “Why?”
Roger
9 responses to “The Only Fundraising Question You Should Ask”
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An excellent post Roger. I think about fundraising all day and it baffles me to no end – even myself! I have no issue dropping $20 on a friend’s race for “Fill in Illness” but keep putting off my annual membership for “fill in the blank org.” I think fundraising has become so much more social and you cannot copy and paste that.
Roger, this is one of the most important posts you all have done in a long time. It’s maddening to see the same old same old strategies and nonprofit jargon/blather. We’ve got to have fresh thinking if we are possibly going to be successful. And we need to demand fresh thinking. I’m with you!
Yes, yes and yes. I recently finished a program review of a new alumni relations program,and included in the findings that they had not asked enough “why’s” before charging off in 40 directions.
Thanks for another post that will help folks remember to ask the right questions. As an old biology professor used to say, the question is
more important than the answer. Answer the wrong question and you could be even worse off!
Even out-of-the-box thinking requires quality tools! I use Excel constantly in my efforts to expand our understanding of what our donors want. It’s up to the organizations who use this tool to decide whether to wield it as a scalpel or as a sledgehammer. Perhaps it’s time to start thinking about data analysis services as a means to generate questions instead of answers…
We need to be careful not to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Unless you have a large budget and fundraising staff, the can’t be a very high risk tolerance. We need to balance the control with improvement and innovation. I do 85% as a repeat of the past, with constant tweaking for improvement, and 15% experimentation. Then I can try out new things without shooting myself in the foot.
Fundraising is about relationships. If you keep changing your strategies then you will lose the audience that you have built.
Great piece! One of my pet peeves! I come in as consultant and am told to just update their forms – excel. And most of them aren’t even checked for accuracy! Get into the database I say! Learn to use the data and integrate into your daily planning.
Thanks for bringing this up!
Roger, you make so many good points. But I think of all the people I’ve worked with over the years who have gone on to start their own consulting businesses or moved from agencies to the consulting side and back again. It’s hard to imagine the colleagues I’ve worked with just substituting the capability of the software for the curiosity they started out with and the rigor they learned working at either end of the spectrum (client or agency rep). I don’t think it is laziness, or lack of training or caring. It may be risk-aversion and tight budgets and not enough staff (because of course the software will do stuff for us). It may be folks are expected to do more and more in seemingly less time and that the expectation is that we can make great decisions in shorter time frames — it may be that thought-time is no longer valued. And instantaneous communication as the norm cuts out worthwhile or meaningful deliberation. And that leads to a lack of willingness to take risks … to lead.
In our consulting practice, we are constantly finding examples of places where technology has completely broken organizational capacity. Here’s one great example of the terror that is Excel:
http://www.slaughterdevelopment.com/2009/04/28/excel-not-recommended/
Oh copy-paste, we’re all guilty even though we know it’s a bad idea much of the time. My favorite frightening-use-of-excel is for donor records. There’s just too much information (like employer, gift history, volunteer history, relationships, call notes) to efficiently use an excel sheet for that. Leave the excel sheets for numbers, not relationships!