I’m looking forward to speaking next week at the annual meeting of the Association of Advancement Services Professionals  because I want to personally thank these unsung heroes.

These are the pros who gather, organize, manage and disseminate the information that is the backbone of solid and effective fundraising. Key activities too often ignored or paid short shrift. Database management and reporting … gift and biographical records management … donor services, recognition and stewardship and prospect research and management.

In my opinion far too much attention is paid to major gifts officers, creatives, and strategists. Far too little credit and fewer kudos fall to those who are the engineers in the engine room that powers the ship of fundraising.

It’s ironic that at a time it’s become fashionable for senior leadership talk about the power of a collaborative, silo-free organization, how little of that talk translates to action.

In fact, most nonprofits are organized and managed to get anything but a collaborative, silo-free result. In the conventional organization, compensation and career advancement is based more on the ability to compete and outshine others than it is on collaboration.

It is this internal, but often unspoken, competition for budgets, compensation and other resources that works against collaboration — and ultimately against the interest of the donor.

Perhaps it’s the social media team who are today’s ‘favorites’ in the eyes of management. And so the web team, the database team and the donor relations folks and other key support personnel are relegated to the status of ‘overhead’ and some other sort of necessary evil.

The result? The organization is actually incentivizing not the value of collaboration but the creation of internal non-collaborative factions. We call them ‘silos’.

There’s a way to change this: by organizing around the donor and by measuring and rewarding success based on the donor success. Higher retention rates. Higher donor commitment and satisfaction scores. Higher lifetime value.

Unless nonprofit leaders and managers measure donor success and reward those organization-wide collaborative efforts that go into creating the experiences today’s donors demand, they face a grim future.

Disconnected, internally competing groups create dysfunctional organizations and the future for such dysfunction is dismal in the age of the connected customer.

In short, the more demanding nature of today’s donor requires a new set of metrics. Measurements that reflect the power of collaboration (retention rates, lifetime value, donor satisfaction) rather than mere campaign totals and response rates.

Two years ago in an Agitator post  I noted that one reason for the mistaken use of myopic metrics stems from a fundamental misunderstanding of the term ‘attribution’.

In reality ‘attribution’ means assigning results or performance to various actions or sources. As in, what factors — message, donor service, communications, thank you’s, donor recognition, frequency, etc — contribute in what proportional way to increasing or decreasing the Lifetime Value of a donor base.

However, for too many organizations, ‘attribution’ is little more than the annual or semi-annual internal battle over who gets credit for the proceeds from various campaigns.

The online silo battles it out with the direct mail silo, arguing that their great work is a major attribution to the organization’s multi-channel efforts.  Meanwhile, the major gift silo largely ignores the other two, believing that direct mail and online activities are mere noise, not substantive signal, when it comes to their big gift program.

Here’s where the problem with retention begins. Even though when it comes to improving Lifetime Value — the only true long-term metric that matters — the tactics/techniques/frequency of activity from the fundraising department accounts for less than 20% of the ultimate value on a donor file.

Despite this, fundraisers and their consultants insist on attributing results and value in a campaign-by-campaign transactional approach. “Yay, the October appeal was gangbusters, guess our great RFM select was the reason for its success.”

Meanwhile, important, ongoing activities that add real and lasting value (proper ‘thank you’ and ‘welcome’ programs … donor-centric newsletters … accurate data management … extraordinary donor service and donor experiences) are discounted or ignored.

There’s a real danger in paying too much attention and overvaluing single campaign activities like appeals and renewal notices. When this misplaced metric is over-emphasized, no other activity, no other department and certainly no combination of all these is held accountable for the positive or negative impact on the donor’s experience, retention and commitment.

What’s your organization doing to build and reward collaboration and recognize your unsung heroes?

Roger