Harness the Power of 'P'

Step 9: Personality
The ninth "P" relates to your individual personality. To ask for time, talent and treasure from others, you must have a mission-driven heart. If your personal values move you to make a difference for others, promoting the institution ahead of yourself and making fundraising a noble career choice, you will joyfully generate positive financial results. Have empathy for others, and seek to promote philanthropy in society. Analyze yourself, and understand what personality traits are needed to succeed. You either have them, develop them or change careers — it's that simple.

Step 10: Process
Utilize the power of "P" by creating a process that blends the "P"s together. If marketing your program, follow product, price, promotion and place. When producing your fundraising program, instill passion while promoting procedures, plans and progression of prospects, priorities and process.

No two fundraising programs are alike, and you must interpret what works for you. We always will be asked to generate profits while minimizing expenses. Like an alphabet soup of letters, the sum of the "P"s must include a process that brings them all together. Seek to continually refine your processes.

Summary
For development officers in the new world of philanthropy, a very important "P" to acknowledge is "paradigm." According to the American Heritage Dictionary, the word denotes a set of assumptions, concepts, values and procedures that constitutes a way of viewing reality for the community that shares it. The fact that practitioners blend art and science, plus theory and practice, complicates paradigm shifts.

We must realize that business is not usual, and regardless of how compelling our case for support, economic factors are raining on our parade. With a recent $2 trillion loss in the stock market, gift prospects might delay or refuse to make assumed gifts to your institution. If we expect to generate greater fundraising revenues for our programs in the future, we must be prepared to know our prospects' (key gift decision makers') needs and desires more effectively, cultivate our donors more lovingly, and bring our case and priorities into sharper focus. Our profession, which is hard, just became harder.