Preparing Your Organization for Outsourcing

Preparing Your Organization for Outsourcing

Feb. 28, 2006

By Abny Santicola, associate editor, FundRaising Success

Lots of organizations rely on consultants as part of their fundraising team. But chances are most, if not all, of those organizations handled their fundraising efforts on their own at some point and made the decision to transition their fundraising from a wholly in-house operation to one involving consultants. Reasons for shifting to using a consultant or consultants are varied.

For the University of Wisconsin's Parkside campus, a regional, primarily undergraduate campus of the University of Wisconsin system serving Kinosha and Racine counties and founded in 1968, it came out of a desire to institute the university's first comprehensive campus-wide benefit campaign after a number of successful solo efforts.

Len Iaquinta, director of major gifts for the institution and a fundraising consultant himself, says there's been a lot to do in terms of building the infrastructure of personnel, defining the institution's core messages and pulling together a list of its top prospects for the campaign. In preparation for working with a consultant, the institution now is in the process of preparing detailed prospect lists and information on current and past board members, honored alumni and graduates. The institution also will perform what Iaquinta calls mini campaigns, to test its ability to do a major campaign.

The consultants then will evaluate the institution's prospect pool and the mini campaigns' success and give the university advice on what it can achieve.

"That's why we want to hire some outside expertise," Iaquinta says. "We need to have an objective look at our infrastructure now that we've gotten the basics put together. We also need to have some third-party people come in and interview some of our key prospects, board members and other stakeholders to get some really objective feedback as to how ready we are, and what themes will be most responded to when we talk about the need for building programs and giving scholarships to our students here."