Tips to Keep Your Fundraising Efforts Out of the ER

The executive director felt her top need was additional staff since she is "the only staff available to handle donor development and fundraising responsibilities." What caught my eye was there was no mention of her governing board. When I responded that it is the board's responsibility to insure adequate resources for staff to deliver the mission effectively, the executive responded that she is well aware of the role of the board in fund development. She stated that her biggest challenge is in convincing board members of this.

The role of board leadership in this particular situation is critical. The executive's response of the need to convince her board as to its role opens up a lot of other thoughts. We'll leave some of those for another time.

To recap, I believe that the situation described by the executive is solvable — but not without investing time and effort, and enduring some short-term pain. It remains to be seen what will actually happen.

Creating and maintaining a sustainable funding base almost always includes a healthy and growing fundraising outreach to individual donor-investors. These are people who are emotionally committed to your cause or organization. You work to engage these individuals in a myriad of ways but fundamentally always treat as partners in the fulfillment of your mission.

I want to thank the hardworking and well-motivated executive director who shared her situation. I hope that the challenges she is facing will resolve themselves in a productive, positive way. Perhaps her situation and my response to it will serve to spark action in other organizations.

In these columns we address real-life obstacles and challenges that nonprofits face in creating sustainable funding to deliver their missions and achieve their goals.

I want to hear from you concerning your particular situation and the difficulties you face in developing sustainable revenue streams. Email me, and I'll give you a quick response. I'll choose some of these thorny obstacles to share, along with my insights, in upcoming columns.