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| Tina Crouse, Strategist |
It's an interesting thing, the English language; two people can say the same word or words and very different things are understood. When you're playing a card game for instance, someone can say, 'Put your card on the table' and if you know all the rules of the game, you'll lay it down correctly. If you don't, then not only do you not know where to put the card but you also don't know whether to put it face up or face down. You can guess the results when you don't know that last rule.
Fundraising has an interesting subset of words and meanings too but more than vocabulary messes things up. The client or organization can often not know much about what it's doing in terms of fundraising, so they hire a professional with the objective to raise money. It's assumed that the fundraiser knows all of the words for fundraising and so will translate questions and answers into dollars and cents. Both sides make that assumption and off they go. An organization states an objective, "We want to increase our membership base and raise dollars." The fundraiser receives org. information like present membership base, past efforts, present income and puts that together with an external scan, comparables with competitors and external constraints like timing, fundraising cycle, near financial collapse (you get the picture) and suggests a plan. Then there is an org. review for resources to carry out the plan (eg. financial, human, time, physical if necessary), agreements on the plan and then, the fundraising activity is launched. Now, what happens if the information received to begin with, is deficient or misleading, not by design but by how people understand and use certain words ? Same as the card game; you lose.
The losers are the non-profits AND the fundraisers. Both sides do their part but the activity is unsuccessful. Both sides can tell a similar story but the fundraiser is always to blame. Looking back at the example above: if an organization claims to have 3,000 members but only after the unsuccessful activity has happened, is it understood that the organization makes no distinction between 'active' members and 'inactive' members, only then can the fundraiser know that the formula, which formed the basis for the fundraising activity, was incorrect. For the fundraiser, it raises the question, 'Why didn't you tell me ?' and for the Organization, the question might be, 'Why didn't you ask?' Both questions are correct and both sides think they laid their cards out properly on the table and yet, both sides lose.
An experienced fundraiser has seen this one many times, as well as, many others. They can ask a lot of the right questions and sometimes side-step the 'misunderstanding-leading-to-missed-opportunity' and sometimes they can't. The more an organization knows and understands fundraising, the more likely it will succeed in all its fundraising activities, either through hired consultants or in-house staff. The more years of experience a fundraiser has, the more likely she or he will 'hear' the mis-translation and clarify what is meant and what needs to be done.
But the final result, just like in business, is the bottom line. No dollars = no funds raised. Dagger in the heart to a fundraiser.
