Webinar: Getting Your Board to Raise Money

Ah, the nonprofit board of directors. That much disparaged group of volunteers who must often be begged, cajoled, or guilted into raising money for the nonprofit they serve.

But it doesn’t have to be that way.

If you can recruit the right people, get very specific about the skills they bring, and work with them to put their assets to use for your nonprofit, you can get even the most fundraising-shy board member to start bringing money in the door.

And this month’s Social Velocity webinar will show you how.

The Getting Your Board to Raise Money webinar will help you:

• Excite and engage the board in bringing money in the door
• Put every single board member to their highest and best use
• Set up a structure for effective board involvement in raising money
• Give you creative jobs for fundraising-shy board members
• Set up systems for tracking and rewarding board involvement
• Overcome board fear and inertia

This is one of our most popular webinars, and each time I’ve offered it, it sells out. Here’s what some past participants in this webinar had to say:

“This was one of the best and most helpful and informative webinars I’ve been on. It was exactly what I was looking for in terms of beginning to get our board energized and on track and I will use the slides
to help me prepare for our upcoming board retreat.”

“The webinar was very concrete and actionable – gave specific suggestions regarding
engaging board members. This was very useful. Well done.”

“This really opened my eyes to new possibilities – thank you so much!”

Financing Not Fundraising: Getting Your Board to Raise Money
Wednesday, May 22, 2013
12:00-1:00pm (EST)

The registration fee will get you:

• Access to the live, interactive webinar
• A link to a recording of the webinar, which you can watch as many times as you like
• The PowerPoint slides from the webinar
• The ability to ask additional follow-up questions after the webinar

Register Now – $49

Photo Credit: buddawiggi

Tags: board fundraising, financing not fundraising, fundraising training, getting board to fundraise, nonprofit board of directors, nonprofit fundraising, nonprofit webinars, overcoming board fundraising excuses

New Guide: Creating a Nonprofit Financing Plan

I’m delighted to announce the release of the newest Social Velocity step-by-step guide, Creating a Nonprofit Financing Plan. This guide is designed to help you build a financing plan for your nonprofit and joins the growing list of Social Velocity tools available to nonprofits.

A financing plan, unlike a traditional fundraising plan, is an integrated, thoughtful, and strategic way to help a nonprofit raise enough money to achieve its programmatic and organizational goals. When you finance, instead of fundraise for, your nonprofit you are developing a long-term strategy for bringing enough money in the door to achieve your mission.

Financing means that instead of asking the question:

“How much can we accomplish with what we can raise?”

you start asking the question:

“How much should we raise to accomplish our goals?”

A financing plan differs from a fundraising plan in a number of ways. Unlike a fundraising plan, a financing plan:

• Raises all of the necessary revenue AND capital required to achieve the goals of your strategic plan
• Includes ALL activities that bring money in the door
• Supports the short AND long term goals of your nonprofit
• Funds your programs AND infrastructure
• Employs activities in line with your core competencies and mission

The Creating a Nonprofit Financing Plan Guide walks you step-by-step through the process of creating your nonprofit’s financing plan and is divided into 8 sections:

1. Align Money, Mission and Competence
2. The Financing Plan Framework
3. Create Revenue Goals
4. Create A Capital Goal
5. Create A Fundraising Infrastructure Goal
6. Operationalize the Plan
7. Monitor the Plan
8. Next Steps

With a clear financing plan, your nonprofit will bring more money in the door, in a more sustainable way, ultimately bringing you closer to achieving your mission and creating change in your community.

Download the Creating a Nonprofit Financing Plan Guide Now.

Tags: board fundraising, capacity capital, creating a fundraising plan, financing not fundraising, fundraising plan, fundraising tools, nonprofit budget, nonprofit fundraising, nonprofit strategic plan, nonprofit strategy

5 Questions to Get Your Board Moving

I love questions. I think sometimes asking people a probing question can be a great way to get them engaged, excited, inspired–awake. I’ve written before about the 5 hard questions every nonprofit should ask, but today I want to focus on specific questions to ask your board.

What the vast majority of nonprofits have in common is a struggle to get their board working effectively for them. But instead of giving into frustration and berating or guilting your board, try asking individual board members a few questions the next time you meet. And if you don’t regularly (at least once a year) meet one-on-one with each board member, you should start that practice this year.

Here are a few questions to try:

1. Why Do You Serve?
   This is such a critical question for your board member to answer. Often we don’t ask board members to articulate why they volunteer their time and invest in a nonprofit. Forming this answer can help your board member re-commit to her service. And if she has a particularly compelling answer, you might ask her if you could videotape or write it up to use on your website, in prospect materials, etc.




2. What Do You Bring to Our Nonprofit?
   Board members shouldn’t just take up space on a board. They should be recruited because they have specific skills, experience, or networks that directly contribute to the strategic goals of the organization. If you and your board member don’t know what assets he brings, it’s about time to start figuring it out. This question can also launch a conversation about how your organization can more effectively tap into those assets.




3. What Are Your Individual Goals for This Year?
   Each individual board member must take responsibility for her board service. How does she want to contribute to the effectiveness and sustainability of the organization? Can we create specific goals for how that will come to fruition in the coming year? Create an environment where each individual board member is expected to take an active and conscious role in her board service.




4. What Results Is Our Nonprofit Achieving?
   As I’ve written before, the nonprofit sector is changing, and it’s no longer enough just to do good work. Nonprofits must begin to articulate how they create change to a social problem. So it’s up to you to start educating your board to think in this new way too. Begin a conversation about what your board member thinks your nonprofit is achieving, what change you are creating. This can be a real opportunity to get your board member excited about where the organization is going, and the value it is providing to the community. With that excitement he can become driven to do more to make that vision a reality.




5. How Do You Want to Contribute Financially?
   Oh, believe me, I know how much this question strikes fear in the heart of board members and executive directors alike. But I strongly believe that every single board member must contribute to the financial bottom line of their nonprofit. The good news is that there are countless ways for them to do that (see my long list of ideas here and here). Even your most fundraising shy board members should be required to bring money in the door in some way, every year. So start a conversation about this individual board member’s plans, and help her brainstorm ways, based on her answers to #2 above, that she can contribute.

I would love to see nonprofit boards and staffs have more open, honest and engaging conversations. Move past comfortable, polite interactions and start asking hard questions to unlock the power of your board members.

Photo Credit: judyboo

Tags: board dysfunction, board excuses, board fundraising, nonprofit board of directors, questions for the board

Financing Not Fundraising: Find and Keep a Great Fundraiser

The news is not good lately about how effective the head fundraiser is at nonprofit organizations. A new study by CompassPoint reveals some startling realities about the fundraiser role in the nonprofit sector:

• 25% of executive directors fired their last development director
• 33% of executive directors are lukewarm about their current development director
• More than 50% of executive directors say they can’t find well-qualified fundraisers
• 50% of development directors plan to leave within the next two years
• And 40% plan to leave fundraising altogether

That sounds like a fundraising crisis to me. And it’s just another example of why fundraising in the nonprofit sector is broken. So in today’s installment of my regular Financing Not Fundraising blog series, I’m talking about how to find and keep a great fundraiser.

If you’re new to this series, Financing Not Fundraising recognizes that fundraising in the nonprofit sector just doesn’t work anymore. Nonprofits have to break out of the narrow view that traditional FUNDRAISING (individual donor appeals, events, foundation grants) will completely fund all of their activities and instead work to create a broader approach to securing the overall FINANCING necessary to create social change. You can read the entire series here.

What I find most troubling about CompassPoint’s recent study is that it makes nonprofits sound so powerless to do anything about this deep dissatisfaction with fundraising performance. But I think it’s not staff, board or donors who are lacking, rather it’s the entire fundraising approach.

Here is how to go about finding and keeping a great fundraiser.

• Hire a Money Head. Don’t hire someone who can just write grants or someone who can just work with individual donors. Take a look at the entire financial engine of your organization and hire someone who can develop and execute a strategy for strengthening and growing ALL aspects of that financial engine. If you have significant government grants or earned income, make sure you have someone on board who understands and can work with those aspects as well as the private money that flows to the organization.




• Develop a Financing Plan. Don’t just expect to hire someone who will magically make money appear. Your head fundraiser has to be in charge of developing and executing an overall financing strategy for your organization. And that means that you need an overall financing strategy for your organization. Without a strategy, your chief fundraiser and your nonprofit are sunk.




• Pay a Real Salary. It amazes me how many nonprofits expect to entice a great fundraiser by offering a salary that is comparable to someone with only a few years of experience . If you don’t have the current budget to pay a market rate, raise capacity capital to fund the first 1-2 years of the position. Once you have a great fundraiser on board he will raise his own salary while growing your nonprofit’s overall revenue.




• Work WITH Them. It drives me crazy how many times a nonprofit’s lone fundraiser is trying to raise all the money by herself. If you are going to align mission and money, you have to make sure that EVERYONE in the organization (board and staff) understand their role in bringing money in the door. Create a culture of philanthropy among the staff so that even a staff member who doesn’t have dollar goals in her job description understands that talking to prospects and donors, giving tours, writing thank you notes are critical to keeping the organization going. And make sure the board is trained in fundraising, has a give/get requirement, and has specific individual and board money goals.




• Hire Enough Fundraisers. The rule of thumb is that it takes one full time person to raise $500K, including anyone who touches prospects and donors (database manager, prospect researcher, etc). If you are asking a single fundraiser to raise $1.5 million there is little wonder why she is (and you are) miserable.




• Give Them Tools. Don’t hire a great fundraiser and then fail to give him a donor database, an interactive website, marketing materials, prospect research, support. It does no good to hire someone with great ideas but no way to bring those ideas to fruition. If you don’t have the budget for additional support and tools, raise capacity capital to find it.




• Train Them. No one knows it all. In every other profession we expect to send employees to conferences, provide them classes, coach them along the way. Don’t expect that your fundraiser automatically knows all there is to know. Give him opportunities to gain new knowledge, meet others in the field, and continue to grow his skills.

If you want to attract and retain someone who will develop a sustainable financial engine for your nonprofit, don’t leave her out in the cold. Fully integrate your head fundraiser into your organization and give her the tools, support and resources necessary to succeed.

If you want to move your nonprofit from fundraising to financing, check out the Financing Not Fundraising page of our website with articles, e-books and webinars to get you started. Or if you’d like to find out more about how I could help your nonprofit develop a financing plan or coach your fundraising staff to greater success, send me an email at nell@socialvelocity.net.

Photo Credit: Sahaja 

Tags: board fundraising, board give/get requirement, capacity capital, chief fundraiser, CompassPoint, development director, financing not fundraising, financing strategy, fundraising dissatisfaction, fundraising strategy, hiring a fundraiser, nonprofit board of directors, nonprofit fundraising, nonprofit strategy, Underdeveloped A National Study of Challenges Facing Fundraising

How to Create a Nonprofit Financing (Not Fundraising) Plan

In an earlier post I talked about the common mistakes many nonprofits make in their fundraising plans. The biggest mistake is that they create a fundraising plan, not a financing plan. If you are serious about raising enough money to accomplish your goals, you need to create an overall Financing Plan for your organization. To help you do just that, I’m delighted to offer a repeat of our popular “Creating a Financing Plan” webinar. This webinar sold out when I offered it earlier this year. And here’s what one of those participants had to say about it:

“I loved the reframing of financing for desired results instead of funding for operations…your message to wed money to the mission was a big AHA moment, and I am now figuring out how to bring this to life for staff and Board.”

A financing plan is different than a typical fundraising plan for many reasons. Here is how they differ:

• A fundraising plan asks “How much can we accomplish with the money we can raise?” but a financing plan asks “How much should we raise to accomplish our goals?”




• A fundraising plan sets goals only for private revenue streams (foundation grants, individual gifts), but a financing plan includes goals for ALL money flowing to the organization (government grants, earned income, etc).




• A fundraising plan is for one year, whereas a financing plan is a strategy for attracting money for multiple years into the future.




• A fundraising plan has little to do with a nonprofit’s strategic plan, but a financing plan is based on what the nonprofit needs in order to meet the goals of their strategic plan.




• A fundraising plan is created only by the fundraising staff with no input or knowledge from the rest of the organization, but a financing plan is created with the whole organization’s input (board and staff).




• A fundraising plan only includes activities that raise money for programs, but a financing plan includes strategies for raising infrastructure dollars as well.

The “Creating a Financing Plan” webinar will help nonprofit leaders understand the steps to creating a financing plan for their organization. Webinar participants will learn how to:

• Set goals for ALL revenue streams flowing to the organization
• Determine the infrastructure dollars they need to raise
• Tie their financing plan to their strategic plan
• Create tactical steps to make the plan a reality, with activities, deliverables, people responsible, timeline
• Divide tasks by staff and board members
• Develop ways to monitor and revise the plan going forward

And remember, all of our webinars are available as recordings right after the live webinar, so even if you can’t make the time of the live webinar, you can still register and have access to all of the content.

I hope to see you there!

Creating a Financing Plan Webinar
Recorded

The registration fee will get you:

• A link to a recording of the webinar, which you can watch as many times as you like
• The PowerPoint slides from the webinar
• The ability to ask additional follow-up questions after the webinar

Cost: $39.00
Download Now

Photo Credit: theurchiness

Tags: board fundraising, creating a fundraising plan, financing not fundraising, fundraising plan, fundraising strategy, nonprofit capacity, nonprofit financial strategy, nonprofit fundraising, nonprofit strategy, nonprofit webinars

Financing Not Fundraising: 7 Mistakes in Your Nonprofit’s Fundraising Plan

I can’t tell you how often I hear nonprofit leaders complain about how difficult it is to raise money, how tired they are of banging their head against the wall, how difficult this economy is. Well, there really is a better way. And it starts with a really good money plan for your organization.  But again and again I see the same mistakes being made in nonprofit fundraising plans, which is the topic of today’s installment of our regular Financing Not Fundraising blog series.

If you’re new to the series, our Financing Not Fundraising blog series shows nonprofits how to break out of the narrow view that traditional FUNDRAISING (individual donor appeals, events, foundation grants) will completely fund all of their activities and instead work to create a broader approach to securing the overall FINANCING necessary to create social change. You can read the entire series here.

Here are the 7 mistakes to avoid in your fundraising plan:

1. Not Having A Plan At All. Yeah, not even having a plan is a huge mistake. It boggles my mind how many nonprofit organizations expect that money will magically appear at their doorstep. It takes an overall money strategy, what I call a Financing Plan, to effectively marshal your resources (staff, board, other volunteers, technology, materials) so that enough, and the right kind of, money comes in the door to achieve your goals.




2. Creating Just A One Year Plan. You cannot expect to create a financially sustainable organization if you are only planning for money one year at a time. Your financing plan should project at least 3-years into the future in order to ensure that you have sound financial footing from which to operate. A true financial strategy takes a long view and plans accordingly.




3. Including Only Private Dollars. Your money strategy must include ALL sources of money flowing to your organization, making it a Financing Plan. You cannot just plan for individual, corporate and foundation dollars, you also must plan for how government and earned income sources will flow, if they are appropriate to your model. And if you don’t have other sources of money beyond private dollars, you probably need to at least explore whether diversifying makes sense for your organization.




4. Not Connecting It to Your Strategic Plan. Ok, I’m going to assume that your nonprofit has a strategic plan, even though many nonprofits don’t have one or they have a poor one. But once you have a strategic plan in place, you have to connect your money strategy to that plan. What good is it to have lofty program goals if you have no idea what those goals will cost (expenses) and how you will raise the money to make them a reality (revenue). You must have a multi-year financing plan that directly relates to your multi-year strategic plan.




5. Ignoring Capital Goals. You can’t just raise revenue (the day-to-day money to keep the organization going), you also probably need capital (the money to build infrastructure, technology, systems) once in awhile. If you don’t include dollar goals for the amount of capacity capital your nonprofit needs, I doubt you will ever raise it. You cannot continue to operate with infrastructure, staffing, technology and systems that are inferior to your needs and goals. Determine how much capacity capital you need and include those goals in your financing plan.




6. Not Giving Your Board a Role. You cannot leave the burden of raising money solely on the shoulders of your staff. One of the key responsibilities of a nonprofit board of directors is to ensure the financial viability of the organization they serve. So this means that the board as a whole and each individual board member must understand and play a role in the money strategy of the organization. So start by requiring each board member to give and/or get a certain amount (usually your major donor level) and then make sure your board “money committee” is active and engaged, and finally integrate money into every meeting and conversation your board has. Money MUST be top of mind for the entire board.




7. Not Focusing On High Return Activities. Some fundraising plans include activities that a nonprofit has always done to bring money in the door without analyzing their effectiveness or expanding into new or more profitable activities. Start by analyzing the return of every money raising activity you engage in and then focus your money strategy on those that actually have a positive return.

I would love to see more nonprofits create a smart, long-term financing plan for their organizations. Because the reality is that those that do so will create more sustainable social change.

If you want to learn more about how to creating a financing plan for your nonprofit, sign up for our Creating a Financing Plan webinar.

And if you want to apply the other concepts of Financing Not Fundraising to your nonprofit, check out our Financing Not Fundraising Webinar Series, or download the 27-page Financing Not Fundraising e-book.

Photo Credit: Hiking Artist

Tags: board fundraising, calculating the cost of fundraising, capacity capital, corporate giving, financing not fundraising, Foundations, fundraising plan, individual donors, nonprofit board of directors, nonprofit financing plan, nonprofit fundraising plan

A Step-by-Step Guide to Finding Major Donors

Amid increasing competition for dollars, it is more critical than ever that nonprofits explore new opportunities for money. To help in this effort, I am delighted today to announce our newest step-by-step guide “Creating a Major Donor Campaign,” which joins our growing list of tools to help nonprofits grow and become more financially sustainable.

This guide helps small and mid-sized nonprofits create a strategy for securing major donors–those wealthy individuals, corporate leaders or foundation officers who you get to know on an individual basis in order to convince them to invest in your organization.

What constitutes a major gift varies by nonprofit organization and depends on the size of the organization and the depth of their donor base. It could be as little as $100 for a small, grassroots organization and as large as $1,000,000 or more for a large, established organization. But this guide will help you determine that and much more.

Typically major donor campaigns are undertaken by larger, older nonprofit organizations. But I believe that any nonprofit organization can turn their board and staff into an army that can secure larger gifts.

Which is why I created this guide. The guide gives you concrete strategies for how to:

• Get your board involved
• Organize your staff
• Find prospects
• Establish a major donor fundraising goal
• Ask prospects for gifts
• Thank donors
• And much more

At the end of each section of the guide, the “Your Major Donor Plan” part walks you through a series of questions or tasks. Your answers there become the basis for your final Major Donor Plan. Your plan will organize your staff and board to raise major dollars for your nonprofit.

This 15-page guide is broken into the following 6 sections:

Section 1: Major Donor Goal
Section 2: Finding Prospects
Section 3: Moving Prospects to Donors
Section 4: Staff and Board Roles
Section 5: Building Fundraising Infrastructure
Section 6: Operational Plan

My hope is that this guide shows small and medium sized nonprofits that major gifts are not out of the realm of possibility for them. To the contrary, major gifts could be the missing link to a bigger, better, more effective organization.

Download the “Creating a Major Donor Campaign” Guide

Tags: board fundraising, building donor relationships, finding prospects, fundraising goal, gift range chart, individual donor fundraising, major donor campaign, major donor goal, major donors, nonprofit board of directors, nonprofit fundraising, raising major dollars

How to Get Your Board Fundraising Webinar

It is probably the single biggest complaint I hear from nonprofit executive directors, “I can’t get my board to fundraise!”

As a general rule nonprofit boards of directors are not very helpful at bringing money in the door. It is often a chicken or the egg scenario that leaves many nonprofits at an impasse. But I believe it is up to the executive director to get strategic about getting her board to take action. I’ve talked a lot about this in the 9 Ways Board Members Can Raise Money Without Fundraising blog posts here and here.

If you want to really get your board moving, this Financing Not Fundraising webinar “Getting Your Board to Raise Money” shows you how.

This webinar will give you very tactical steps for how to:

• Set up a structure for effective board involvement in fundraising
• Get every board member raising money
• Create a compelling fundraising message for the board to deliver
• Develop a system for moving prospects to donors
• Give every board member a job
• Overcome board fear and inertia

Boards need to step up. There is no doubt. But it is up to the executive director to make sure that they do. By getting your board to be strategic, focused, invested, integrated and aware, they can start helping to finance your work. This webinar will help you get your board members excited, engaged and committed to raising money for your nonprofit.

Getting Your Board to Raise Money
Wednesday, May 22, 2013
12 noon – 1pm EST
Register Now

The $49 registration fee will get you:

• Access to the live, interactive webinar
• A link to a recording of the webinar, which you can watch as many times as you like
• The PowerPoint slides from the webinar
• The ability to ask additional follow-up questions after the webinar

See all of our webinars here.

Register Now

Photo Credit: manhattanloftcorporation

Tags: board fundraising, financing not fundraising, fundraising strategy, fundraising webinar, how to get the board to raise money, nonprofit board of directors