Great Fundraising

Adrian Sargeant

Director – Centre for Sustainable Philanthropy, Plymouth University

Professor of Fundraising: Indiana University and former Hartsook Chair

Greatness

• Exceptionally high quality (Merriam-webster)• Eminence or distinction (Oxford Dictionaries)• Superiority within a particular sphere (Oxford

Dictionaries)• The particular person, object or place, when

compared to others of a similar type, has clear advantage (Wikipedia)

– Greatness is Tangible, Measurable and Achievable

Greatness in Fundraising

• Defined by 20 sector’s leading thinkers (directors of fundraising and senior fundraising consultants): – They defined greatness in terms of delivering

substantive growth (double, triple or even quadruple fundraising income)

• so that the charity climbs dramatically up the league table of charities as ranked by voluntary income.

• It transforms the organization• It transforms the essence of how an organization

accomplishes its mission.

Sargeant and Shang, (2013)

Greatness in fundraising

• This presentation tells you how these organizations did it:

– Cancer Research UK– British Red Cross– NSPCC– Save the Children– Royal British Legion

AND what that means for fundraising education

Our great leaders …

“I didn’t wake up one morning and just think‘I want to be a fundraiser.’ I joined a specificCause that I feel really passionately aboutAnd my way to make a contribution to it is to Raise money and support”

“So fundraising is the expertise that I’ve beenable to bring, but I think I can bring many othercontributions into the organization as well.And to be honest, I think I can see that from other Directors as well.”

“I’m absolutely in love with and besotted with theCause … I do love fundraising, I love the chase,I love the accumulation of wealth in that sense,I like the process.”

Professional Will Personal Humility

Creates superb results, a clear catalyst in the transition from good to great

Demonstrates a compelling modesty, shunning public education; never boastful

Demonstrates an unwavering resolve to do whatever must be done to produce the best long-term results, no matter how difficult

Acts with calm determination; relies principally on inspired standards, not inspiring charisma, to motivate

Sets the standard of building an enduring great organization; will settle for nothing less

Channels ambition into the organization, not the self

Looks in the mirror, not out the window to apportion responsibility for poor results, never blaming their team, external factors or luck.

Looks out the window, not in the mirror, to apportion credit for the success of the organization – to other people, external factors and good luck

Collins (2011)

They

• Inspire through their confidence• Make others accountable for their own and

team goals• Align organizational metrics with long term

goals• Create shared mental models• Create an element of task conflict

• You need to have supreme, quiet self confidence.

• You have to have a sense of purpose and really mean it.

• You need to be so committed you stay for a long time.

• If you ain’t into it, or they ain’t into you, leave.

Task 1

• How do you represent your role as a Fundraising Director or Director of Development?

“50% of your job is about your functionalResponsibilities and 50% is about your Responsibility as a director of the organization”

“I spend very little of my time managing the fundraising function. Most is spent managing the organization to allow myTeam to do what they do best”

Task 2

• What metrics do you use to assess your fundraising?

Task 3

• What goals do you have for your fundraising? What time horizons are associated with these goals? Represent in a diagram how these goals relate to each other.

Short-term

System

Medium-Term

System

Long-term System

Sargeant and Shang, (2013)

In order to transform the organization

• Our fundraising leaders were able to identify the “bigger picture” • All aspects of the environment that might be relevant for

securing improvement in fundraising rather than allowing organizational constraints (budgets, established patterns of behaviour, etc.) to dictate the problem definition.

• They are able to think about this bigger picture at a sufficient level of complexity (Ulrich and Reynolds, 2010).

• In other words, they know both “what” to think about fundraising and “how” to think about fundraising.

They built

Sargeant and Shang, (2013)

They begin, however by building the team

Team: Must have

– Technical Skills --The ability to apply specialized knowledge or expertise. All jobs require some specialized expertise, and many people develop their technical skills on the job.

– Human Skills -- Ability to work with, understand, and motivate other people, both individually and in groups, describes human skills.

– Conceptual Skills -- The mental ability to analyze and diagnose complex situations.

Their people

• Thought in the same way …• Good technical skills, but …• Conscientious• Future leaders

And they worked on their belief

“So in an NGO you have lots of very smart people, certainly in fundraising, but most definitely in policy, advocacy and communications.So as a fundraiser you need quite a lot of confidenceto argue your corner on how you might want toportray a child, how you might want to portray an Issue. And so in a weird way this was also about building people’s confidence to do that.”

Task 4

• How do they recruit these future leaders?

“I recruit people who have got a sense of where they might like to be in say three or five, well usually five years time. An idea of where you’re going; it doesn’t have to be definitive, but its just about establishing people’s aspirations and thought processes, keen to know what they want from me.”

“I think people that are able to work in a setting that is quite fast paced, they’re comfortable with a fairly high degree of change. They enjoy being a part of it. It’s not just that they’re subject to it. They want a high degree of personal autonomy or want empowerment, will take some risks and are usually energetic, just personally energetic.”

“I’ve been very much recruiting, very much lookingfor a certain personality type, but with that extrakind of drive and motivation. I think when peopleare having to work on a very busy growth program, they need that level of motivation and drive.”

Task 5

• What would these individuals find most personally rewarding?

• How do you retain them?

Development

• Leadership, negotiation, conflict management, coaching skills

• Mentor programs• Placements, secondments• Talent program

• Recruit by personality.

• Invest in skills and attitude as well as knowledge.

• Groom them to become future leaders

And Great Structures

• Reward, remuneration• Performance appraisal• Team efficiency – more important than great

people alone

Great Organizational Structure

• Leaders Upward Management• Leaders Peer manage

– Coordinate– Cooperation

• Leader build new teams:– building new functional teams for specific forms of

fundraising (or relationships)– setting up an appropriate reward systems to

support outstanding performance

And Great Culture

• “… it is a culture of change, you’ve got to have a vision if you like, for how things can be different, so that people will come with you on that journey. You need to do that with the people below you, so that they feel enthusiastic and get behind you; but you also need to do that with the people in front of you and above you, in order to get their buy in, to give you the tools, the investment, and not to put barriers in the way that would prevent you from doing that.”

Great Fundraising Learning Culture

• ‘‘a continuous testing of experience and its transformation into knowledge available to the whole organization”

• ‘‘a process through which managers try to increase organizational members’ capabilities in order to better understand and manage the organization and its environment”

Organizational Learning Culture

• Acquire knowledge• Interpret it fully and transform it into

knowledge• Modify behaviour as a consequence.

Held together with great communication

Copyright © 2013 Pearson Education, Inc. publishing as Prentice Hall

Levels of Thinking

• Great thinking, yes, but …• Great systems thinking …

Types of systems

• Natural systems• Designed systems• Designed abstract systems• Human activity systems

An organization

• Is made up of systems and problematic areas that exist in the mind of the observer…

• Our leaders discern complex systems and how they could be managed.

Leveraging systems thinking

• Embed themselves• Understand themselves and the benefits that their

intellectual, emotional and social system of activity could deliver for the organization

• And do the same with their team. Embed the fundraising function …

• So that existing systems can be transformed systematically such that great fundraising may be created

Systems thinkers

• Define Broad Context• Make Critical Choices in that Context• Continuously Reflect• Synergy with the team

Sargeant and Shang, (2013)

Or

In The Team

• Members will not share the same broad context

• Nor will they make the same critical choices

• So they must say what they think and how they arrived at their broad context and critical choice

• MUST develop capacity for viewing comms from the perspective of others

• All others then primed to think about other broad contexts so decisions less biased than other types of decision-making processes

• Exponential improvement in problem solving

Understanding in Systems

• Data• Pattern Discernment• Systemic Response• Inter-System Response• Critical Hermeneutics

Harvesters

The Process

• In 2000 the board had commissioned a strategic review. What kinds of people could they reach and how?

• $14.7 million needed. Reduced to $11.5. Even that dwarfed their current annual support of $2m

• The new facility would also significantly punch up operating costs.

• A new way of talking to donors was needed

The Birth of the Initiatives

• Feeding children• Feeding families • Feeding seniors• Promoting healthy eating

Harvesters’ operating, capital and expansion budget was broken out by each initiative, and spread over a 5year period.

The Results

• Now they raise $15,000,000 ANNUALLY

To be great one needs to

• Be consciously aware that whatever understanding one comes up with for a reality will be only a partial representation of that reality

• Be consciously aware that one is engaged in multiple levels of thinking in order to understand reality

• Broaden one’s thinking to other levels• Broaden individual thinking to collective thinking with

others• Go through the process in multiple iterations to reach

the perfect understanding of the situation

Create

Organizational

Change

Create

Organizational

Change

Create

Organizational

Change

Create

Organizational

Change

Sargeant and Shang, (2013)

The GREAT fundraiser

Commits to a cause.

Thinks well and long term.

Sets an outstanding culture of learning.

Makes their people and teams awesome.

Inculcates systems thinking

Manages Upwards

Develops PRIDE on the part of the organization in its fundraising and fundraisers