If you’re a fundraiser, you most likely have your hands in lots of your organization’s pots. After all, fundraising requires a little bit of finance, a dash of IT, and a big heaping of communications. Of course, you also have to build up an expertise in your organization’s program area, as well as be an expert volunteer coordinator, right?
And then there’s just the fundraising itself.
With all of those demands pulling fundraisers every which way, it’s hard to know if you are doing the right things to raise money.
We’ve been thinking a lot about this lately. We have clients, large and small, that are struggling to figure out if they have enough staff, too much staff, or the right staff doing the right things. Or, they just can’t get that face time they need with their donors. Or, they are wondering how much those events really do cost in staff time.
How can you know?
I had a professor in business school who said, “You can quantify anything.” I really believe that. It might not be easy, but it can be done. While none of us has a “standard” day, we can still measure and categorize our time get a view on what we really do with our days.
We have a couple of ideas and resources for how you can track your time and easy analyze the results:
If you’re feeling like other responsibilities are taking you away from fundraising, try tracking your time by functional area. What other responsibilities besides fundraising are a part of your day?
We have attached this spreadsheet that Ann and her colleague in Chicago, Kathy Hurley, have used with staff members to estimate the amount of time they spend on different fundraising and “other” tasks.
Add categories that are meaningful to you, but do try it for at least 10 workdays and see what it tells you. You can use percentages or track your actual hours.
Are you spending your time on administrative and “other” tasks? Are you able to devote a significant amount of time to fundraising? How much time are events or communications taking from your day and does that percentage align with your job objectives?
If you are spending most of your time on fundraising, but you’re not sure if you’re being as efficient and effective as you can be, try doing the same kind of exercise using the Cycle of Donor Relations to guide your analysis.
Are you spending most of your time cultivating new donors? Stewarding existing donors? Asking? Is your time spent in line with your objectives?
Ann was telling me that she has done this exercise before and found that more than 50% of her time as a major gifts officer was spent stewarding donors. While that’s a fantastic number, she did find that she wasn’t spending as much on identification and qualification of new donors as she needed to feed the pipeline long-term.
I’ve done a similar exercise and found that our team was actually too focused on the ask. We were driven by dates and deadlines and not paying as much attention to building the relationship as our donors really wanted. We found that each member of the team had too many prospects to manage with a personal touch and decided to add a team member.
While you may not have the luxury of adding staff, you can use this kind of analysis to advocate for more assistance from program staff, your executive director, and Board and volunteers. You can also use the results of this process to shift work between staff and to develop job descriptions and objectives. We’ve attached a spreadsheet tool to help you do this.
Try it. I know it’s a bother. I know every day is an exception. I know this time of year (and every other time of year) is weird. But just try it for 10 days and see what it tells you.
And here’s our special offer for you, gentle reader. If you do it for 10 days and you need help thinking through the results, write us and we will spend 30 minutes talking it through with you. What a great use of TIME!
