It’s not unusual for us to think a lot about how fundraisers spend their time. Several of our clients have recently undergone our dreaded “Time Allocation Survey” process and survived to tell the tale. And, they’ve learned a lot.
We’ll tell you more about that in a moment, but first let’s remember that development is a demanding field. Fundraisers get pulled away from their primary responsibilities all the time. They pitch in for events, respond to last-minute requests, help with grant deadlines, pull together materials for board meetings, and so on and so on.
The things that get left behind are often the most critical. Face time with donors, creative thinking about donor retention or upgrading, building a planned giving program, systems improvement, professional development, etc.
I don’t need to tell you this, do I? You’re living it every day.
Here are some of our latest tips for using time to get on track and stay there:
Know how you should be spending your time.
We’re big advocates of “management by objective.” Every team member should have SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, time-bound) objectives for their work that go beyond just achieving a certain dollar goal. These objectives should feed into the larger objectives of the department and establish a road map of specific activities that will get you all to the end zone.
Once you have your objectives, you have an important tool for managing your time. If something threatens to pull you away from achieving your objectives, raise a red flag immediately. It’s quite simple: if you do x, then you can’t do y. Make sure x is pretty darned important if you’re going to allow it to waylay your work.
You can engage your supervisor in this conversation – don’t feel like you have to make these decisions by yourself. If you’re the supervisor, then make sure your team knows to come to you if things are getting in the way of their objectives.
Know how you are spending your time.
We highly recommend an analysis of how you (and your team) are spending time every now and then. There are a couple of ways to do it:
You can track your actual time for a period of weeks.
There are wonderful time tracking tools out there (I particularly like Toggl) that you can use on your desktop or smartphone to track every minute of your day for a couple of weeks. Heck, you can even do it the old fashioned way with pencil and paper. And, here’s an earlier blog from Leslie with a handy time tracker to help you do it in Excel.
However you do it, it is almost always surprising (and a little frustrating) to see the true answer to “where did the time go?”
You might want to do this a few times a year because it’s certain to be quite different in February than it was during the year-end season or the month leading up to your gala.
You can estimate how you’re spending your time over the course of a year.
Front Range Source’s new Time Allocation Survey is a handy tool that not only allows you to estimate the division of your time, but develop your vision for the optimal use of your precious hours! This is a less scientific method, but a useful one for understanding where people feel they are being pulled.
Our experience has shown that face time with donors is almost universally the piece of the puzzle that gets short shrift on time. If you’re a manager, you may need to help your more junior staff figure out what the optimal use of their time should be. Don’t expect them to know without some coaching.
Of course you can customize this tool to suit your own operation, but we encourage you to be clear about the categories you measure so you can easily see how much time you’re spending on cultivation and solicitation vs. stewardship vs. administration, etc.
Compare the two and make adjustments.
Here’s where time can help again. Make time to do this analysis, set some goals for achieving a better balance, and then revisit it regularly to make sure you’re getting on track and staying there. Now that’s a good use of your time!
