Nonprofit Communications Plan: How to Identify an Audience and Create an Avatar

If you’ve been at this development game for a while, you know there’s more to successful fundraising than just making the right appeal at the right time. There’s a whole complex web of organizational and cultural factors that influence how well your fundraising performs.

This is what I call the organizational ecosystem of fundraising. That ecosystem includes a number of elements:

• Culture: what are the attitudes toward fundraising and philanthropy among your organizational stakeholders (staff, board, volunteers, community)? What does that culture support, and what does it undermine?
• Infrastructure: what are the technological and operational systems you use to support your fundraising program?
• Capacity: what is the human and financial resource capacity of your fundraising program?
• Leadership: how does your organizational leadership prioritize and support the fundraising function?
• Strategy: how deliberately and strategically are you planning your fundraising efforts?

As a fundraising professional, you need to understand this ecosystem — what it is, and what it means for your fundraising program. And you need to develop it proactively, rather than simply reacting to problems as they arise.

One valuable tool for assessing the organizational ecosystem of fundraising is the development audit, or development assessment. A development assessment is a systematic review of your development program, which typically includes a comprehensive review of a number of key variables in your organizational ecosystem, including:

• Board engagement with fundraising
• Organizational culture and leadership
• Fundraising capacity (staff, budget, systems)
• Fundraising strategy and planning
• Fundraising outcomes and key performance indicators

Conducting a formal development audit — or even an informal internal review — of these key variables can surface critical insights into the state of your organizational ecosystem, and help you identify the most important leverage points for improving your fundraising performance.

Here’s a quick tour of the key elements of the organizational ecosystem of fundraising, and what to look for as you assess each:

Board Engagement

Your board is one of the most important elements of your fundraising ecosystem. Board members can play a number of important roles in fundraising, including:

• Opening doors to new prospects and donors
• Making peer-to-peer asks
• Hosting cultivation events in their homes
• Writing personal notes in cultivation letters
• Participating in major donor solicitations
• Contributing financially themselves

Ask yourself: is my board doing these things? Or are they largely passive observers of the fundraising process?

If your board is not actively engaged in fundraising, that is a critical ecosystem issue to address.

Organizational Culture

Culture is hard to measure and hard to change, but it has an outsized influence on fundraising outcomes. The questions to ask about organizational culture in relation to fundraising are:

• Do staff members across the organization understand and embrace the role of fundraising in sustaining the mission?
• Do organizational leaders (executive director, senior staff) model a philanthropic mindset and actively champion fundraising?
• Is there a culture of abundance (belief in the availability of philanthropic resources) or scarcity (belief that resources are limited and must be competed for)?

A culture of scarcity is a significant barrier to successful fundraising. A culture of abundance is a powerful enabler of it.

Fundraising Capacity

Fundraising capacity is about the resources available to support your fundraising program: staff, budget, and systems. Ask yourself:

• Do you have enough staff to execute your fundraising strategy? (Consider the 80/20 rule: the top 20% of your donors typically give 80% of your revenue. Are you dedicating enough staff time to cultivating and stewarding that top 20%?)
• Do you have an adequate fundraising budget? (A general rule of thumb is that for every dollar invested in fundraising, you should get back at least $2-3.)
• Do you have the right systems in place? (A robust donor management system is the foundation of any effective fundraising program.)

Fundraising Strategy and Planning

This one is simple: do you have a written, multi-year fundraising plan? Are you executing against that plan in a disciplined, strategic way? If not, this is a leverage point worth addressing.

Fundraising Outcomes and KPIs

Finally, are you tracking the right fundraising KPIs? In addition to tracking dollars raised, some of the most important KPIs to track for a healthy fundraising ecosystem include:

• Donor retention rate
• Average gift size
• Donor acquisition rate
• Cost per dollar raised
• Return on investment for major fundraising channels

These KPIs will tell you a great deal about the health and performance of your fundraising program, and help you identify where the most significant leverage points for improvement are.

The goal of assessing your organizational ecosystem is to surface the most important leverage points for improving your fundraising performance, so that you can prioritize your efforts and resources for maximum impact.