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Asking For The Money Is The Job Of The Leadership And Friends Of A Non-Profit Organization: Never Hire Someone To Do What Is Their Responsibility  For
organizations with an inexperienced, small, or nonexistent development
staff, consultants can do everything from mentoring a budding
development director to designing a campaign. Larger, more experienced
organizations, even those with a fully professional development staff,
can benefit from a consultant's mastery of the process of initiating new
types of fund-raising efforts and reorienting the development
department.There
is a valid place for consultants in the business of fund-raising, but
there is also a place consultants should never go. It is one thing to
engage a consultant to assist in the creation of a development effort,
the design of a campaign, or an evaluation of organizational need and
the resources available to meet that need. It is quite another to hire a
consultant to ask prospects for money. Organizations
ask for money to meet a current need and lay ground work for the future.
The twin goals of every solicitation should be to get the largest gift
possible and to strengthen the organization’s relationship with the
donor. Use a "hired gun" to ask for money and you
automatically reject those two goals.Every
competent fund-raising professional knows that the best solicitation is
made by someone the donor knows and respects. It is always easier to
flat out turn down or, at the very least, give less to, someone you don’t
know. When I want you to give to a campaign, the person I want asking
for that gift is a colleague, a neighbor, or best of all, a friend who
contributed to a cause when you asked. Does that sound like a
hired-off-the-street solicitor?We
can all agree that when a volunteer solicitor asks a peer prospective
donor for money, the opportunity to achieve a significant contribution
is maximized when solicitor and prospect share the following qualities:
When you
engage a "hired gun" outside fund-raiser to come into your
organization to solicit a prospective donor, that individual will most
likely share none of the above qualities with the prospect. I would take
five out of five any day---and I could live with having only points 3
and 4 available in some solicitations if I had to. But, I would not
chance a solicitation to a prospective donor for my organization with
any less. A
board will be less likely to contribute its time to a fund-raising
effort which has been turned over in its entirety to an outsider. That
can leave the executive director and staff development professional out
on a limb and weaken the board. A hired solicitor will short circuit the
growth of an internal development effort. Money spent on the hired
solicitor will not be available to build a professional development
department. And that gets to the matter of money.If
your organization needs to raise $50,000, then engaging a professional
solicitor will require that you raise $50,000 plus the commission or fee
you pay the solicitor, and that commission or fee can be a substantial
percentage of the money raised. A study(1)
reported by Janet S. Greenlee of Penn State University at Harrisburg, PA
and Teresa P. Gordon of the University of Idaho of 970 campaigns using
professional solicitors between 1991 and 1996, found that the median
gross amount raised was $28,082 and the median amount netted by the
organizations was $4,693--an effective yield of less than 17 percent.But that is not
even the worst of it. Greenlee and Gordon reported that, "In some
solicitations, the cost of the fund-raising campaign exceeded
contributions generated by the campaign. A total of 56 solicitations
resulted in such negative proceeds. These charities actually lost money
by engaging a solicitor. The average loss for these "negative"
solicitations was $13,540; the median was $3,015."One of the most
frequently asked for pieces of data by prospective donors is how much of
their gift will actually be used to produce the work of the organization
or will benefit the clients-users of that organization. I can't conceive
of telling a donor that 83 percent of his or her money will be eaten up
in the cost of a campaign. I know what my response would be.Independent of Greenlee's
and Gordon's numbers, my experience has been that a thoughtfully
conceived and well-run campaign using volunteer solicitors will nearly
always yield more than a campaign in which an individual or a firm is
hired to ask prospects for donations. Equally important, a volunteer
solicitor campaign is a stepping stone for future fund-raising.
When
an organization's leadership and committed volunteers are the ones doing
the asking during a campaign, they are building relationships with
donors on two levels. They are establishing a relationship between the
organization and the donors and between themselves and the donors. As a
result, when the organization conducts its next campaign, it has a
double foundation upon which to rest its base of proven donors. These
donors have a history of giving to the cause and a history of giving in
response to solicitation by a volunteer who has demonstrated his or her
own commitment to the cause. The organization receives an immensely
greater future benefit from volunteer solicitor campaigns over hired
solicitor efforts.A
regional or national hired solicitation firm can give no guarantee that
if it is engaged for future campaigns the same solicitors will be
assigned. A local hired solicitation consultant may be asking the very
same donors for gifts to another organization next month, or may have
asked your donors for someone else the month before. No matter how you
cut it, donor relationships and solicitation credibility suffer when the
work of asking for donations is given to a "hired gun."I have yet
to find the organization that believes it will only need to ask for
money once. The business of fund-raising for a non-profit organization
is the business of building relationships, and relationships are built
on a personal level and based on trust. The hired solicitor is here
today and gone tomorrow. He or she brokers no relationship between donor
and organization through the strength of his or her ongoing personal
contact. Donors who see a substantial portion of their gift going to pay
an outside, hired solicitor feels taken. There is no relationship and no
trust. So, when a "consultant"
says to you, "Don’t worry, I'll raise the money. Neither you,
nor your board, nor your organization’s friends will have to ask
for a penny," run, don't walk. Run in the other direction. If you
fall for that line, you most likely will not make the campaign goal and
you are assuredly selling short your organization's future. Those are
my views on the subject. What are yours? I welcome your comments and
suggestions. tony@raise-funds.comNote: Additional Resources relative to the importance of building and maintaining donor relationships which can be accomplished only from within an organization, are available at my website using pdf and/or html methods as follows:
(1) "The Impact of Professional Solicitors on Fund-Raising in Charitable Organizations." Greenlee & Gordon: Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, vol. 27, no. 3, September, 1998, pgs. 277-299. 1998 Sage Publications, Inc.
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