Fundraising Staffs are Overworked. Here's the Solution.

If you are like most development professionals in the United States, your forty-hour work week could really benefit from being an eighty-hour work week, which does not sound like anything you would sign up for anytime soon.

Additionally, for most charities, a full-time fundraising staff or even one full-time fundraiser is a pipe dream. The fundraising responsibilities often fall to the Executive Director or the marketing staff person or an unsuspecting board member. There is so much you could be doing in fundraising, but with your job, you literally don't have the time. Whether you have zero or six fundraising staff, it likely is not enough to meet the expectations and responsibilities, much less all the fundraising needs of the organization. To make matters worse, in the middle of this trend, a worldwide pandemic ensured that connecting with donors is harder than ever.

If this problem resonates with you or your nonprofit, we may have a way out, not just for the short term, but something sustainable that will last the life of your organization:

Volunteers. We are not suggesting you hire full time staffers and opt not to pay them, but truly build out a robust volunteer organization solely dedicated to fundraising, and ask that each willing participant give just a few hours per month of their time. Almost all of us can find a couple hours in a month's time, and if we can recruit top community leadership and give them the tools to succeed, we can take our fundraising work hours into the hundreds each month without spending a dime.

The most common reaction to this is, “I have tried getting my board engaged in fundraising for years and they just won't...etc.” Though getting your board involved is critical, that's actually a different topic. For the best way to do that, read our article on getting your board engaged. Your board likely signed on with the understanding that fundraising was not part of the gig, and that's okay! We are talking about a whole separate group of people just dedicated to philanthropy.

So where to begin? At the top. Successful programs lead with recruiting a philanthropy chairperson or volunteer leader to take ownership of the program or a campaign. We then can work with that individual to build out the team. Separate volunteers by giving type, giving level, and create committees for each constituency. Meeting monthly on Zoom to check in is usually all it takes to get the initial group in place. Smaller charities can benefit from 20 or more fundraising volunteers, and larger organizations often have as many as 40 or more. The process of getting everyone in place can take a few months, but with the right combination of people it will allow you to access with one degree of separation almost anyone in your community, creating a new and vast pipeline of prospective donors to engage.

For more information on how to effectively recruit a philanthropy volunteer organization start to finish, set up a free consultation with us at PRIDE Philanthropy. 2021 may be the year you take the burden of fundraising off of your team and reach out to the community to help you realize your mission!