Assessing Productivity in Your Fundraising Efforts
Ellen Bristol, President, Bristol Strategy Group
 Is your fund-development effort successful? Is it productive? It’s easy to confuse success and productivity in fundraising, but in fact the two are not the same. Fund development can be successful without being productive. It all depends on how you define success. If the only metrics you employ are income-related, it could be costing you more in time and effort than it should, to keep your agency properly funded. Assess your agency's productivity by comparing your methods to the best practices employed by both highly successful nonprofit and for-profit enterprises. You may be surprised by what you discover. ...
What's New at BSG:
De-Mystifying Fundraising: Effective Donor Strategies
Our newest nonprofit workshop will take the guesswork out of fundraising. Ellen Bristol will present this workshop at the Nonprofit Resource Institute Training Academy on April 26 in Boca Raton. Click here for more information and to register.
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The Risk You Shouldn't Take:
Recruiting Executives the Right Way
Dabney 'Bud' Park, President, Performance Executive Search |
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Hiring a key administrator—especially for a top job—is a critical intervention in the life and development of a nonprofit organization. Educational requirements, desired experience, and skill sets are all important in the search process—but far more important are the elements that ensure a fit with the culture and style of your agency. Accurate assessment of the candidate’s leadership characteristics and personal qualities is key to making the right choice so that your agency will grow and flourish.
Remember that choosing the right person for the job is the most important decision a leader or a nonprofit organization can make. It follows that choosing the wrong person is the most serious mistake you can make.
It's All About the Mission:
How Healthy is Yours?
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Quick- what is your organization’s mission? If you were to ask that question at random, would you get the same answer from every employee, board member or volunteer? More important – would the answer hold up to scrutiny? Would it be heavy on jargon like “enable people to achieve their potential,” a statement that could apply to virtually any social need, and light on specifics like “show teenagers how to settle disputes without violence”?
Nothing is more important to the organization than a clear understanding of its mission. The mission is the purpose of the organization, its reason for being. A well-understood mission can, even should, act like a strategic plan in one phrase or sentence. Thus, all other strategic goals, objectives, performance standards, marketing, communications and even fundraising tactics stem directly from this simple, concise message. Assess the ‘health’ of your mission by comparing your agency’s situation to these key points. ...
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BSG CLIENT CASE STUDY:
Miami Metrozoo - Feast with the Beasts
Mark Haney, VP Corporate & Annual Giving, Zoological Society of Florida
This is the first of an occasional series of articles written by our clients about their experiences with BSG services. This article was written by Mark Haney, Vice President, Corporate & Annual Giving, Zoological Society of Florida, the fund-raising arm of Miami MetroZoo. Feast with the Beasts is one of the Society’s two major fund-raising events per year.
Feast with the Beasts at Miami Metrozoo started in 1989 as one of the first “taste of” events in Miami. With more than 40 top-notch restaurants, quality entertainment and an amazing atmosphere, it quickly became a staple of Miami’s social scene. It was also the top fundraising event for the Zoological Society of Florida and Miami Metrozoo.
The event became increasingly popular with the public but the production costs and staff time to run it were out of control. Dwindling financial commitment from the event’s only cash sponsor made the situation worse. In 1999, the Zoo’s Board of Directors made the decision to pull the plug on the much-loved but financially draining event.
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Avoiding Liability in Grants Management
Brian Misiunas, CPA, Pinchasik, Strongin, Muskat & Co. PA
Financially speaking, there is no greater exposure that a nonprofit organization has than potential liability associated with administering grants and restricted awards. Failure to properly administer grants or awards could have negative consequences such as noncompliance findings in the annual audit report, refunding unspent monies or unallowable costs or even non-renewal of funding in the subsequent year. ...
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Services for Nonprofit Organizations:
Fund Development
Fundraising the SMART Way® - Our Flagship Methodology for
Creating A Sustanable Fund-Development Process
Strategic Planning
Balanced-Scorecard, Metrics-Driven Strategic Plan Development
Plan Execution and Implementation Support
Governance
Training, Implementation of the Policy Governance® Model
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Assessing Productivity in Your Fundraising Efforts - Continued
Review the following statements and see how your funding strategy measures up. Compare your practices and processes to these statements, and rate yourself on a three-point scale of Low, Medium and High. This quick assessment of your agency's level of productivity could fuel significant efforts to improve things. Investing time in this exercise is bound to pay off.
Tip #1: Donor Retention is High. You devote a lot of attention to keeping your relationships with key donors, grantors and sponsors fresh and lively. Year after year, there are few defections. Grantmaking organizations renew your funding as long as their internal policies allow.
Tip #2: New-Funder Acquisition is Consistent. Every year, you strive to bring in a measurable amount of new donors. No matter how good a job you do on retention, you also pay attention to bringing in new relationships.
Tip #3: New Funders Resemble the Ideal Funder Profile. You have identified the characteristics of your ideal funders in each category, and invest the majority of new-funder time seeking those that are similar to the profile.
Tip #4: Cost of Fund Development is Controlled or Reduced Year After Year. You have methods in place for assessing both the hard and soft costs of fund development, and you make an effort to keep soft costs under control.
Tip #5: You Understand
Opportunity
Cost. You recognize that your fund-development time is both scarce and precious, and avoid wasting it on opportunities or activities unlikely to produce favorable results.
Tip #6: Results Matter More Than Activity. Performance metrics are based on results and outcomes, not activity. You work to improve performance ratios, rather than to increase raw activity levels.
Tip #7: Staff Meetings Focus on Best Practices and Efficiency. Your fund-development team collects and review performance data, and analyzes ways to improve productivity. You don’t spend too much time on anecdotes and war stories.
A highly productive fundraising effort will bring in more income, and more unrestricted dollars, at lower costs in time, effort and out-of-pocket expenses. How does your organization rate? For every statement where your efforts compare at a High level, you are doing a good job on productivity, and have tools in place to maximize income and minimize costs. For every statement where you compare at a Low level, there is significant room for improvement. Take advantage of these insights, and start building your productivity now.
Bristol Strategy Group can help you assess and improve your agency's productivity. We have a proven ability to clarify the situation, identify areas where productivity is draining away, and build the methods, practices, tools and habits that will improve productivity continuously, year after year. Call us at 305-576-6236 or send email to info@bristolstrategygroup.com for more information.
The Risk You Shouldn't Take - Continued
By Bud Park
Hiring a key administrator—especially for a top job—is a critical intervention in the life and development of a nonprofit organization. Educational requirements, desired experience, and skill sets are all important in the search process—but far more important are the elements that ensure a fit with the culture and style of your agency. Accurate assessment of the candidate’s leadership characteristics and personal qualities is key to making the right choice so that your agency will grow and flourish.
Remember that choosing the right person for the job is the most important decision a leader or a nonprofit organization can make. It follows that choosing the wrong person is the most serious mistake you can make.
Consider the costs of a bad hire: disruption of the agency’s work, decline in the morale of employees, and strained relations with the executive team and the board. You also waste time in determining that the person is a problem and working through the termination. Finally, you waste the time required to repeat the search process and bring the new individual up to speed. Months are lost in the process.
Consider also the costs of a mediocre hire. Often, people already know someone they would like to work with. The better you know someone, the harder it is to be objective in evaluating their capacity to do a job and fit with the culture. When a search is limited to people already known or applicants (people actively looking for jobs), you often exclude the best candidates and therefore short-change the organization by not hiring the best possible talent. When you use a search firm and decide to choose a known candidate, you can be sure that you are hiring the best there is. This is why proactive recruitment yields consistently superior results.
The best candidates must often be recruited into the opportunity, and this requires a high degree of professional skill in understanding the hiring agency and the job opportunity and in helping lead the recruited candidate through a career decision process. Many fine candidates have been run off by the lack of careful handling at critical moments in the process.
Contributing author DABNEY PARK is the Founding Partner of Performance, an executive recruiting firm specializing in nonprofit and higher education. Park has deep experience in strategic planning, executive team building, organization development, and leadership training. He has served as founder of Performance, Senior Partner in Mark Stanley & Company / EMA Partners International, Executive Vice President of Thoughtware, Inc., Vice President of the Higher Education Management Institute, and Executive Officer of the Episcopal Diocese of Southeast Florida. He was a professor at the University of Cincinnati, Staten Island Community College, and Florida International University. Dabney Park, who is fluent in Spanish, has worked extensively in business and industry in the U.S. and Latin America, including work with Fortune 500 companies, medium sized companies, and small companies in a wide variety of industries. He also has considerable experience in higher education and the nonprofit world. email Bud at dpark@performancesearch.com. |
BSG CASE STUDY: Feast with the Beasts - Continued By Mark Haney
Feast with the Beasts at Miami Metrozoo started in 1989 as one of the first “taste of” events in Miami. With more than 40 top-notch restaurants, quality entertainment and an amazing atmosphere, it quickly became a staple of Miami’s social scene. It was also the top fundraising event for the Zoological Society of Florida and Miami Metrozoo. The event became increasingly popular with the public but the production costs and staff time to run it were out of control. Dwindling financial commitment from the event’s only cash sponsor made the situation worse. In 1999, the Zoo’s Board of Directors made the decision to pull the plug on the much-loved but financially draining event.
In the next six years, hardly a day went by without the question, “When are you bringing back Feast with the Beasts?” In 2005, we decided to try again – “Feast with the Beasts – the Beast is Back!” The event was semi-successful – we made 90 percent of our revenue goal and went just slightly over our budgeted expenses. We did have a great party that our donors and guests loved! People were thrilled that Feast was back. However, the staff time was still exorbitant and we hadn’t made our initial goals, in revenue or expenses. Not wanting to repeat history, we decided that we had to make some changes if we wanted to make Feast with the Beasts a permanent event at the Zoo.
Here’s where Bristol Strategy Group saved the day…
Realizing we needed more expertise, we sought out Ellen Bristol from Bristol Strategy Group. Ellen came highly recommended by our volunteer event chairperson. We were dubious at first because of prior negative experiences with consultants, but Ellen quickly impressed us with her no-nonsense style and knowledge. After meeting with key staff and volunteers, she skillfully helped us create a plan to approach the event in a more orderly manner which included controlling costs and increasing margins.
Feast with the Beasts is here to stay!
After implementing Ellen’s recommendations, we feel much more disciplined in the way we approach our fundraising events. This is evident in the final numbers for Feast with the Beasts 2006. We were able to:
Achieve 123 percent of our overall goal
- Stay 11 percent under budgeted expenses
- Increase our number of cash sponsors from one to 28
- Increase our number of in-kind sponsors ten-fold
- Increase regular and VIP ticket sales
- Throw a great party that people will be talking about until the next one!
Ellen and Bristol Strategy Group made sure we had the tools to succeed and stayed with us every step of the way. Our Board was amazed by the results. We are already implementing Ellen’s plan to make next year’s event an even bigger success. Thanks to Bristol Strategy Group, Feast with the Beasts is here to stay!
Contributing author Mark G. Haney has been managing fundraising efforts for non-profits for more than 15 years. Early in 2007, he was recruited to join the staff of the ACLU of
Florida
as Senior Director of Development. You can reach Mark via email at mhaney@aclufl.org.
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It's All About the Mission: How Healthy Is Yours? - Continued
Quick- what is your organization’s mission? If you were to ask that question at random, would you get the same answer from every employee, board member or volunteer? More important – would the answer hold up to scrutiny? Would it be heavy on jargon like “enable people to achieve their potential,” a statement that could apply to virtually any social need, and light on specifics like “show teenagers how to settle disputes without violence”?
Nothing is more important to the organization than a clear understanding of its mission. The mission is the purpose of the organization, its reason for being. A well-understood mission can, even should, act like a strategic plan in one phrase or sentence. Thus, all other strategic goals, objectives, performance standards, marketing, communications and even fundraising tactics stem directly from this simple, concise message. Assess the ‘health’ of your mission by comparing your agency’s situation to these key points.
You Have A Mission. Do you and the rest of the team know what your mission is? Is it absolutely clear to everybody? Do you have to look it up somewhere to figure out what it is? If any of these is true for your agency, your mission is not healthy.
The Mission States Your Purpose Clearly. We often run across mission statements like “we will help our clients achieve their potential and become empowered.” Dandy. How are you going to do that – by distributing free jigsaw puzzles? By providing job-skills programs? Immunization or cancer-screening? Make sure your mission states your purpose: what you do, how you do it, why you do it.
The Mission is Not a Slogan. If you just write up a ‘mission statement’ that's catchy, then drop it into your website, then your mission needs work. The Mission describes why your organization exists, what it does, what difference it makes in the world. Crafting the mission requires ongoing collaborative effort and analysis on the part of the board and staff. The Mission is more important than the Mission Statement.
Everyone Knows the Mission – By Heart. If they don’t, your mission needs work. If the board members don’t, your mission needs work. If your funders don’t, your mission needs work. If your CLIENTS don’t, your mission really needs work; they don’t know what purpose you serve.
The Mission is Visible. Your mission should appear on your website, your letterhead, your marketing collateral, annual report, program flyers, and most important on the lips of your ambassadors, board and staff members who represent you to the community. If no-one knows it or can find it, your mission needs work.
The Mission is the Strategic Plan in One Statement. If your mission has been clearly defined and made visible, you and others should be able to ask yourselves this question: “Is what I’m doing right now contributing to the mission or not?” If the answer is “yes,” that’s good. If it’s “no,” stop wasting your time. But if the answer is “well, I’m not sure,” then your mission is not clear to you and it needs some work.
You Review the Mission Regularly. A well-run organization should scrutinize the mission at least once a year, as part of the strategic planning process. Missions evolve as a result of changing market conditions. Have market conditions changed in such a way that your core programs, services or clients no longer fulfill the mission?
Your Mission Drives Your Fundraising, Not the Other Way Around. Missions should drive fundraising. If the mission is viable, you can find the money to support it. If you find the money first and then squeeze your mission into the money, your mission needs work.
Your Mission Drives Your Programs, Not the Other Way Around. Programs may seem attractive, especially if somebody will fund them. But does the program serve the mission, or does it stretch the mission out of shape? If the programs don’t serve the mission, either your mission needs work, or your programs need work.
Your Mission Drives Your Staffing, Not the Other Way Around. By now, this ought to be fairly simple to analyze. Ask this: what does it take for us to fulfill our mission, in terms of money, programs, and staffing to run the programs and find/manage the money? Then and only then do you go out and find the staff. And if the staffing doesn’t fit the mission, either your mission needs work, or your staffing plan needs work.
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Avoiding Liability in Grants Management - Continued
Unfortunately for nonprofit organizations, funders are placing more and more restrictions on the money they give out. Common restrictions include time restrictions, strict adherence to budget line items or results reporting. As the number of grants or awards with restrictions grows, so does the complexity of properly managing the funds.
However there are procedures that can be followed to ensure compliance is met and that the dollars awarded are fully utilized. Some examples are as follows the master schedule of grants, the net asset schedule, master state or federal restrictions guide, and adequate oversight of prepared schedules.
First and foremost a master schedule of grants should be maintained by the organization. This list should include, but is not limited to the following: name of grantor, contact person, CSFA or CFDA number if applicable, amount of grant award, time restrictions and allowable expense by amount and category.
Once the grant or award has been identified the activity must be monitored on a monthly basis at a minimum, or more often if necessary. An easy way to monitor the activity on an organizational wide basis is through a net asset schedule which is easily designed and maintained on spreadsheet software such as Microsoft Excel. The columns of the spreadsheet consist of the various funders and the rows represent the activity in a format such as; beginning net asset balance, current activity, net asset released from restriction and ending balance.
Even though the organization may have met the time and amount restrictions associated with the grant or award, there also could be additional restrictions on the category or budget amounts. Additional restrictions in this arena are often placed by the federal or state awarding agency. For instance the federal government and state government has restricted per diem amounts which may be different than amounts prescribed by the IRS. There is a myriad of these type of restrictions and having a federal and state restrictions guide is imperative for compliance.
The final and most important ingredient for grant administration is competent and adequate oversight. Management should have a thorough understanding of all restrictions and limitations placed upon the organization by the funders. Communication and training on these limitations and restrictions to the applicable staff is the key to successful grants or restricted awards.
Contributing author Brian Misiunas is a CPA who specializes in nonprofit accounting and audits, with the firm of Pinchasik, Strongin, Muskat, Stein & Co., Miami, Florida. Brian's email address is BMisiunas@PSMS-CPA.com.
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