What Is Innovation, Anyway?
Finding it in our fundraising is easier than we may think
My recent podcast conversation with Mallory Mitchell has had me thinking…
… about innovation.
Mallory and I talked a lot about AI and how it risks dampening our very human creativity. We also talked about how it can kill innovation.
Think about it.
Innovation is not something that we will ever find outside of us. That truth even lies within the word itself!
The insights we need for our work — especially answers to problems that we are encountering and need creative solutions for — will never be found outside of ourselves, or our organizations.
Not in AI.
Not in so-called “best practices.”
Not in copying what the org on the other side of town is doing.
Friends, there has been far too much external validation baked into how we do our work in community and philanthropy.
I mean, it’s not surprising.
The way our entire dominant culture conditions us, from birth to… now… is that all the expertise we need (even about ourselves!) is “out there.”
Parents. Teachers. Friends. Therapists. Coaches. Aunts. Uncles. Grandparents. School Principals. Professors. Bosses. Celebrities. Influencers.
We have essentially been repetitively trained — year after year, situation after situation — not to trust ourselves.
We have also been trained that the more we hew to whatever everyone else around us is doing, the more successful we’ll be.
All of this conditioning adds up to our tendency to look outside ourselves, or our orgs, for everything we need.
This tendency not only means we’re just repeating what others have already said or done (certainly not very creative, and also not very life-giving)… but it also means that we are very likely making decisions that run counter to what we and our orgs actually need in order to be successful.
Because we don’t need what everyone else needs.
Our orgs don’t run like every other one does.
We are unique.
Our orgs are unique.
Each and every one.
Let’s look at some specific places this comes up.
Donor Portfolios
If you’ve been in this field of work for any amount of time, I’m guessing you’ve heard it. What is the recommended portfolio size for someone managing individual donor relationships? 150. Yes?
I’ve heard this again and again, in so many settings. Haven’t you?
But why is this the number?
Why is this the standard by which we all determine our work?
You may be surprised that it’s based on our brain size… and anthropology.
Robin Dunbar, a British anthropologist, first proposed this number in the 1990s: Dunbar's Number is a suggested cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships — relationships in which an individual knows who each person is and how each person relates to every other person.1
This number was extrapolated, using the average size of the human brain, from the results of research with primates.
I’m not even sure at what point “150” became the “best practice” for a donor portfolio… but do you see the problem with that number?
Even if 150 is an accurate number for the number of stable human relationships that we can maintain at once, we obviously can’t dedicate all 150 of those to donors! We have professional colleagues… and family members… and friends… and neighbors… and more. We have many people we are maintaining relationships with beyond donors.
So, even if we’re going to use that research as our standard (an assumption that is questionable), we’d still have to ramp down the number of donors per portfolio.
Ultimately, we need to build portfolios based on factors that are entirely specific to the individual who’s managing the portfolio… and the org they’re serving.
Factors like:
What other work they have besides managing donor relationships
Whether they have any reporting relationships
Whether they have any admin support
Where donors are located
What kinds of contact/communication the particular donors favor
What the org has decided their strategy for relationship-building will be
What hours the individual needs to work, for their own energy- and life-management purposes
Etc.
All together, these decisions need to be made with the specific needs and preferences of the individuals involved and the org in mind.
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Job Titles
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the widely accepted-and-repeated typical job titles within our field.
Some things I’ve been thinking about, and that I suggest you mull over too:
“Fundraising” puts all of the emphasis on funds, for everyone involved (including and especially the donors being approached by these staffers).
“Development” is also a bit of an odd framing too. I especially encountered this at an org where a huge percentage of our donors (institutional and individual) were involved in commercial real estate. Many of these folks got very confused when hearing my job referred to as “development.” What are we developing, in this work? If you asked that question to most people with that word in their title, you’d probably get wildly different answers.
“Advancement” is another common one — primarily coming from academic settings and used when encompassing not just fundraising, but marketing, communications, and other functions. But… why advancement? Is our primary purpose in our work to… advance? Advance to where? Why?
“Officer” is a bit odd as a regular title, too. The connotations of “officer” are for things military or law enforcement, primarily. Do we really want to be invoking marching and straight lines and guns and violence in our work?
Shouldn’t we be invoking the things we say we’re all about in our job titles? Things like community? Or relationships? Or the mission?
What if, instead of a Development Director, we had a Community Engagement Director? Or a Community Relationships Lead? Or a Head of Community Connections? Or a Lead Guide for Mission Support?
The things is, the way we name our work absolutely affects how we think about our work… and how others, including and especially donors, think of it too.
Words carry energy.
What energy do we want them to carry?
What do we want our work to focus on?
What do we want others to know about what we do?
Why aren’t we titling our jobs with these words?
Why aren’t we getting creative and innovative with our job titles, within our orgs… so that they really fit the work we’re doing?
Events
Galas. Breakfasts. Auctions (silent or… loud). Golf Events.
So many people, when they think about fundraising, think about events.
How many conversations have you been a part of where someone talks about needing more funding for something you all want to do. And the next thing people start talking about is a fundraising event?
Take it from someone who has been around the block — many times. In general, events are a bad idea.
I’m not going to go into all the reasons why here, because many many words have been written and spoken all over these internets about this topic. I’m sure you’ve heard many of them.
Bottom line, though, is that the bottom line doesn’t bottom-line in the black, when it comes to events.
The ROI (return on investment) of events is almost always ridiculously low-to-negative, when you factor in all of the staff time and energy required to make them happen. And almost no org ever includes that expenditure in their calculations, either.
And here’s the thing that gets me about fundraising events:
A huge percentage of the time — one I don’t even want to try to calculate, or I’d probably get profoundly sad — guests can go to an event meant to fundraise for a specific mission… and walk away from that event knowing next-to-nothing about that mission, or the org they were giving to.
So here’s where your creativity and innovation needs to come into play:
If you must gather people together to support your org’s mission… how can you do that in a way that is deeply connected to your mission?
How can you minimize the staff time/energy necessary to create the gathering?
What creative ideas might help you achieve your mission… even as you’re also raising funds to support the mission?
Your org has a particular vibe/culture. What types of gatherings are especially tied to that vibe/culture? What type(s) of gathering(s) just feel(s) like… YOU?
If you are going to hold a gathering with your supporters, or potential supporters… how are you going to really connect with each one? How are you going to ensure they have a meaningful experience? How are you going to ensure they experience and understand your mission? How are you going to actually grow your relationship with them, since you’re both spending your valuable time and energy engaged in the same space, at the same time?
You may have noticed me using the word “gathering” instead of “event” throughout this list. Can we shift to a “gathering” mindset, if we must gather people together? The word “event” connotes something much more like a show, or entertainment, or something transactional. A “gathering,” instead, connotes togetherness; community; meaning; purpose.
If you’re going to gather your people… how can you do it in a way that is much more creative and innovative… and thus meaningful for you?
Year-End Appeals
Here’s another topic where so many of us know the conventional wisdom.
Sources will say that anywhere from 20% to 30% (or more) of an org’s annual giving comes through in December. Sources like Giving USA have often cited that fully 10% of nonprofit giving happens in the last three days of a calendar year.
What does this end up meaning, in practice?
Those of us who work with nonprofits work ourselves weary at year-end. And those of us who give to nonprofits are overwhelmed by snail mail and email in the last few weeks of the year, sent by orgs desperate to raise as much as they can during this time they’ve been told is most lucrative.
The desperation and stress are loud at year-end.
Yes, lots of folks are in especially giving mindsets, due to the holidays that align with the time of calendar year-end.
But also, for the same reason, folks are stretched during this time. Their attention is split in 50 different directions. Their time and energy are constantly being demanded by those closest to them. Gatherings, concerts, parties are aplenty.
In short: in purely human terms, this is a bad time to try to ask anyone for anything.
What if, instead, you innovated?
What if you found a timeframe that made special sense for your org and mission? For instance, if your org serves students during the school year, you have a July/August appeal to prep for the students’ arrival? Or if your org supports the natural environment, you have an appeal around Earth Day?
What if you held a series of mini-appeals for different segments of your donor base, at times of the year that made sense for each?
What if you sent far more non-appeal communications to donors throughout the year, purely for updates to and connecting with your donors, knowing that those would very likely spur greater giving from donors feeling like their gifts are really making a difference… and that they’re really a part of your community?
What if…. ?
The sky is the limit, here.
I’m just trying to get you thinking outside the box — or really, outside looking outside yourself for the answers, to really interrogate what makes the most sense for you… for your team… for your supporters… etc.
Life is hard right now. Community work is hard right now. I know. I feel it, too. Stress has always been an inherent part of this work…but it’s been exponentially multiplied lately. The world feels like it’s on fire. And still, we’re expected to keep on truckin’ everyday. Friends, we were never meant to do this work alone.
Community work is ecosystemic work.
When we’re working to better our communities — especially if we’re fundraising, especially if we’re working in nonprofit organizations — we need to be connected with each other… and collaborating with each other.
Check out my newest offering:
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Creativity, Innovation Arise From Within
Each org is unique (in its particular staff composition, mission, business model, fundraising capacity, etc.).
We need to allow for that uniqueness... and hew to whatever structures and practices work best for each individual org/individual people within an org.
Let's let our humans... and orgs... bloom and grow from within, according to their own unique flowering...and not according to the care tips that exist for an entirely different sort of plant.
Everything related to this work of philanthropy is based in human relationships. And human relationships — like humans as individuals — unfold, gradually, over time.
Like a plant, you cannot force them to grow.
And the process of innovative creation for these humans, within their human relationships, and in support of the missions they care about — is not one that can be imposed from without.
Rather, it emerges from within.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number