chapter THIRTY‐THREE
Infrastructure for Fundraising
Effective time management often marks the difference between a good fundraiser and one who is not going to live up to their potential. Because a fundraising job is never done, you are never caught up on your work, so you have to be very clear about your priorities. And partly as a corollary to Parkinson's Law (“work expands to fill the time available”), expenses rise to meet income. The more successful the fundraising plans are, the more plans the organization will make to spend that money. Consequently, no amount of money raised is ever enough. No matter how supportive the organizational culture is of its staff and volunteers, the ongoing need for money can translate into significant pressure on those raising it. For this reason, fundraising staff (paid and unpaid) must set their own limits on how much time they will spend working.
The main reason good time management will separate otherwise quite talented people from those who actually do well in fundraising is that the purpose of time management is to help make you happy. Excellent fundraisers are, by nature, optimistic. For example, we believe the next person we ask might respond with an enthusiastic “YES!!” Our enthusiasm can wane, however, under the pressures of a job that has huge responsibility without a whole lot of authority. If you are not able to set your own boundaries around your work, and you don't feel that the priorities you have are taking maximum advantage of your time and talent, you will soon be unhappy in your job, and, in what sometimes becomes a vicious circle, you will gradually be less effective.
Here are some guidelines for using your time to best advantage.
GUIDELINES
Every Day
Reserve time when you cannot be interrupted. For one hour each day, do not talk to other staff, do not read texts, and do not check email. Use that time for planning, writing, analysis of your fundraising results so far—anything that requires uninterrupted time. If you simply cannot set aside a full hour, then set aside 20 or 30 minutes two or three times a day. Like exercise, you will improve even in smaller chunks of time.
Create or Update To‐Do Lists. Spend 10–15 minutes at the end of the day creating your to‐do list for the next day. At the beginning of the day, review your to‐do list. Unless something comes up that really can't wait, do only those tasks already on your to‐do list. Put new things on tomorrow's list. Don't plan to do more than can be done in about half to three‐quarters of the day. The rest of the time will be taken up with stuff you must deal with that you did not plan for. If you plan eight hours of work in an eight‐hour day, you will wind up working 12 hours. Plan four to five hours of work, and you will be done with a day's work after seven or eight hours.
Make Sure Thank‐You Notes Are Being Sent. Ideally, a board member or volunteer is helping to write or personalize thank‐you notes on a regular basis, or the executive director is sending a personal email or adding a personal note to thank‐you notes going to longtime or major donors. But you must stay on top of this process.
Make Sure Your Database Is Up to Date. Data entry is a task that can easily be put off in favor of more urgent tasks, but this is a mistake. Ideally, you have someone who does data entry for you: either a very detail‐oriented and trusted volunteer or a part‐time staff person; or data entry is an assigned part of a full‐time person's job. Even very small organizations have realized that paying someone to enter data is a better use of money than having the development director do it, which frees the development director to focus on more strategic work, particularly if you actually use a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) database.
Development directors are not always precise at data entry, and our tendency can be to rush through this task, leading to misspellings and duplicate entries. Data entry is listed here under “daily” because this is the best way to keep up with this task; if it can't be done daily, the important thing is to have a system and a schedule for data entry and to keep current with it. Of course, when you use a volunteer or pay someone to do data entry, you have to be sure that the person understands how confidential these data are.
Stay on Top of Other Communication. Don't put off difficult tasks such as sending a card to a volunteer who has just had a disturbing health diagnosis, or writing your section of the e‐newsletter, or setting up a meeting of the major gifts committee. Do these tasks on time.
Every Two Weeks
Review Your Fundraising Plan Year‐to‐Date. Take note of the following: What is right on schedule? What is ahead of schedule? What is falling behind? What is unexpected? What course corrections do you need to make to your plan? Who needs to be involved in deciding those changes? Who will be affected, and who will tell the affected person? Remember, don't plan on catching up—you probably won't, so some set of tasks will need to be delegated or triaged. Doing this in‐depth analysis every two weeks means a minimum number of major surprises and the maximum chance of meeting your goals.
WATCH FOR TIME SINKS
How many times have we looked up at a clock and in total disbelief said, “How could it be so late?” or “Where did the day go?” Sometimes this is a sign that we have been absorbed in important work, but sometimes it is a sign that we have used up our time doing a lot of stuff that seemed important but actually wasn't, or doing important stuff that could have been handled in a fraction of the time. Here are the most common time sinks.
Internet Surfing. It starts out innocently. You are looking around for good examples of short fundraising videos because you are wondering if your organization should invest in one. You read what a few notable experts have to say, you follow the link to the samples, which leads you to a dog video, which you watch because it is only two minutes and you deserve a break, then back to sample fundraising videos, which leads you to a video about how to supervise people who are working remotely, which you watch because you need to know more about that, which leads to a TED talk, and, and and… three hours have passed. You are more well informed but no closer to deciding about a fundraising video. The blessing of having practically all the world's knowledge just a click away, with more being produced every day, is also a curse. If you tend to get drawn into surfing, set the timer on your phone for 10–20 minutes when you are about to do research on the internet, and stop when it rings.
Email. Email is a great time‐saver to be sure, but it is often one of our biggest time sinks. You can limit the amount of incoming email a great deal. Unsubscribe from anything that is not useful to your work or that you don't read anyway. Don't use work email for personal communication. Don't check personal email at work more than once or twice a day. Delete without reading any emails that have been forwarded to you that you know are not related to your work. Don't feel obligated to answer every email, particularly if you receive email from people who are not and are never going to be important to your organization and/or whom you have never heard of and will probably never hear from again. Although a great deal of your work will take place on email, you need to impose limits on how you use it. Some people check their email only three or four times a day. Avoid the temptation to respond to work email in the evening, and limit how much time, if any, you spend with it on the weekend. This boundary is particularly important if you work remotely. Being able to work at any hour of the day or night allows flexibility, but too often leads to working all the time, which is not healthy for you or the organization. Email is not the boss of you.
Social Media. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, and so on are fun, interesting, and have opened up multiple new ways to communicate. These platforms and dozens of others that exist or will appear also give us many new avenues for fundraising and the ability to reach new constituents. But from a purely time management point of view, you must apportion your time to them only in accordance with the answer to the question: “Is this helping our organization raise money?”
The Telephone. The telephone is much less of a distraction than it used to be, but with no net gain of time, having been replaced by texting, email, and social media. Even for the few calls you make, you will probably leave voice mail messages, so spend a few seconds before you call thinking about the exact message you are going to leave. Although friendliness and warmth are wonderful, “Hope you are well” does not need to be followed with “and I hope you are having time to enjoy this wonderful weather.” Ditto with “OK, take care. Look forward to talking with you. Great to hear your voice.” Pick one of those, preferably a short one.
Chatty Coworkers. Learn to sort out what kinds of conversations are important for maintaining morale and showing interest in other people and what conversations simply occur because you or your coworker is procrastinating. Schedule social time with coworkers you like so that you will not have to steal time away from work.
CALENDARS
There are hundreds of different calendar systems; find one that works for you.
Many people find an electronic calendar system to be most efficient. A great beauty of electronic calendars is that they can be synced to your smart phone, your tablet, your laptop, and an office‐wide electronic calendar. No matter where you are, you can easily look up your current appointments for any given day as well as know when a coworker might be available for a meeting. With electronic calendars you always have a backup copy in the Cloud, even if you were to lose your smart phone or tablet. Whatever system you implement, put in the dates of board meetings, the annual meeting, special events, proposal deadlines, newsletter deadlines, and any other meetings or deadlines that you can anticipate. Indicate how many days it will take you to prepare for any of these events so you don't schedule long meetings or big projects during those times. With this system, you will have a clear visual picture that allows you to assess quickly: “Can I take on this commitment?” “Does it make sense for me to attend this conference when I will be exhausted from our annual retreat?” “Should we start our capital campaign during our audit?”
Remember also that some of the days of the year will be used up by illness (yours, your partner's, your children's, and so on), by goofing off or not working efficiently, and by work emergencies that take precedence.
Finally, consider getting an app that helps you keep track of your to‐do list as well as collaborate with coworkers. (There are many on the market, both free and paid. Workflowy, Google Tasks, and Remember the Milk are examples.) Whenever possible, set your meetings, appointments, lunch dates, and so on by referring to the whole week or month. A day does not stand alone. Do you really want to have a 7 a.m. breakfast meeting with a major donor the morning after a board meeting that will run until 10 p.m.?
Avoid Bemoaning Your Busy Life
When you say to yourself or others “I am so busy,” or “I don't know how I'll get everything done,” you tend to set up a self‐fulfilling prophecy. Further, comments such as these don't accomplish anything except to use up time. Most people are busy and few people finish everything. Tell yourself instead: “I can finish this. I have enough time.”
Skip Unnecessary Conferences
Conferences, trainings, webinars, workshops, and seminars are both expensive and time‐consuming and often not worth either the time or expense. Choose the events where you will really learn something or see people you truly want or need to see. Then go and be there. Too often we decide to attend a conference halfheartedly and spend most of the time during the plenaries and workshops checking email, sending text messages, or slipping out to answer our cell phones. If you choose to attend a conference or seminar, be at the event and get as much out of it as you can.
This is even more true of the videoconferences that have replaced in‐person meetings. Waiting for people to get on, waiting for people to unmute or unfreeze or to finish a long and boring report creates a temptation to text a friend or read email. Pretending your internet signal is weak gives you a way to turn off your video so no one can see what you are up to. However, you are not gaining anything because you are neither at the meeting nor are you really completely focused on another task.
Avoid Scheduling Too Many Meetings
Meetings are very important. There are ideas and ways of doing work that would only be thought of by a group of people talking together. As such, we want to create an environment where we look forward to most of our meetings. Further, a certain amount of the work we do at meetings is socializing and building camaraderie, which is crucial to a functioning organization. Nevertheless, some meetings are not really necessary, and many meetings last too long. So, ask these questions of every meeting: Is it necessary? Do I need to be there? Can I be there for part of it and not all of it? If you have any say in what will go on at the meeting, make sure there is an agenda with times for each item. Items tend to take the amount of time that is planned, and with no clear end time, unimportant items can fill many minutes. If an item takes more time than was allotted, the facilitator can negotiate the need for extra time.
Keep Track of Next Steps
One of the difficult things about working with individual donors is that this work has few externally determined deadlines, so you have to create your own. Whenever you work with a donor or a prospect, make a note in that person's record of what occurred and what you intend to do next. This information should be recorded in a separate field under the donor's name in your database. Next steps are brief and often mostly reminders: “Invite to Martina's house party,” or “Call with outcome of organizing effort in Roane County,” or “Send policy brief as soon as available.” Then add a date by which you will do this. Contact‐management software is very helpful for keeping up with these plans, but the calendar and task functions in most smart phone apps also do a great job as well; even a task list on a piece of paper will do. Find a system that works for you and use it.
If you are systematic about your donors, you will have a date for each important donor or prospect on which you are going to do something to move along the process of building their relationship with the organization. Remember that you do not need to meet with each of these donors, and in fact, you shouldn't. Distribute the work of relationship building with other staff, board, and volunteers and spend some of your time building the confidence of those people in building relationships with donors.
A fundraiser's job is often compared to that of the circus performer who balances plates on sticks by keeping the plates twirling and runs from stick to stick to keep the spinning going. If the performer misses, a plate falls and may break. The fundraising plan is the stick and the to‐do list and next steps are the plates. This is how you keep your plates spinning and not falling. The overall idea is to have as little to remember as possible. You shouldn't have things only in your memory that you could record somewhere. This system frees you to use your mind to be creative or to learn new details about new people and write those down later.
The wide variety of tasks involved in fundraising are both exciting and one of the many difficulties of the job. Minimize the difficulties by using time and technology to best advantage.