Does a slow economy prevent a charity from asking?

I recently had a conversation with a fellow fundraiser who has worked for a nonprofit organization for a couple of years. His experience really points up the reality we're digging at here.

During that time he endeavored to put in place a major gifts emphasis and worked out all the basics, setting up staff and volunteer assignments to pursue the first round of major gift prospects gleaned from their database.

This nonprofit definitely wanted and needed more money; significantly more money. But my friend noted that the management team at that nonprofit apparently had some reservations about how money couold be raised. He tole me the CEO kept saying, "I'm not as enthusiastic as you are about our potential to do this."

But my friend was excited by the possibilities. Apparently their database of donors was a veritable goldmine for a major gifts process. He described their donors as loyal, frequent givers, and said there were lots of them. And this nonprofit had, over the years, taken the pains and trouble to put many of the right codes on donor records, making the work of prospect identification a pretty straightforward task. The stage was set.

The reason my fellow fundraiser mentioned this situation in the first place was the way this rather positive situation quickly collapsed on itself. Having assigned the first round of prospects to staff and volunteers for cultivation and solicitation, and having had a few early successes, one of their early discoveries was that they really needed to do more information sharing and more cultivation with a much more personal touch than they had used previously.

So that called for some changes in the way people viewed the task, and in the time it would take, and in the alteration of daily schedules for key staff. Nothing new there, it happens all the time.

But, in the meantime, it happened that some special event fundraisers this nonprofit put on came up short in terms of the amount of money they raised. That caused something of a financial crisis and the CEO decided they'd had enough of the major gifts emphasis and could do with more energy being spent by the development department on the special events.

My response to this situation was, "It looks like it might have been time for the development department and management staff to simply go out and raise the money you need with the process you already have in motion. You seem to have the prospects, the method, the program in place to do that; and if there were still six months before the end of the year you had plenty of time. Why didn't you just go out and raise the fiscal shortfall and be done with it?"

His reply was that the CEO had said to him, "As I told you at the beginning, I don't think I'm as enthusiastic as you are about the potential for our organization to go do that. I think you need to bear down on the special events."

More this afternoon…