Using Volunteers to Cultivate and Solicit – Part 2 of 5

I’ve heard some executives and development directors decry the use of volunteers. Some say “too busy.” Others say “too much problem.” Others feel “too pressed to take the time” to meet their revenue goals.

Hey! I’ll be first in line to say that, yes, volunteers can be very heavy maintenance sometimes. Yes, it does take time to find them, train them and then to monitor and evaluate them out in the field. And, yes, you have to go with them most of the time.

But the payoff is in the fact that they steer you away from the “duds” and right to the gold, and that they bring home the gold with so much greater frequency, not to mention the fact that they extend the capability of the whole fundraising operation quite a bit. Staff simply cannot handle the cultivation and solicitation load that a typical nonprofit needs to meet its revenue targets. Conversely, if the nonprofit is limited by the cultivation and solicitation reach of its development staff and executive, it will not be able to raise the money it needs to adequately perform its mission after the first year or two. I cannot imagine why it wouldn’t be worth the time, bother and aggravation to have that much more revenue!

For example, here’s the ABC Charity. They’ve been scraping along on about $250,000 of contributed funds each year. Of course “strategic planning” for this group consists of making up each year’s budget, so it bears the "curse of the finance officer" – no new revenue sources because that person doesn’t trust that there’s any new source out there that will produce! So they limp along. Executive director Mary does program work and development work. She’s in charge of seeing to it that the $250,000 happens. She has precious little time to go scouting around after a bunch of volunteers, and relies on a couple of nerve-wracking events and the ability to write a couple of proposals each year to local foundations. Those volunteers are trouble enough as it is! She can't be bothered.

But what that organization REALLY needs is about $500,000, and if Mary would slow down enough to take the time to do a reasonably good job of putting together a gift pyramid and selecting a decent list of prospects, she could see her way to finding that much money in a community that has been able to produce the $250,000 only with difficulty.

Now, if Mary would get herself a dozen volunteers and turn them loose on that prospect list, she would find out where the gold is, and would probably have added another couple dozen new prospects the volunteers thought of. If she turns them loose in the community to solicit, after having given them a bit of training and a thorough knowledge of the organization’s case for support, her job, basically, would be done. Mary would have cut her time in the field soliciting approximately in half! Yes, she’s still working hard for that half million, but the TYPE of work she’s doing is more oriented towards supporting and managing the people who can REALLY get the job of cultivating and soliciting done. And in doing that, she’s set the organization up for continued and incremental success in the future.

Tomorrow we’ll talk about finding volunteers.