5 Tips to Assess the Efficacy of Your Organization’s Fundraising
Why do a self-assessment of your development work?
Before we jump into the “how”, let's take a step back and discuss what a development self-assessment is and why we always recommend them to our school and nonprofit partners. Simply put, a development self-assessment is an opportunity for you and your team to take a deep look at every aspect of your development work to identify areas of strength and areas of growth. Once you’ve identified these areas you can start building effective and individualized plans that are specific to your fundraising landscape and start answering important questions like: What should we do differently next year? Did that new monthly giving program work effectively? Are we ready for a larger campaign?
A self-assessment is a crucial first step to beginning the planning and goal-setting process.
It can be tempting to jump right into setting ambitious financial goals, dreaming of elaborate fundraising events, and planning new and improved community engagement initiatives, but without a clear sense of what worked and didn’t work for your community, you’ll be entering your work with blinders on. You can do an assessment or check-in whenever is best for your team but we recommend doing one at the following times:
At the end of your fiscal year
Before you begin a new strategic plan
When you think a capital campaign might be on the horizon
If you are adding additional development staff and are looking to identify where their time could be best spent
Any time you feel like you are spending a lot of hours on development but not necessarily seeing results
No matter if your goal is: preparing for another ambitious year of fundraising, thinking about launching a capital campaign or new large project, or just wanting to do a general infrastructure check-up, a self-assessment is the perfect first step!
Here are the 5 tips and tricks to make sure you look in every nook and cranny and come out with a clear understanding of how to fine-tune your fundraising work!
Tip # 1 Make sure you’ve got your numbers ready
It’s easy to assume, especially as frontline fundraisers, that we have a good sense of what our fundraising landscape looks like, but you’d be surprised by how much can be hidden in your CRM or excel docs. When we meet with new partners we always encourage them to look at the following data:
How much do you raise yearly from Individuals v.s. Corporate v.s Foundations v.s. Competitive government grants?
How do those numbers compare to the year before?
How much did you actually raise from that event or campaign, especially once you subtract any costs? What were the main contributors to your success?
What is your success rate when applying to grants? What about when you break it down between new opportunities and renewal applications?
What does your donor retention rate look like each year? (Psst. The average for most nonprofits is usually between 40% and 45%, how do you compare?)
How many emails do you actually send out to donors and potential supporters? To whom? And what percentage of recipients open them? Or click?
Tip #2 Don’t Forget to Look at Your Supporting Infrastructure
It’s easy to think of fundraising as just the activities that actively bring in financial resources, but there are so many areas and activities that are deeply intertwined with development work. The biggest one we see our partners overlooking? Marketing and Communications
Now we’re not saying you need to post on Tik Tok daily, we know that small teams don’t have the capacity for that, but during this assessment process don’t forget to take time to analyze the language, collateral, and materials that you use in the community and online to talk about your school. Is it up-to-date? Is it visually appealing? Is the language clear and compelling? Even if you are not looking to grow or scale your individual fundraising it is imperative to have strong communications infrastructure. Foundations and Government funders are a lot less likely to stalk your social media than individual funders but having the language and materials to clearly explain who you are, what you do, why you are unique, and why they should support you is crucial for funder meetings, school tours, grant applications and more.
What else do schools often overlook? Staff and Human Resources
I know our first tip was to look at the numbers, but you can’t forget about the people! Take a look at who does what on your team, is the delineation of roles and responsibilities clear and effective, and most importantly: are there any resources or extra capacity that you’re missing? Is your board engaged and involved in fundraising? What about your Parent-Teacher Association?
Tip #3 Don’t be afraid to admit mistakes or plans that didn’t work out
Hopefully your team already has a culture that’s focused on honesty and self-improvement rather than expecting perfection. If not, an assessment is the perfect time to model that behavior. Especially, on a small team that’s wearing multiple hats it’s normal that things will fall through the cracks. Maybe in the back-to-school rush you forgot to follow-up with a potential funder. Maybe at an event your team wasn’t sure who should make the ask so no one did. Maybe you tried to launch a planned giving program but no one signed up. Our school partners share stories like this all the time. What’s important is not to dwell on these errors but rather to talk about what happened, and how you can set your team up for success in the future. Don’t let pride or embarrassment keep you from identifying areas of improvement.
Tip #4 Don’t just focus on the weaknesses
While it’s important to admit mistakes and growth areas, that should NOT be the only topic of discussion during the assessment. I don’t know about you all but at least for me it is way too easy for me to focus exclusively on areas for improvement and ways that my work could have been better. The point of the assessment is not to find fault in your work but rather to ensure that you have all the information you need to make a plan and meet your goals. Not only is it a more positive process to discuss the wins, it's also essential to identify the things you need to keep doing, not just the things you need to do differently.
When you’re going through the assessment don’t forget to ask yourself or your team:
What went well and why did it go so well?
Where are areas where my/our talents and skills are paying off?
What were some unexpected wins and how can we replicate that?
Tip #5 Use your takeaways, make a plan, and make it tangible
Reviewing all of your development processes is time intensive but it can and will pay off in innumerable ways if you use that information effectively. Make sure that you and your team take full advantage of everything you learn during the assessment. It’s tempting to wrap up with a general “we’ll do better next year” but unless you lay out intentional steps and accountability… you probably won’t.
Identify the top 3-5 areas of improvement (or however many feels reasonable to your team) and think about what clear actions you can take on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis to make them happen. Set up monthly check-ins to keep yourself and others on track.
Final Thoughts
Doing a self-assessment is a fantastic opportunity for reflection and a great first step for strategic planning and goal setting. If you’d like some guidance please check out our guiding document. We’ve laid out all the questions that we usually ask our partners to answer.
