Communicate, Evaluate, and Keep Everyone in the Loop

Every so often I send an email to my sister with the subject line: The Whine Report. Then I proceed to bitch and moan about all that is rotten in my life and the world. One thing that would definitely get a headline in The Whine Report is the lack of ability many people seem to have with the word no.

As a friend once told a prospective employer, you won’t have to put me on a suicide watch if the answer is no. I just need closure so I can move forward. I know that feeling well.

It’s more than just saying no, of course. It’s the lack of communication about what is going on, what needs to be going on, and (back to that no) what isn’t going on that often drives me to think about drink.

It’s that sinking sensation you get when you are working on a project and your Board president informs you that something you didn’t even know about is moving forward rapidly and it directly contradicts what you are doing. Like the grant proposal to the funder who only takes one proposal—so why did we submit one for $5,000 when I am working on one for $200K?

Communication shouldn’t be that hard, and yet, somehow it is.

That was the thing I hated most about management. There seemed to be such a fine line between micromanaging and not having a clue what my staff was doing. With certain people, I never seemed to be able to get a good feedback loop going.

That was particularly difficult when that person was my administrative assistant—and that was too often the case. But that, I fear, was a personal problem.

More to the point, oftentimes I would find myself shaking my head and wondering what my staff was thinking as I found out they were spending time on something that wasn’t where we really wanted to go.

So much of that could have been avoided, if only they would have reported in to me what they were doing. But that seemed to be secret. Not with most of my staff—mostly we did communicate and keep things on track. But there was always someone, and sometimes a few someones, who didn’t think they needed to play on the team.

So maybe I was a bad manager. Or perhaps I didn’t communicate well enough. Certainly in my consulting I find weekly reports invaluable. Yes, they take time, but then I can feel sure that we are both—my client and I—heading in the same direction. And if we’re not, it becomes clear before we’ve gone too many miles and at that point, it is easy to correct.

And so, I have come to love metrics—measures by which we can evaluate progress. When carefully developed and used, these do increase success rates considerably. On the downside, too often these are merely sticks and that serves only to increase failure.

Metrics should not be something to fear. Nor should they be arbitrary. They should be a way to make sure that we are all headed in the same direction and that we all have the necessary tools to get there.

Creating a metric that says, “last year we raised $X. This year you must raise $X plus 10%” is a losing proposition. Unless you put that up as a target and work as a team to develop the strategies and tactics for getting there.

For example, you might note that last year in order to reach X, one–third of the Board introduced you to a new prospect. This year, you would work on ways to get the remainder of the Board to make some introductions. Or perhaps you could segment your database and find new people on whom to call.

As part of this, you could—really, you should—clearly define the purposes for which you are fundraising. I know, this is a hobbyhorse of mine, but I truly believe that if you can’t articulate your need, you can’t effectively raise funds. And even if you bring in gifts, you may not be raising the money you need.

As you head into the new year, why not try a new tactic. If you are the boss, be very clear about your expectations with each of your staff members. If you are staff, resolve to let your boss and your colleagues in on what you are doing. But don’t stop with staff—think about Board Relations.

The biggest complaint I hear from Board members as well as management of organizations is that the other is not doing their job. I suspect that in many cases, the problem is that the other doesn’t know what job they are supposed to be doing—or know the job but haven’t a clue how to do it.

Try this—have an open meeting and talk about roles and responsibilities. You may want to do this with both Board and staff—but not in the same meeting. You may want to bring in an outside facilitator, just to make sure that you are hearing each other. And from this, develop your metrics for the coming year.

Opening up lines of communication can be messy, but mainly it can give you an incredible insight as to what is really going on and a clearer vision of what you need to do to get where you want to go.




Janet Levine is a consultant who focuses on increasing productivity for nonprofit organizations, their staff and volunteers. She can be reached at janet@janetlevineconsulting.com.

The Right Words

In five years, where does your organization want to be? That’s a question every nonprofit should be able to answer, but I suspect that for most, if they’ve considered the question at all, the answers they’ve come up with are sketchy at best.

It’s not that these organizations don’t have the ability to envision, or the desire to plan. They do but so many of us are completely focused on keeping our heads above water and getting to land that we don’t bother to think about which part of the beach we’d like to land on.

Fundraising ends up being a lot like that, too. We may consider how much we need to get through the year, but we don’t consider what it will take to allow us to do what we want to do next year.

This focus on survival rather than vision and growth may be why so many volunteers have a problem fundraising. No matter how you couch it, asking someone to help you keep the doors open feels a lot like begging.

”Give me a script,” Board members say, but it’s not about the right words. It is about clarity on what the call is supposed to accomplish.

For years, I sold insurance—life, health, disability. In order to sell insurance, of course, I had to get in front of people and talk with them about my product line. I had no natural constituency, so I spent a lot of time cold calling. I knew the odds were dismal—I could count on one in every hundred becoming a client. And it wasn’t one for each 100 calls I made, but one, over time, for every hundred. So sometimes I would make literally a thousand calls before I hit pay dirt.

As any sane person would, I hated it. But my kid really did need new shoes, so I persevered. And I discovered a few interesting things. The main one was the odds were about the same whether I used the professionally prepared scripts my agency offered, talking about building wealth and security and such, or whether I simply cut the chase and said, “Hi, I sell insurance.”

Along with that, I discovered that the appointments I did get were much smoother when we—the people with whom I was meeting and me—were on the same page. When they knew I sold insurance, it was easy: that’s what they were interested in and why they had agreed to the meeting. There were no misunderstandings or crossed wires.

Fundraising is not insurance. And you may not be calling to get an appointment. You might not even be cold calling. So, who am I calling? And why?

Is this a friend—to me, to someone on the Board, to the organization? Am I calling to thank them for past support, invite them to something, or yes, ask for an appointment? What outcomes I am hoping for? Do I simply want to make them feel good, introduce myself, begin cultivation, connect them a little more closely to us?

The who, why and what will tell me how I will approach this person.

Remember, when you call, you have literally seconds to get someone’s attention. That’s why when I trained students to call alumni I would recommend that their first sentence be “Hi, I am a student at (Your Alma Mater)” and then say “my name is….” Their name would not mean anything to the alumni, but the fact that they are a student and the name of the Alma Mater would grab attention.

So, “Hi, it’s Janet,” to my friend assures that I will get my say; “John Jones suggested I call you,” will reach John Jones’ contacts, and “I’m calling from (the organization you care about)” will push the person you are calling to listen.

But if this call is to a person who I know about but they don’t know me, my organization, or anyone else involved with the organization, this may be a very cold and difficult call indeed.

In these cases, I try to use what information I may have about the person to get the person’s attention. Generally, I make the first contact via letter or—increasingly—email. In the letter, I explain who I am and why I am contacting them. And then I tell them what I want and close with the comment that I will be calling in the next few to days to arrange for a meeting.

Here, especially, keeping the doors open to an organization they are not tied to is not terribly compelling. Nor, frankly is letting us continue to do what we are doing at the same level we have been doing it. If that’s all you want, you don’t need new supporters.

Rather than offering your Board members scripts for phone calls or face to face meetings, engage with them in a conversation about where you want the organization to be next year, the year after that and the year after that. If you did get there, what would that mean? How would the world—the world that your organization impacts—be changed? How many more people would benefit from the good you do?

If you dream enough—and then make concrete plans to make those dreams come true—believe me, you won’t need scripts to get your passion across. And since you won’t be asking people to dig deep to help maintain the status quo, you may very well find that whatever words you use, as long as you convey the mission and the goals, you will be as articulate as necessary.

Janet Levine is a consultant who focuses on increasing productivity for nonprofit organizations, their staff and volunteers. She can be reached at janet@janetlevineconsulting.com. Gets Grants!, an online grantwriting class is is available at www.janetlevineconsulting.com/classes.html.

Right and Left Hands

I read a lot of fiction. One thing that strikes me is how often the characters go off in strange and unlovely directions simply because they fail to communicate with each other, or at least, fail to communicate fully.

Of course, I’m struck by the same thing in real life, but who pays attention to reality anymore (unless it is televised)? Certainly not those who think that there really is a fund raising magic bullet.

But, surprise!, I’m not going to rant here about the lack of understanding of certain board members and CEO’s who are sure that everyone is just dying to give them some money if only somebody (else) would ask. I am going to rant about communication gaps.

Nothing, and I do mean nothing, is more irritating than finding out that you are the right hand who doesn’t know a thing about what the left hand has just done. I wish I had a dollar for every time a program officer informed me that someone in my organization just submitted a proposal for $5,000 so they could not consider the one for $50,000 we had been discussing until the next funding cycle. I wouldn’t be rich, but I could buy a pretty fancy dinner. And let’s not even mention the Board that decides that instead of the one-on-one major donor solicitations they had agreed to, they’ll throw another “fundraiser” event instead. So what if that will net very little?

Complaining, however, is one thing. Communicating so that complaining is less necessary is another. You’d think that in a world so full of noise, communication wouldn’t be such a hard thing to do. But it is.

The first step is to make sure that you are not part of the problem. You are only allowed to complain about how they don’t tell you what you need to know if you are telling them what they need to know.

Speaking of reality as we were a few paragraphs back, recognize that not everyone communicates and the best response to that is to communicate with that person.

My husband, who is an engineer and we all know how well they mix with communicating, used to have a bad habit of not telling me if he was going to be late or if he was bringing someone home for dinner. I, a sales type with motor mouth who informed him of everything I might possibly do that day, decided that two could play the no communication game.

Instead of making things better, it made them worse because now neither of us had a clue what was happening. It was so bad that my dogs too often did not get their evening walk as because the one who was home was waiting for the one who wouldn’t be home until 10 but hadn’t bothered to inform the other. And instead of learning from my lack of information, he decided that it was now completely OK to forgo telling me anything. That notion, I might tell you, took a lot of work to undo.

With fundraising, communication is even more important. Fundraising is much like a dance, and if both partners don’t know the steps, you are liable to stomp on each other’s toes. Practically speaking, that means that your organization needs to have a plan of action and that action must be communicated to everyone. Everyone.

Communication can be even more basic. Recently, I was conducting a workshop to help board members make the case for giving. The first step, I told them, is to define the situation, the problem or the need.

”Everybody knows the situation,” the ED snapped. “We don’t need to belabor that to everyone.”

Beyond setting my teeth on edge, that attitude is exactly the one that (a) too many nonprofits have and (b) is guaranteed to keep donors away from you. YOU may know what you do, how you do it, and what all those acronyms nonprofit and educational organizations are so fond of, but I guarantee that most of your prospects, many of your donors and even a large percentage of your board, don’t. If they do, it’s not necessarily on the top of their thoughts and they will (silently) thank you for being communicative with them.

Besides, you won’t necessarily be saying “Homelessness means that someone doesn’t have a home.” Rather, you will talk about why homelessness in your community matters to your community and by extension to your prospect.

Communication in the dictionary of Janet is defined as the fine art of including people into your world so they will want to be involved. Or, as businessdictionary.com so eloquently puts it:

Two way process of reaching mutual understanding, in which participants no only exchange information but also create and share meaning.

Think about it. Give and take. Sharing. Creation. Aren’t these all things that good nonprofits practice? And aren’t they all the things that move your good mission forward?

So, talk to me and to each other. Make sure that the right hand does know what the left is doing and vice versa. But also, perhaps especially, listen. Hear what the other is saying. You will be astonished at how much more you can do—how much better you will do it—if you communicate.

Janet Levine is a consultant who works with nonprofits and educational organizations. She can be reached at janet@janetlevineconsulting.com. Her online grantwriting class is available at www.janetlevineconsulting.com/classes.html.

Perfection

For years I’ve tried to no avail to learn another language. It isn’t so much that I can’t master the grammar or learn the vocabulary (though none of that comes easily to me) but rather because I wouldn’t use what I knew. I wouldn’t speak the language because I couldn’t speak it well.

That was dumb. And I knew—know—it was (is) dumb. And yet I could not make myself speak it because everyone would know I wasn’t perfect.

Perfection. Sigh. When I was a little girl I thought perfectionists were people who did things perfectly and I wanted desperately to do be perfect at something. I haven’t completely outgrown that desperation—or the desire to do things without error. But I have learned that perfection is a pain—and it can also be a barrier to doing anything at all. Hence my mono-linguism, and perhaps, your organization’s inability to actually fundraise.

Over the years, I’ve heard boards and staff tell me that they can’t possibly fundraise yet because:

• We don’t have an elevator speech.
• Our database is messed up.
• We don’t actually have a database.
• No one knows who we are.
• Our website is embarrassing.
• We don’t have any brochures.
• Name your favorite non-fundraising excuse.

In short, things aren’t perfect so we can’t possibly move forward and ask anyone to help us move our mission forward. And speaking of mission, have you noticed that no one ever says, “We can’t ask anyone for money because we aren’t doing good work”?

It seems to me, that if your mission is good and you aredoing good work, you are perfectly situated to raise funds. Yes, you do need to let people know about you—but you really don’t need fancy brochures. Databases are built over time and by themselves, don’t actually fundraise for you. And an “elevator speech” is nothing more than a statement of your passion about your organization.

Good fundraising does rely on a strong database and great communications. But—to coin a cliché—every journey starts with a single step. Begin by identifying five people who you have reason to believe would support your organization. Find out if anyone on your board knows any of those five—and what size gift they think is reasonable as a first gift.

If you can convince your (fellow) board members to set up meetings with these five, you will probably get three to five meetings. If you can’t, count on one. And each time someone is willing to join with you in supporting your organization, add that person to your database. More importantly, ask that person who else you could call on and, by the way, would they be willing to introduce you? Next, add another 5 potential prospects to your list.

Slowly, surely, you will develop that elevator speech. The more you tell others about your organization, the more you will understand what catches their attention and fans their flames of passion.

Your database will get filled with premier prospects and more and more people will know who you are. If you actually start fundraising, you will start to raise funds. And I ask you, what could be more perfect?


Janet Levine is a consultant who works with nonprofits and educational organizations. She can be reached at janet@janetlevineconsulting.com. Her online grantwriting class is available at www.janetlevineconsulting.com/classes.html.