The COVID-19 pandemic exposed a host of fallacies about how to fundraise effectively. Here are three of them, and suggestions on what nonprofits should be doing instead.
Four years ago, our government’s response to the Coronavirus pandemic shut down businesses and schools, closed the doors of churches, and overturned life as we knew it. The disruption of the pandemic era opened our eyes to many things, not the least of which was that the truisms we used to believe were never actually true. For fundraisers in particular, the pandemic exposed that many comfortable little lies we had been telling ourselves about our work were far from true.
During the pandemic year, our fundraising work continued, but it was changed. Gone were the events and in-person meetings, replaced by video meetings, online giving days, and fundraising events hosted on Zoom and Google Meet. These changes laid waste to a number of common lies that nonprofits often tell themselves . . . lies that have persisted for years (if not decades) in the fundraising industry.
The Coronavirus shutdown shone a light on these fallacies… and ultimately made fundraising stronger, because these lies held many nonprofits and fundraisers back from reaching their full fundraising potential. Here are three of the many false fundraising ideas that the COVID pandemic helped debunk:
#1: We Can’t Fundraise Outside of Our Area Because We Don’t Have a Travel Budget
I can’t tell you how many nonprofits I have worked with believed that there was no way they could raise money nationally—or even regionally—because they didn’t have the travel budget to go out and meet with donors. These organizations knew that personal contact was the hallmark of a great major donor program, and believed that without face-to-face meetings, there was no way to personally cultivate donors.
Sure, these nonprofits realized they could do direct mail or online prospecting to try to reach lower-dollar donors in far-off places (if they were willing to make the investment), but they figured there was no way to upgrade these donors without traveling to meet with them in person.
The Coronavirus quarantines showed that donor cultivation through Zoom and other online meeting software (supplemented by old-fashioned phone calls) is not only possible but very feasible for nonprofit fundraising.
Don’t get me wrong—in-person meetings are a very important part of a strong donor cultivation program, and should be included, if you have the budget. But never again can a nonprofit claim that they can’t do donor cultivation nationwide (or worldwide) because they don’t have the budget to fly fundraisers out for in-person meetings.
#2: We Can’t Raise Money without Events
Nearly every nonprofit uses events to raise money. At many organizations, fundraising events seem to multiply: the nonprofit starts with one event, and as fundraising needs grow, adds more events year after year. Eventually, the organization runs five or six events per year, most of them taking up too much time and raising too little money.
As a fundraising consultant, I often recommend to clients that they cut back on the number of events they run. I tell them to focus on other, higher-ROI fundraising methods, perhaps leaving one or two major events on the calendar each year. Inevitably, the staff at these organizations tell me that they simply can’t raise money without events. They are convinced that there is no way for them to replace the money they raise from their events, even if the events suck up far too much staff time.
The Coronavirus shutdowns showed that this simply isn’t the case. Throughout the shutdowns, nonprofits were forced to move their events online, replace them with crowdfunding or other online fundraising campaigns, or cancel them outright and focus on other types of fundraising. Tens of thousands of organizations successfully replaced the money they were raising through events with other revenue streams—because they were forced to.
Nonprofits can cut back on events and replace them with other revenue streams, while simultaneously growing their income. Now that the Coronavirus pandemic is over, organizations should be wary of constantly adding new events to their fundraising calendars, because the COVID year showed that new events aren’t necessary to raise the money nonprofits need to thrive.
#3: We Just Don’t Have the Time
Over the past twenty years, I have presented hundreds of webinars, online classes, and in-person seminars for nonprofit fundraisers. Invariably, during the Q&A section, a fundraiser or executive director will commend me for all my great ideas but say that they lack the time to implement them. “We would definitely do that,” they say, “but we just don’t have the time!” (for example, when I tell fundraisers to call donors after each gift comes in).
During the Coronavirus shutdown, fundraisers, executive directors, and board members had more time on their hands than ever before. There was no commuting to the office, donor visits were canceled, events were rescheduled, and programs were paused. Yes, there was lots of work to do, but the vast majority of fundraisers I talked with had more open time to fill than ever before. (On its own, working from home probably saved the average fundraiser 5 hours per week in travel time.)
In other words, during the pandemic year, the average fundraising team had the time to implement one or more of those strategies that they had always said they wanted to implement but didn’t have the time. But did they? For most nonprofits, the answer was no. Even though they had more time than before, they didn’t start calling donors after gifts, they didn’t change their e-newsletter from monthly to weekly, and they didn’t do any of the other things they always thought they were too busy to implement.
Now it’s clear: the reason they didn’t implement those strategies wasn’t because they didn’t have the time, it was because they didn’t prioritize them. My advice to nonprofits is to make a list of all the things they say they always want to do at their organization, prioritize them, and start implementing them—today. Don’t let the “no time” excuse get in your way, because in 2020, when everyone did have more time, they didn’t get these things done anyway. Time isn’t the issue, prioritization is. If something is important for your fundraising program, make it a priority, and get it done!
