By Kathy L. McKinley, MBA, CFRE
Developing and growing a donor base pre-pandemic was a nearly mature industry with defined best-practices. Professional fundraisers reviewed and tweaked mission statements to be relevant and well-coordinated with the level of the ask. Donors and constituents relied on a social and traditional mix of media, annual reports and corporate communication to determine applicable funding. A key success feature included corporate transparency as a valued benchmark in the fund development community.
March 2020 brought the population of North America—and the world—radical change. Feted annual fundraisers, galas and mixers were cancelled, communities pulled together to recognize and support a new essential worker: sanitary, janitorial and transportation personnel. While traditional frontline workers—health care, security, government and military—continued to work above capacity for months on end, so did the newly identified essential worker. Meat cutters, bus drivers, grocery employees, fast food workers, gas station attendants, dietary aides, preschool staff and nonprofit providers pressed on with regional closures and quarantine mandates. Personal protective equipment, medicine, food, supplies, utilities and entertainment took priority in the sporadically quarantined population. Items like toilet paper, bleach and hand sanitizer were the sizzlers of the market.
The pandemic changed day to day living worldwide. Caring for an older relative and delving into a ZOOM call while trying to mute and teach new math to a fourth grader became normal in the pandemic. An ala carte customer service became the ubiquitous side hustle that took delivery service from pizza to curbside-to-go all the way to Instacart, Door Dash and Uber Eats gig economies. Everyone was employing one of these custom niche services or was connected to a purveyor of these on-demand deliveries.
Far less resourced, frontline employees did not have the means or luxury to support lengthy quarantines and plumb the depth of the unknown. Segments of the population began to fall behind on rent and mortgages and succumb to COVID-19 at alarming rates because they were working at a chaotic pace, managing the same supply chain challenges in food, health care, childcare and shelter gaps with less liquid funds. The strain on existing limited supports was depleted by the overwhelming need for assistance.
Communities capable of supporting several charities were spread too thin and began to buckle along with the over-worked, under-funded and potentially ill people, who exhausted coffers with constant demands. This uncharted territory levied frontier stakes on everything from bleach futures to cryptocurrency and government intervention spending rivaling the New Deal.
The array of variables made private fundraising more a treasure hunt and less the science of the most recent past. Funding cycles can be amended only if the balance sheet holds, with an eye to the end of pandemic funding, development professionals ardently worked to rebuild donor bases. Companies delved into strategic planning to identify organizational goals and develop feasible paths to the desired outcome. The entire process enhanced with involvement of cross-functional team members and community participants—each working with stakeholders to determine an ideal—create a graduated balance score card and a reporting mechanism. Project successes measured with Gantt-style illustrations charted the processes while correlating the timeline needed to manage a positive outcome. Regular interval report-outs encouraged camaraderie and community engagement. While traditional water-cooler chat went on freeze-mode, employees were encouraged to take the time for change to engage in new learning.
Companies that nailed it, modeled their ideal culture fostering a bridge between needed protocol and old-school management. Leaders learned to be approachable, proactively rewarding innovation and recognizing how the toll of continuous societal pressure over the course of the pandemic deeply affected the customer, donor, employee and the funder.
Just as it seemed devoid of rhyme or reason to the system, a pattern emerged bolder than estimated. Two years of a global pandemic physically separated the populous and killed an estimated 5.5 million people creating an evolutionary shift in how we live and work. What we value got a hard reboot. In many ways, markets were checked, resulting in an abundant opportunity to strengthen relationships.
The more things change, the more they stay the same; genuine compassion and the ability to adequately aggregate data are essential to any pre-pandemic or post-pandemic toolbox.
If you had a donor list, it is now a good starting point to groom a viable data tool. Reconnect with donors and ask them how they have been affected and how their priorities have shifted. More than ever, a call to support a basic need is something the public can rally around. If you are new to development or are working without a prior history of donor information, this is a golden era of information. Previously reliable documents, like census and tax records, are no longer accurate or crisp enough for planning purposes, while consumer data, household information, entertainment, education, food, goods and services information are mined, collected and available with real-time results.
We are living in a precipice of change. Access to information and the ability to utilize it, is a cultural shift for many organizations and people. Accordingly, the break-even point for quality rapid information is the effectiveness of the team to pivot and streamline cultural change. For the purpose of steering a funding campaign or building a reasonable budget, review all the available data, determine synergetic elements of donor and organization.
As a development professional, tap into the elemental core of your entity with the pertinent commonality of stakeholders and the community in which you live, and work will begin to reveal transformational donors. Keep the culture of change flexible, outcomes reality-based and regularly revisit the plan with executive staff and constituents to address needed changes and praise positive results. This is the time to involve the village in the promotion and success rate of your organizational mission and take the next step to continue to build quality resources.
Kathy L. McKinley, MBA, CFRE has worked in professional fundraising and development for over twenty-five years. She achieved the Certified Fund Raising Executive gold standard credential in spring 2019. McKinley has worked in both for-profit and non-profit organizations. She lives and works in Charleston, West Virginia. For more information, please feel free to contact her through LinkedIn or directly at: Kathy.lee.mckinley@gmail.com.
