Ever hear about the pastor who wanted to move a piano from one side of the sanctuary to another? His proposal was met with indignation and near fury from a congregation that hated change. During the whole piano kerfuffle, a congregant happened to move away. When she returned for a visit years later, she was astonished to find the piano against the opposite wall. How had the pastor convinced his flock? No convincing was necessary, the pastor explained. Rather than arguing, he had solved the problem by moving the piano one inch every week until it was in its new position.
It might be good to follow my last post with one on the value of consistency and focus in fundraising. It’s not lost on me that based on the relative infrequency of my posts, I might not be the best candidate to be lecturing on either subject, but maintaining consistency and focus in your fundraising and communication efforts will endear your supporters to you, build name recognition and a broader constituency over time, reduce staff turnover and help you quantify the relative success of your efforts and help you measure the impact when you change up your routine in small increments.
Unfortunately, maintaining consistency and focus is where many nonprofits fail.
It’s unfortunate because donors love consistency and for the most part hate change. Consistent messaging fosters familiarity and a donor’s ability to articulate why she supports your organization. When you consistently remember a donor’s gift anniversary, she’ll feel important. She’ll reserve a specific date in her calendar for your consistently stellar event and bring her friends each year.
Inconsistent donor outreach, changes in plan or focus or marketing strategy are tantamount to an outright snubbing. Nothing feels worse than being inadvertently left of an invitation list (even if it’s because the event has been discontinued), being asked for a gift without any mention of how previous support has helped (or even acknowledging such support), or left out of the loop when major shifts occur in organizational programming or mission focus.
With respect to consistency and focus, nonprofit professionals can be our own, worst enemy. We love trying new things. We’re right brained, emotive, visionary. We want to make our mark on programs, events and messaging. What adds to our inability to focus is the fact that we’re approached every day by like minded individuals who have the “next best thing” in mind.
Discipline, consistent planning, budgeting and reporting cycles are our friends. Constancy in leadership, work environment, and mission focus can make up for variables that often don’t remain constant such as changes in the economic or giving climate, changes in the community need to be served, and regular changes in board leadership, not to mention our own propensity to be attracted to whatever’s shiny today.
If you find yourself, as a nonprofit professional, constantly distracted by new possibilities and ideas, and therefore never getting anything done, consider evaluating key activities and strategies where the return on your investment of time and other resources is more or less constant. Plan your year around making sure you can maintain these activities and branch out from there. You’ll find yourself better prepared to evaluate new initiatives based upon their own merits if everything else has been maintained at a more or less constant level. This is the basic idea behind testing.
The concept of testing a new idea is often foreign to nonprofit staff, but common in other industries, and invaluable to thinking strategically. Keeping as many variables as constant as possible, while focusing on small changes, allows us to test new approaches in a somewhat controlled environment. Scrapping big initiatives, events or efforts altogether after they fail to gain momentum over a short period of time is like throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
For example: If an annual letter that has performed reasonably well over past years suddenly brings in fewer than anticipated donations this year, consider designating a portion of your list to receive the letter at a different time of the year, or with different copy or a different format. Send the remainder of the mailing list the same letter as a control group and compare results.
An event may perform consistently every year in terms of dollars raised, but volunteers are wearing out, or there’s a need to raise even more. Rather than scrapping a moderately strong event altogether in favor for something new, consider adjustments in the format, location or theme to see how your audience reacts. Change the volunteer structure to diffuse the number of tasks any one person is responsible for. Appoint co-chairs. Change up one or two elements each year, and keep all others constant (maintaining consistently good administrative practices, like registration and bookkeeping is always a must, however). Concentrate on changes you can make to keep your established audience while expanding to new ones. When it’s over, ask for feedback from your volunteers and some attendees before making additional changes.
Always take the time to compare results of your experiments with controlled data and make decisions based upon what’s best for the organization, its mission and resources. Don’t be afraid to take time to make strategic changes. For some projects, tweaking to find the right approach takes one or two cycles – or enough time to move a piano from one side of the room to another an inch at a time.