Now is the Time to "Think Different"
You’ve all heard the adage “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result”. It does seem like our world today borders on the insane, or, if not, certainly the insanely challenging.
For nonprofits, and for funders, it’s time to stop doing the same thing over and over again. In fact, since this pandemic has made just about everything seem different, it seems only logical that for many things, including fundraising, we should think differently.
I read somewhere that a foundation was refusing to accept any communication other than “snail mail” — even now. They evidently stated that they would never (now included) accept any communication via email.
Crazy! That foundation is stuck somewhere in the last century, and should spend down their money and be done with it.
Requiring that grantees use snail mail (exclusively) is like saying that cars can come in any color as long as they’re black. In this day and age, it’s akin to saying that you’ll never allow staff to work from home, or that successful business meetings can only happen in-person. We’re past that. We’ve all learned by now — some of us in the last six weeks, that these “norms” of old (i.e. from two months ago or more) — are no longer valid. Guess what? They haven’t been valid for much longer than the last six weeks.
The problem was, with everything happening so fast and with so much pressure to do more, and to do it better, faster and often with less resources, we didn’t quite realize that the world had substantively changed along the way.
For fundraisers, the tried-and-true “official” calendar for fundraising will likely not be the same this year. Fundraising events (offline) may not be the same for a long time. Will people still want to support an organization that they can’t see and touch?
Yes — of course.
Did people need to see and touch those organizations to raise money in the last several years? Maybe not, but somehow nobody noticed, and the few that did notice were reticent to change the status quo.
So that’s where we are now. In the same way that you’re learning to work from home, funders are proactively becoming much more flexible and forthcoming. We’re all learning that things have changed, and we need to “get with the program” and change as well.
Let’s look at all of the ways we do fundraising and funding, and find a better way that makes sense given the world around us. Doing anything less would be the definition of insanity, no?
Can't get enough? Read more on Twitter and follow me on Pinterest. And please feel free to share.
- Lisa