Seeing Around Corners
One of my favorite authors, Leif “LW” Persson has a series of books that center around a police force looking into the assassination of Prime Minister Olaf Palme. One of the characters, Lars Martin Johansson, can “see around corners.” This means you not only see what is right in front of your face, but can anticipate what is coming at you.
As a fundraiser, it can mean seeing how the broader economy affects your donors—and by definition your organization’s bottom line. It’s anticipating how technological advances could affect the way you work and not getting freaked out when AI, which has been talked about for years, suddenly becomes a much bigger thing.
More than that, however, it is seeing how A impacts B and what you do in a given moment has been shaped by what came before and, in turn, shapes what happens next.
I was struck by this recently when I was developing a fundraising plan for a client. It wasn’t THE fundraising plan for the organization, but rather, the steps to ensure that a particular activity took place and was done well. I quickly put down the larger steps, like segmenting the data. And then thought that how I would segment the data depended on a variety of things:
What was the biggest purpose of this activity (perhaps to get new donors, steward regular one, bring back those who lapsed but maybe something else)?
What was the theme?
Were there groups I wanted to exclude for a specific purpose?
What else was being asked of these people—now, a few weeks ago, in a few weeks or months?
These and other things would definitely impact what we were planning to do.
Too often in fundraising, we jump to the newest thing-without looking around corners to see what the ultimate impact will be. So organizations flock to giving days, which tout the fact that giving on those days grows each year. And yet, few organizations have assessed how these giving days affect their other fundraising. Organizations that do, often find that yes, the giving on that day grows—but at the expense of gifts given to other appeals, and often allowing donors to make much smaller gifts. This may not be your experience, but I think you should look around those corners and make sure.