Foundations

There are some core, basic principles in fundraising.  (As an industry, we tend to not talk about them enough because we silly humans like shiny things.)

But these core principles are part of every successful, national organization I know of.  They should be the roadmap for the fundraising programs that small and medium-sized nonprofits are building.

Principles like:

• Communicate with your donors regularly.
• Focus more on improving the metrics that matter most, like “net revenue” and “retention rate,” and focus less on metrics like “likes” and “awareness.”
• Infuse your individual donor communications with emotion.
• You have to Ask, you have to Thank, and you have to Report.
• Create as many fundraising assets as you can, and fewer fundraising art projects.
• Use language your donors understand immediately. 
• Major Donor Management systems work better than ad-hoc approaches.
• Build a donor pipeline.  Have steps and benchmarks for everyone from “email list subscribers” to legacy givers.

The surest path to success is to build your fundraising program on and toward these principles.

Then, defend them and enshrine them. Make sure they don’t leave when your current staff do. 

You could say these principles are boring, in the same way you could say that a foundation for a building is boring.  But you cannot build a reliable, ever-expanding organization without a good foundation.