If you’re a fundraiser whose appeals have to wind their way through four (or six, or eight) reviewers before they go out the door, you’re allowed to push back. In fact, you should. Here’s the case to make.
You were hired to do two things (well you were probably hired to do lots of things but there are two main things you were hired to do in regard to this): understand donors & what motivates them, and understand how direct response fundraising actually works. That’s your job, and is one of the main ways you add value to your organization.
But a long approval chain takes those exact skills out of your hands. Every reviewer who can change your copy is, in effect, overriding your expertise. By the time a piece survives six approvers, it doesn’t sound like a fundraiser wrote it. It sounds like a committee wrote it. Because a committee did.
Let me acknowledge something up front: the heavy approval process doesn’t exist because anyone is being unreasonable. Boards want to protect the brand. Leaders want to make sure nothing embarrassing goes out under their signature. Program staff want their work represented accurately. Marketing wants the language consistent. All of those instincts come from a good place.
Let me give you an analogy: the best performing appeals are like a screwdriver; they do one thing and they do it perfectly. A large approval process tends to turn the screwdriver into a Swiss Army Knife that does a lot more things – but none of them well.
I’ve watched this scenario at hundreds of organizations. And I’ve noticed that the orgs that grow their individual donor revenue the fastest have a few things in common, and one of them is this – they keep their approval teams small, and one person, not a group, makes the final decision.
When committees decide, fundraising gets compromised in predictable ways. The bold ask gets softened. The emotional language gets neutralized. The specific gets generalized. The urgent gets diluted. Nobody in the room is trying to make the piece less effective, but the cumulative effect of “let’s also add…” and “could we soften…” and “I’d feel better if we mentioned…” is fundraising that doesn’t work.
It’s also slower. Every reviewer adds days. Every round of revisions adds more. Every piece that takes a month to clear is a piece you didn’t send while you waited. The hidden cost isn’t just the quality of the pieces – it’s the volume. The orgs that send more, raise more. Approval bottlenecks suppress volume.
Here’s a small structural change worth proposing to your leadership:
- A small group reviews each piece – three or four people, max.
- Reviewers can suggest changes, but not make them.
- One person – ideally someone who knows direct response – makes the final call on what gets changed.
- After a piece goes out, anyone in the org can comment on it. Those comments go to the person in charge of fundraising, who decides whether to take them into account for next time.
That’s it. Same care. Same brand protection. But the fundraiser gets to do their job, the pieces stay sharp, and the volume goes up.
If this is something you want to bring up, here are three things to say, in this order:
“You hired me to understand donors and to understand how fundraising through the mail and email works. The current approval process makes it hard for me to do what you hired me for. I’d like to propose a small change that keeps everyone involved but lets me move faster and keep the pieces effective.”
“It’s a well-known truth that fundraising written by a committee performs worse than fundraising an experienced person. That’s not a criticism of anyone on the team – it’s just how committee decision-making works. The pieces get smoothed out, and smoothed-out fundraising raises less money.”
“What I’m proposing isn’t ‘no review.’ It’s right-sized review. Reviewers can suggest. One person decides. After the piece goes out, everyone can give feedback for the next one.”
And one note for any leader reading this: the trade-off is real. You can have careful fundraising, or you can have effective fundraising. The organizations I see grow the fastest have learned to choose the second – by trusting the person they hired to do the job they were hired for.
Importantly, when the person doing the job feels trusted, they will tend to stay in the job longer.
You hired a fundraiser. Let them be one.
Steven Screen is Co-Founder of The Better Fundraising Company and lead author of its blog. With over 30 years' fundraising experience, he gets energized by helping organizations understand how they can raise more money. He’s a second-generation fundraiser, a past winner of the Direct Mail Package of the Year, and data-driven.
- Steven Screen
- Steven Screen
- Steven Screen
- Steven Screen
Something that often happens at organizations: There’s one person on the review committee we have permission to ignore. Usually because he doesn’t know what he’s talking about; his comments are recognized as not likely to be useful.
That’s so incredibly disrespectful to that person! By inclusion on the committee, you’re telling him his thoughts matter. But that’s a lie. His thoughts don’t matter. His colleagues just don’t want to say that out loud.
If “that guy” is like pretty much everyone working in nonprofits, he has too much to do, and not enough time to do it. Yet you’re asking him to put time and care into a task that has no meaning. If his comments are truly useless, you need to do one of these things:
1. Respect him by removing him from the committee and free up his time to do things that matter.
2. Clarify what you want from him as part of the committee. (Often, this person is a technical expert who his fact checking that the message is accurate. But he doesn’t understand that and mixes his fact checking with his marketing opinions. Respect him by making it clear what his value is.
3. If he really is useless in a bigger way, let him go. You are wasting his valuable life by employing him to do useless things. There is probably a better workplace for him elsewhere.