Run the Fundraising Department, Don’t Be the Fundraising Department

Almost every national nonprofit uses a fundraising agency for specialized tasks.  For the first 15 years of my career, I worked at those fundraising agencies building mail, email, radio, and TV campaigns for many national nonprofits.  It was fun, rigorous work.

So I was genuinely surprised when I started working with smaller nonprofits and found that many of them were wary of outsourcing their fundraising.  In the world I’d come from, outsourcing was simply how it was done.

Over time I came to understand two reasons smaller organizations tend to keep it all in-house.  I’m going to share them both here because I think there’s a freeing idea hiding behind them.

The first reason is cost. We hear it from nonprofit leaders all the time: “Why would we hire you? For that money we could hire a staff person who’d write our appeals and do a dozen other things we need done around here.”

That’s a great question.  It’s the same question I ask of anyone trying to sell a specialized service to Better Fundraising.

Here’s the one drawback of this question: it treats the services as equal, but they aren’t.  For instance, the staff person a nonprofit hires will write maybe four appeals this year. Our team will write around two hundred appeals this year – and then review the results, look for patterns, and keep learning what’s working in fundraising right now.

So the real choice isn’t “staff person or agency.”  It’s which path results in more net revenue.  One path costs more upfront, but the appeals raise more, and your team gets its time back for the work that only they can do.  The other path adds no expense – but the appeals tend to raise less, and your team has less time.

The second reason is more interesting.  Many nonprofits feel their work is too special, too nuanced, too unique for an outsider to really understand.  All of which is true.

But being special isn’t a reason to keep the writing in-house.  It’s a reason to make sure the writing is done well.

The large organizations don’t think their work is one bit less special or important than yours.  They think it’s so important that it deserves a specialist – someone who does direct response fundraising all day and does it well.  The large organizations have the same starting belief – “our work is unique and matters enormously” – and reach a different conclusion.

Here’s how that belief sounds when you move it to another corner of your organization. Picture a nonprofit that does its own taxes because “we’re unique, nobody on the outside could understand how our accounting works, so there’s no point hiring a tax expert.”  You’d gently point out that their uniqueness is exactly why they’d want a professional who does taxes all day – someone who catches what an amateur would miss.

You already believe this.  You just may not have aimed it at fundraising yet.  You pay for a CRM instead of building your own database.  You use an email platform instead of coding one.  Plenty of nonprofits hire fractional fundraisers to help with strategic planning, or an expert to audit their technology stack.

That’s good leadership: putting critical functions in expert hands so your team can spend its time on what only your team can do.

Which brings me to the idea I most want to hand you:

Your job isn’t to be the fundraising department. It’s to run the fundraising department.

Running it means keeping for your own team the things only your own team can do – leadership, vision, sitting across the table from a major donor, carrying the real stories out of your programs.  And it means feeling free to hand the specialized production work – the appeals, the emails, the testing and tracking – to people who do it two hundred times a year.

You’re allowed to do this.  It isn’t giving up control, and it isn’t admitting your work is ordinary.  It’s the same move the largest, most effective organizations in the country make every single day – precisely because they take their missions so seriously.

So if you’ve been carrying the whole thing yourself, consider this your permission to set some of it down.  Run the department.  Let specialists handle the specialized work.  And spend your irreplaceable hours on the handful of things that truly can only be done by you.