Obstacles or Opportunities?

When you sit down to make your fundraising plan, are you looking at the obstacles in front of you? The money you’ll need to spend, the limits of the medium, the staff and consultants you’ll need to corral into doing the work, the difficulty of coordinating it all?

 

Or are you looking at the task at hand and getting it done?

This post over at Wild Apricot has a video of Hildy Gottlieb, nonprofit consultant and author of The Pollyanna Principles: Reinventing "Nonprofit Organizations" to Create the Future of Our World,  talking about obstacles and challenges we bring into the room when we’re looking at the tasks before us. She urges people to take away those “negative stopping words” and look at barriers as “empty conditions” we must meet.

Your fundraising program is a complicated set of tasks full of conditions that must be met. Are you relying primarily on direct mail, personal solicitation, or online giving? Are you coordinating those efforts, or is each team working independently? How are your resources allocated – staffing and financial?  

All of these questions and your organization's specific conditions can be overwhelming to the point of paralysis, but it’s far more valuable to consider how you’re going to meet the requirements in front of you than to worry about all the reasons you can’t.

This week, I’m going to talk about three of the most common “barriers” clients throw at me when talking about their direct mail: cost, time and effort.

What are your barriers? What conditions are you working with? And how can you meet those conditions and be successful?