Are you suffering from these fundraising delusions?

Our profession is oddly prone to delusions — mistaken beliefs that don’t stand up to either experience or close scrutiny. Here are just a few of the common delusions that send fundraisers down wrong paths from Social Velocity, at 5 Fundraising Delusions Nonprofits Suffer:

1. Events Are Fundraisers. With some meanigful exceptions, events are not revenue producers if you counted all the real cost of them.
   
2. Crowdfunding Creates Revenue. If you’re lucky, crowdfunding can get dollars in the door. But it doesn’t create ongoing relationship — which are the name of the game in fundraising.
   
3. Major Donors Can Be Recruited En Masse. It never works.
   
4. Skimping on Fundraising Staff and Systems Saves Money. Under-staffing or hiring people with no experience are among the most expensive mistakes nonprofits can make.
   
5. Endowments Solve Money Woes. They’re nice, but a strong fundraising program is better.
   

Here’s one more:

• There’s some kind of technology or medium out there that’s going to solve all our problems and make fundraising easy.
  

Nope. I guarantee you that any new technology or approach that actually works will make our jobs harder, not easier.