Is your donor focus just empty talk?

You can read a lot on the blogs, including this one, about how to write “donor-focused” fundraising. You can learn how to do it, and you’ll raise more money.

But writing donor-focused fundraising doesn’t mean your organization is donor focused.

That’s the important point from The Agitator, at Donor Relations … A One Way Street?

… when you assign a junior assistant intern to answering the donor service lines at lunch or have your donors listening to a recording that endlessly assures them — “Your call is important to us” — you need to be rethinking your priorities. Without putting donor relations at the top of your list, all that good copy and creative is simply going down the drain.

If you’re a donor-focused fundraiser working at an organization where donors are considered a pain, or an afterthought, or not considered at all — you may indeed be wasting your efforts. You should consider moving along and leaving the organization to its self-destructive ways.

Unless you believe you can spread pro-donor thinking and transform your organization. (You can get some help from my book, The Money-Raising Nonprofit Brand, which is as much about building a pro-donor organization as it is about pro-donor messaging.)