6 fundraising beliefs that might be dragging you down

Here are six commonly believed fundraising untruths, from Clarification: Totally FAKE Nonprofit News: 6 Fundraising Untruths.

Free yourself from these beliefs, and things will go much better for your fundraising:

1. Hiring a fundraiser will do the trick. One super-smart, deeply experienced fundraising professional can have a big impact on your fundraising. But they can’t do it alone. Fundraising is a team sport. If you don’t have the right people doing the right things — and/or the right outsourcing — that one lonely fundraiser will struggle. And probably leave you in less than two years.
2. Our fundraiser will find all our donors for us. Wouldn’t it be cool if this worked? You bring in someone with a magic rolodex with the names of all the rich people in town. They go to work and rope a bunch of them in. First off, it would be unethical for someone to import donors they cultivated for another organization — and they’ll likely do it to you eventually. Finding donors the right way means finding them among people who are already giving to you. It’s a shortcut that really doesn’t work.
3. A fundraiser should raise their salary within a year. With a lot of luck, this could happen. Realistically, it takes a year or more for fundraiser to cultivate a group of donors. Doing it right is an investment, not a lottery win.
4. When times are tough you should cut back on fundraising expenses. When you cut back on fundraising, you cut back on revenue. The bite comes quickly, and hurts a lot. But even worse, the bite lasts for years to come. You lose donors, not just donations.
5. It’s fine to focus our fundraising on events and/or grants. Events are some of the least effective ways to raise funds. They take a lot of work — work that is often not accounted for because it’s all done by people on staff — and they bring in a lot of one-time donations. Grants can be an effective way to get revenue, but they are not a sustainable source of revenue. You need a balanced portfolio of donor revenue, with a solid foundation of individual givers.
6. It’s more important to prioritize acquisition than retention. It’s better to keep a donor than to replace someone with a new donor. By far.