4 ways to beat destructive silos in fundraising

Organizational silos destroy fundraising success.

That’s not at all the intent, but overwhelmingly when you put people doing different types of fundraising into different “departments,” that what happens.

When the Major Donor “department” doesn’t cooperate with the general donor people, you damage the outcomes of both groups. When you have a digital “department” that’s separate from your snail-mail group, one — or more likely both — of them will come up short. If you have a communications/brand/awareness “department” that isn’t tracking fundraising, they will not only waste all their budget, but they’ll likely undermine direct fundraising.

These things require different skills, and in many cases, need to be handled by different people.

That’s okay.

What’s not okay is when they don’t communicate, or worse, compete for limited for zero-sum resources.

Here’s help from the Veritus Group Blog, at Breaking Down the Silos: Why Your Development Team’s Lack of Communication is Hurting Your Donors:

While we’re busy protecting our turf and working in our comfortable silos, we’re failing the very people we claim to serve – our donors. Every time we fail to share critical donor information across teams, every time we neglect to coordinate our strategies, we’re essentially telling donors that our organizational structure matters more than helping them move through the donor pipeline.

Here are four things you can do to overcome silos:

1. Establish weekly cross-functional meetings. Share trends, donor movements, and changes. Information is power!
2. Create unified donor records. All your donors should be tracked in the same database. Each group should have access to what the others are doing, and how those efforts are working. Without that knowledge, you’re working blindfolded.
3. Celebrate collaborative wins. Even though it may be members of one team who brought home the prize, it couldn’t have happened without the work of other teams. Celebrate those successes and give them all credit.
4. Remember why we’re here. It’s easy to fight for limited resources, to play politics. But then we betray our donors — and our cause. Be one team!