Is the pandemic challenging your program?
Are you struggling to grow revenue year-over-year? Do you need to lower your cost-per-dollar-raised?
Is your major gift program producing only 60-percent or less of your revenue?
… Or are you just starting to build a major gifts program?
Are you preparing for a major campaign?
Do you need to justify more (and better-paid) staff?
If you say yes to any of these, here’s how to make your fundraising more productive.
All organizations—for-profit and not-for-profit alike—experience challenges associated with business processes. All can benefit from performance improvement initiatives. But fundraising organizations face a special barrier:
Development has traditionally been approached more as an art without much appetite for management science.
Lean Six Sigma is an Opportunity
The opportunity is to use Lean Six Sigma principles to drive systemic performance improvement in two ways.
The first is organizational redesign for a high-ROI operating structure that reduces overhead and rebalances the organization to focus more resources at the front line on major gift prospects. The second is a highly donor-focused approach to major gift fundraising through a well-defined, stage-gated process that leads to ever-deepening donor relationships as the system cycles repeatedly.
This approach is based on three sources of performance improvement knowledge:
- Ongoing research to identify those factors that drive high performance
- Proven Lean Six Sigma and quality principles from the commercial world
- Observations made over the past 12 years in developing and refining the Fundraising Performance Imperatives system with pioneering fundraising operations.
A good place to start is a relatively modest investment to redeploy existing resources to create or enhance a major gifts program. A well-documented improvement in production can provide compelling support for a subsequent larger “capital investment” in fundraising.
A 30- to 40-percent improvement in production within two years is not an unreasonable expectation. A half-million-dollar investment in more frontline staff working within a proven approach to high-performance fundraising offers a bigger, more compelling potential payoff: on average, $3 million more a year in revenue. An even bigger payoff will come from an investment in full-scale organizational restructuring.
Make the Transition to High Performance
Top performers in the U.S. and Canada regularly raise five to six times the amount of median production raised by all others. Harmonizing the “science” of Lean Six Sigma with the “art” of front-line development, creates a sustainable path to higher levels of fundraising performance.
A willingness to let go of things that take time away from donor-facing work is essential. The goal is to eliminate the non-value-added components in the development process by ensuring team members are focused only on those functions most essential to the team’s success and those each are most uniquely qualified to perform.
Lean Six Sigma thinking can drive how a team works together to create huge gains in efficiency, cycle time, and production. It even improves the donor experience by boosting the quality and effectiveness of donor interactions.
Learn more about how you can raise more money by applying Lean Six Sigma principles to your fundraising operations.
Give us 30 minutes (along with some data) and we’ll give you a proposal you will want to seriously consider.
Email us at jrechtien@mpicompanies.com or fill out the form below and we will be in touch.