No Going Back
Abby Falik had spent a decade jumping on planes to meet donors on their time and turf ― at a ranch in Aspen, an airport lounge in San Francisco, a hair salon in New York City. She’d hop on red-eyes at a moment’s notice to have breakfast on another coast or in another country, believing that showing up in person was a requisite part of asking for a gift.
Suddenly, when the pandemic hit nearly a year ago, showing up was no longer an option.
In a new essay, Falik, the leader of Global Citizen Year, reflects on how she and her team have worked amid the constraints of Covid-19. Global Citizen Year has been successful in its fundraising, thanks to seeing these constraints as opportunities. She makes the case that many adaptations fundraisers have made over the past year should stick around.
In conversations on Zoom, Falik allowed herself to let down her guard with donors in a new way. “The old currency — performative confidence — was devalued,” she writes. “Authenticity, directness, and, surprisingly, vulnerability took its place.” 'How are you?’ was no longer a rhetorical question.
With pets and kids interrupting meetings and so much uncertainty about the future, Falik let herself go off script.
Under the old “rules” of fundraising, there was an agreed-upon playbook. You didn’t ask someone to give you money during the first conversation, for example. But during the pandemic, those rules went out the window, she writes. She and her team became comfortable making bigger and bolder asks for donors to support their vision. And donors trusted them.
“I was able to say, ‘I don’t know what happens next, but with enough financial runway, I know my team will find a way to expand our impact,’” she writes. “From this pitch, which would have seemed absurdly vague just months before, money flowed. People weren’t funding a plan or a promise; they were investing in potential and possibility.”
While Falik, like so many of us, eagerly awaits a time when she can travel safely once again, the pandemic has raised the bar both on what warrants a trip and on donor-fundraiser relationships, she says.
“Post-Covid, showing up to raise money will no longer mean always showing up in person,” she writes. “Rather, it means showing up as a person — confident, yes, but humble, whole, and human, too.”
In another essay, Lisa Hartsock, foundation relations executive at Valleywise Health, and Kate Fassett, vice president for development at Valleywise Health Foundation, make a similar case for continuing to use the technology fundraisers were forced to adopt over the past year.
In many cases, the changes that were forced upon development staff actually helped them improve their efforts. The Phoenix-based foundation, which raises funds and community awareness for the area’s only public teaching health-care system that serves uninsured and underinsured people, raised more money in 2020 than in any other year in its history.
After converting many of its in-person events to virtual gatherings, the foundation saw a 24 percent increase in new donors over the same period in 2019. The foundation couldn’t have managed the surge in donors without new tech tools to facilitate those relationships, the authors write. For example, they partnered with an online fundraising platform that allowed donors to set up their own web page to raise money from family and friends. That strategy allowed the organization to reach previously untapped audiences.
Scrapping in-person events and galas while leaning more heavily on virtual engagement also lowered the foundation’s cost-per-dollar raised, enabling the group to put more funds where they were needed most.
And in addition, previously tried-and-true performance measures were revisited and slightly modified to reflect the way fundraisers communicate with supporters in socially distanced times. “In the past, it would never have occurred to us to use text messages, cellphone videos, or Zoom meetings when cultivating a major gift, relying instead on in-home and dinner meetings as best practices,” the authors write. But donors appreciated those time-efficient modes of communication.
“As we look ahead to some degree of normalcy in the coming year, fundraisers should think twice before stepping back into the old ways,” Hartsock and Fassett write. “Instead, we should embrace and improve upon what we’ve learned during the pandemic.”
Read the rest of these essays from Falik and from Hartsock and Fassett.
