Lessons From a Difficult Year
Flexible work hours, calls for boardroom equity, and examples of fundraising success during the past year’s crises highlighted this week’s annual conference of the Association of Fundraising Professionals, which showcased just how much 2020 transformed the nonprofit world.
My colleague Emily Haynes reports that the conference — coming on the heels of “Giving USA’s” finding that giving increased nearly 4 percent last year — is something of a victory lap for fundraisers, who relied on trial and error to stay connected with their donors and inspire new ones to give during a period when face-to-face conversations were limited.
Josh Selo, executive director of the California social-service nonprofit West Valley Community Services, recalled trying to balance the shifting public-health guidance with accelerating community need. “This is not our expertise,” he said.
Yet Selo and other professionals are emerging from the pandemic knowing how to lead a charity through crisis and effectively communicate new needs to supporters. Demand for the nonprofit’s services increased 140 percent during the pandemic, but the group also expanded its donor rolls 260 percent and completed a capital campaign.
“We just pushed through,” said Kohinoor Chakravarty, the nonprofit’s development director. “We did not stop.”
Another topic that was widely discussed was how to demonstrate a commitment to equity. Speakers said they wanted to see a more inclusive and equitable nonprofit world in the future. They also discussed how the spotlight on racial equity has shifted grant makers’ expectations for nonprofits. More and more foundations expect grant applicants to share a strategy to include diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility in their mission, says Lauren Steiner, president of the grant-seeking consultancy Grants Plus.
Nonprofits can show their commitment to these principles by reconsidering the language they use in their grant applications, Steiner said. She realized amid the racial-justice protests last summer that “language was something that we control, and language is very powerful.”
Authenticity was another hot topic at the conference. Fundraisers now know that having conversations with gift officers over Zoom didn’t dissuade donors from giving.
Speakers encouraged the audience to continue having authentic interactions with supporters even after the pandemic abates. Donors grew accustomed to Zoom interlopers like kids and pets over the last year and a half; that didn’t discourage giving. Speakers said it proved that fundraisers could bring their own challenges and values to conversations with donors — rather than hiding their humanity under a veneer of strict professionalism.
During a session on how nonprofits and foundations can retain millennials on their staffs, speakers highlighted how the stressors of the pandemic and racial reckoning pushed employers to demonstrate empathy to their employees in the form of flexible work hours and policies.
“That level of empathy is not something that I had always seen in the past, and I want that to be continued moving forward,” said Allison Quintanilla Plattsmier, executive director of the Jordon Thomas Foundation. “We are people first and employees second.”
Read Emily’s full story to get the scoop on this year’s conference.
