Keys to Successful Remote Fundraising & Management - Reflections on a Decade of Practice

In 2007, I was the Regional Director for the MidAmerica Region in the Office of Leadership Giving at MIT when my wife accepted a job at a prestigious law firm in Portland, Maine. At the time I faced a choice: leave MIT, or pitch a "telecommuting" arrangement that would allow me to continue my career at the Institute. Rather than leave what at the time was my dream job, I started working with the MIT Office of Work & Family Life, the MIT Ombudsman's office, and my supervisor, I crafted a proposal to pilot a remote work arrangement. MIT agreed to a 6-month "trial".  A decade at MIT and 13 years as a remote advancement professional later, here we are - all working remotely together.

I started my trial period at MIT as a single major gifts contributor and grew my responsibilities to include regional leadership and talent management, to eventually leading all capital fundraising for MIT.nano, then the largest basic research project in MIT History. At MIT I cultivated and closed over $100M in individual contributions, and when I left had the opportunity to lead 20-person major gifts teams involving 8- and 9-figure individual, foundation & corporate partnerships in support of scientific research.  In the end, my belief in the potential of remote philanthropic work inspired me to launch the first fully virtual philanthropic consultancy: Rootstock Philanthropy, LLC. 

My goal with Rootstock is to present nonprofit organizations with a virtual alternative to in-person retained outside counsel, provide high-quality just-in-time virtual advice, interim major gifts transition and staffing services, as well as campaign and project fundraising counsel without requiring clients to pay for mileage, airlines, hotels, rental cars, and restaurants for the privilege.  

And since my advisors and I will not be traveling the 80-90% of the time - leaving our families & communities behind for weeks on end - Rootstock will tap into deeper pools of philanthropic wisdom than might otherwise be possible (and be the most carbon-friendly philanthropic advisory service on the planet to boot!).

But that's not what this article is about.  

What I wanted to do here is share three critical actions any fundraiser or manager can take to improve their remote fundraising productivity and make the remote fundraising management experience more productive and meaningful. Each of these actions is easy to implement, and with discipline leads to deeper engagement with donors and volunteers, improves communication quality and frequency among remote staff, and increases the transparency of activity across the organization.  Ancillary benefits include a lower carbon footprint, increased job satisfaction, and lower staff turnover. 

Three Keys to Successful Remote Fundraising and Management

#1: Drop your bias against remote/mobile fundraising. 

I've had the privilege of working for some of the finest philanthropy professionals in the country. And yet most told me point-blank that they did not believe that mobile/remote advancement work would be productive. Several said it would be impossible.  Nothing could be further from the truth.

I've witnessed a successful $60M solicitation over YouTube (of all things!), successfully closed multi-million gifts almost entirely over ZOOM or SKYPE, lead talent management and interview programs entirely over WebEx, and executed remote/virtual stewardship activities that brought donors into more frequent, personal contact with the programs, research, and facilities they've supported. Facility with mobile technology is an essential toolkit for modern philanthropy professionals.  For creative fundraisers, bringing more unique cultivation and stewardship opportunities into play through virtual platforms can set the stage for lifelong engagements, unbound by geography, health, and wellness, familial constraints - or most importantly, time.  

#2 Assess your team's proficiency on your desired Mobile Platform 

Don't leave this to chance. There will be members of your community that will stiffen and even actively resist the use of mobile technologies like SLACK and Yammer, ZOOM, WebEx, Microsoft Teams, BlueJeans, Google Hangout...you get the idea. Some may be unwittingly undermining (or in my experience, actively subverting) your efforts to deploy modern technologies.  I've had staff pretend not to understand (or refuse to admit a lack of understanding) about a chosen technology, undermining the cohesion and communications efforts of the entire team in the process.  So first, evaluate your team and key volunteers as to their comfort with the platform. Ask questions about the user interface, concerns about bandwidth, etc. so as to identify what roadblocks are preventing the embrace of mobile technologies. And once those roadblocks are identified, initiate and encourage training (much of which can be done on-line) on the platform.  

Do not leave this last step to chance.  In my experience, simply rolling out a platform is not good enough.  Teach the basics, assess where people are, and then train some more.  Communicate the logic of universal basic proficiency. The upshot here is that you need everybody singing from the same (virtual) sheet of music.

#3: Knowing what will happen is far more important than what has happened. 

Fundraisers use CRM to capture information on what's taken place (meetings, mailings, volunteer calls, event attendance). But to be successful in mobile/remote fundraising, it's far more important to develop full transparency about  by all staff on our team messaging platform: SLACK, Yammer, or more recently, Microsoft Teams.

The reason for the Monday Post is not the start of some nefarious fundraising surveillance state, rather this simple act does four things simultaneously;

1. Informs everybody re: who is working on what, including when internal meetings are taking place; and
2. which donors are being visited that week and why; and
3. whether folks are in or out of the office
4. Avoids duplicative effort (i.e. multiple fundraisers working on the same proposal, engaging the same volunteer without knowing, etc.); and 
5. Develops strong habits and expectations around work planning and execution; and
6. Eliminates misunderstandings that arise when actions are reported after the fact, reducing perceived microaggressions, which if left unchecked can create a toxic work environment.

Along the same theme, I strongly encourage taking full advantage of your CRM's capabilities by fully utilizing the use of future actions. Committing to a future action automatically creates an execution timeline, thereby reducing mental strain. In sum, focus intently on what's on the horizon rather than what's already taken place. 

Finally, it would not be a complete article if I did not note that we are in a highly competitive advancement hiring marketplace.  Finding and keeping great people is the key to longevity and success in any modern advancement program.

Thus, the key metric for successful fundraising is finding and hiring the best people, focusing their efforts on your best possible prospects, donors or projects, and keeping them at your organization for as long as possible.  

I've worked in major gifts fundraising and management for more than 2 decades. No matter where I've been, the organizations that best identify, nurture, and retain their highest quality staff raise more money, develop organizational memory and EQ, and serve as repositories for institutional knowledge that once lost is nearly impossible to recover.  

So if you are a national (or even regional) organization with hiring practices limited to specific geography, you are closing doors to candidates whose talents, commitment, and effort might revector your entire organization.  Today's mobile technologies are redefining what constitutes successful advancement practices.  I encourage your organization to get on board the mobile train now, or risk being left behind. 

Toot. Toot.