If you weren’t a finance major (I wasn’t), learning the ins and outs of endowments can be intimidating. But fear not! Endowments are easy to understand once you know some basic terminology. Becoming proficient with these terms is essential if you want to grow a career in fundraising. Being able to converse intelligently about endowment issues is a must for nearly all development professionals. Luckily, I worked with three phenomenal CPAs at my last job and I owe those ladies a lot, because through their patience I learned this essential information well enough to utilize it in my fundraising and to teach it to you here! I find that it’s helpful to explain things in terms of a household budget so I’ll give the standard explanations and then I’ll give my liberal arts definition. What is an endowment anyway? First off, the main idea of an endowment is like a savings account where you never ever touch the original amount you put into the fund. Imagine you won the lottery and took the lump sum option and after buying a house and some cars and taking a big vacation, you put the remaining money into a savings account. You decide not to touch it and live off some of the investment earnings. That’s all an endowment is! The original amount that you put into the account goes by several names in the nonprofit world: corpus, principal, or the permanently restricted part of the endowment. I tend to use corpus most often. Surely it’s not that simple? You’re right! It’s not. As we all know earnings in the investment world are neither guaranteed nor constant. Thus, if you want to maintain your originally invested amount in perpetuity (that’s accountant-speak for forever), you’ll need to be careful with how much you spend year to year. Let’s say that the market averages 8%. You would not want to spend all 8% of your earnings that year, because next year you could earn only 3% or *gasp* have a negative return. This is why most nonprofits put a cap on the amount of the earnings that can be spent, often only 4 or 5%. That’s called the spending allocation. (This could be for scholarships or program support, anything that the donor and the organization wishes to fund. What the spending allocation gets used for is governed by a written agreement between the organization and the donor. I call it a fund agreement but other groups use different names for the same document.) Anyhow, the spending allocation is the portion of the annual investment earnings authorized to be spent on the mission of the endowed fund. (One endowment can have many endowed fund under its umbrella. Think different scholarships or faculty support funds in a higher education context.) In the metaphor of you winning the lottery and putting a large lump sum in an investment account to live off of, you might earn 8% but you’ll only spend 5%. So if your lump sum was $10,000,000, you’ll need to find a way to live off of $500,000 annually rather than $800,000. What happens to the earnings not spent? There are generally 3 things that can happen to earnings not spent.
Each organization will have an investment policy for its endowment and a target investment earnings that they hope to reach. You can see why: if you need 5% for the spending allocation, 2% for the administrative fee(s), and some to hold in reserved earnings for a rainy day (or a bear market year), suddenly your endowment needs to clear 8-10% every year for everything to remain viable and run smoothly. Now here’s a mind bender for you: if a fund earns some returns but not all the way to your target and the total market value is over the corpus amount, you can’t give it a full spending allocation. That’s called underfunded. (Not to be confused with underwater, but seriously how could you not confuse them. This took me YEARS to figure out completely.) Here’s the analogy: Your $10 million is still intact and you’ve banked another $100,000 in reserved earnings, you earn only earn 3%. Remember your usual allocation is $500,000. So, you made $300,000 and you have $100,000 extra without touching your original investment, but that’s only $400,000. Guess you better stock up on ramen until next year! And furthermore, it’s likely that as a good manager you wouldn’t want to wipe out your entire reserved earnings lest the situation of lower than expected earnings continue for another year. So, you might only allocate $200,000 be spent this year, leaving $200,000 in reserved earnings. That’s an underfunded endowment. Whew! Now my brain hurts. Let’s talk about something else. I hear about divestment. What’s that? Many organizations with long standing endowments managed their investment only for strong returns and with little regard to the greater social good. This means some prominent endowments are invested in things such as fossil fuel companies or private prisons or other things that are actually at odds with the organization's mission in some cases. For instance, if you were an animal lover, and you hear from your financial planner that a significant portion of your $10 million nest egg was invested in cosmetic companies that cruelly test on animals but you’ve been making phenomenal returns. What would you do? If you told them to move to other companies that are cruelty free but to do it in a way that hopefully preserved returns, that’s divesting from companies profiting from animal cruelty. Conscious Investment Some organizations are so committed to their mission and values that they do not want their endowments to be utilized in ways that are contrary to their values as an organization. These groups can decide to invest in what are sometimes called ESG or environmental, social and good governance funds, ensuring that organizational monies are not used to exploit people’s labor, trample their rights, damage the environment, or other things that are negative. In some cases, ESG funds can be invested in companies that are not doing things the right way as part of a strategy of putting pressure on the companies as investors. This has been done successfully to influence labor disputes and to support the growth of clean technology divisions at fossil fuels companies, for example. Constituents including donors, program recipients, the general public, students (in the education field) can lobby and put pressure on governing boards of non profits to divest from certain areas which they feel are in conflict with the values of the organization. Leadership can also chose to divest as part of a vision for the future of the organization. How can I use this information as a fundraiser? I’m going to cover that in an upcoming post “Fundraising and Endowments”. Stay tuned by subscribing. You’ll receive my FUNdraising Friday emails where I bring you curated information and super cool freebies exclusively for my subscribers. Do you find endowment-talk intimidating? Did this post help to demystify it somewhat? What questions do you have for me to answer in my upcoming "Fundraising and Endowments" post? Comment below and let me know! Comments and questions are, as always, welcomed and encouraged! Cheers, Jessica Cloud PS – If you liked this post, you might also like these:
PPS - If you found this article helpful, please comment and let me know. Also subscribe to Real Deal Fundraising so you don't miss a post! You’ll start to receive my FUNdraising Friday emails where I bring you curated information and super cool freebies exclusively for my subscribers! And don't forget to visit my store for transformative training and consulting products!
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Imposter Syndrome.
Have you ever felt it: that deep rumbling of self-doubt? Have you felt that fear of failure, of being “found out” and of everyone knowing that you aren’t really as amazing as your LinkedIn page might lead them to believe? I’ve felt this way at different points over the years and I’ve known many others who admit to these feelings. Research once thought it was a phenomenon exclusive to women. Now, it seems many demographics share this particular kind of anxiety. The gravest consequence of imposter syndrome isn’t the personal anxiety, it’s the paralysis that the anxiety engenders. The “logic” in your head goes something like this: “If I try and fail, everyone will know I’m a fraud, so let’s do nothing.” How do we as fundraisers and professionals move past imposter syndrome and start giving ourselves the credit we deserve? How do we begin to own our expertise and use it in positive action? I’ve been working on this blog post for years, though I didn’t know it. I was doing research for this blog post when I had many breakdowns in college from running myself into the ground in the name of achievement, afraid to “let everybody down”. I was figuring out strategies for this blog post when I was passed over for a promotion when I was 27 and I thought I had “failed my family” which at the time was just myself and my husband. And I was testing solutions for imposter syndrome, as I clawed my way back to normalcy after battling postpartum depression. I felt that old familiar feeling, in the guise of being exposed as a “bad mother”. For me, achievement and confidence have often come at the price of near-paralyzing self-doubt, anxiety and fear of failure. My job now is to try and keep the awesome and give up the unnecessary shitty feelings that have come with it in the past. I conquered this fear when I applied for a job with the title Vice President for Advancement despite not having any six figure major gift experience yet. And then I got that job. I conquer this fear whenever I take time to do some yoga and tend to my state of mind first, before tending to deadlines. And I conquer this fear every time I post on this blog, since I am positioning myself as an expert in this field. The older I get the less I care about what other people think. And amazingly I am also slowly losing that frantic worried feeling that comes with being an overachiever. I know I can and will get things done and carrying around the baggage of stressing about it is pointless. I have more confidence that I always come through for myself and my family when it matters. These are very good developments. So, what strategies have I found useful as I battled imposter syndrome? The variety of specific tactics fall nicely into 3 broader categories: mindset, environment and action. The majority of my suggestions focus on mindset but it is also important to manage your environment and media. And most importantly, to truly defeat imposter syndrome you must take action. Let’s dive in. MINDSET
ENVIRONMENT
TAKE ACTION
This is a journey of self-validation. Change your mindset. Manage your environment. Then, take meaningful action. Do not give in to intellectual or professional paralysis. You have something important to give the world. Fight through the feelings and do what only you can uniquely do. It’s worth it. YOU are worth it. Have you tried any of these suggestions? Are there other strategies to counter imposter syndrome that I missed? Comments and questions are, as always, welcomed and encouraged! Cheers, Jessica Cloud PS – If you liked this post, you might also like these:
PPS - If you found this article helpful, please comment and let me know. Also subscribe to Real Deal Fundraising so you don't miss a post! You'll get my guide to Call Center Games for Free! And don't forget to visit my store for transformative training and consulting products! Over this last year since I started Real Deal Fundraising, readers have sent me questions. I’m a believer that if one person asks a question, there are many others out there that are wondering the same thing but haven’t asked it out loud yet. So, in that spirit, I scoured my email and social media messages for some of the best questions I’ve been asked and compiled my response for all of you.
If you have a question you would like me to answer on my next installment, comment on this blog post or contact me here. Question: What is your opinion on making a second ask in a thank you letter to donors? In a letter, I'm not a fan. In a dedicated thank you call, I'm not a huge fan. In a thank you email, you can include a link and/or a PS with a passive pitch. However, you can do some dedicated 2nd ask calls that are distinct from Thank You calls. You thank them for their past support and then pitch something different from their previous gifts. For instance, if you ask for general fund gifts in the fall, do a 2nd ask campaign for the colleges or academic departments. Get very clear about the purpose of each communication piece you do. Stewardship should be 90-100% stewardship. Asks should be 80% asking but always with gratitude for past giving rolled in. Question: What do you think about adding all students to our donor database upon enrollment instead of waiting to add them when they graduate? If you have the capacity to keep that data up, it's not a bad idea. You'll have to load new students, remove those who don't stay from semester to semester and regularly update demographic info. That requires a strong advancement services staff along with a tight schedule and partnership with student data staff. That said, if you can do it there are lots of advantages. You can:
Question: Do you send receipts to all donors? Yes, all donors should get a receipt. In the case of online gifts, I use an auto-generated receipt sent via email after the gift is processed electronically. Those that make a monthly gift receive an acknowledgement the first time the recurring gift/pledge is set up and then a statement each January that covers the total amount of their giving for the previous calendar/tax year. Question: I’m talking to our deans about fundraising for the first time ever. Do you have any advice for what topics I should cover? When talking with the deans, you need to convey two things:
You should make sure to emphasize the importance of viewing this as a partnership. So for instance, you can tell them how you can help them raise more money (phonathon, direct mail, taking them on major donor visits, etc.) but also tell them practical ways they can support you in that work (doing an alumni newsletter, encouraging grads to update demographic information, regularly sending you good news about their programs and students, responding to emails, getting their student scholarship recipients to write thank you notes, etc.) I would use this opportunity to tell them you will be happy to train them to do things like write thank you notes and talk to major donors but they must also trust you when you tell them that something isn't a good idea and they need to know the limitations of your staff. If you have the ability to be a bit frank with them, gently convey the sense that trust is important and that this is a give and take partnership. If you can do this, you will be further along that most shops in terms of relationship with academic leadership. Question: How can I improve our percentage of phonathon gifts given via credit card? Improving credit cards is a simple (but not easy) thing to do. You must prime the mindset of the callers so that they genuine expect the prospect to give via a credit or debit card. You must emphasize that credit cards are THE default payment option for everything in our world today, right down to a sweet tea for $1 from McDonald's. After addressing mindset, callers must do TWO credit card asks, according to this formula: assumptive ask then what I call the “reasons plus reconsider” ask. The assumptive ask goes like this: "Which credit or debit card would you like to use?" If they give the credit card on this ask, of course, no need to keep asking. If they balk on the first ask, you simply tell them why you are asking for a credit card and ask them to reconsider. Here’s an example: "The reasons we ask donors to make their gift via credit card is that it puts your gift to work right after for the institution. It's very safe and only takes a few seconds. Would you reconsider using your credit or debit card tonight?" This rebuttal ask can be customized to the most common reasons why donors might hesitate to give on their credit card. Callers must follow this formula without fail. It's hard to get volunteer callers to do that and hold them accountable. But, you'll make significant strides by following the formula above. You'll notice it's very natural and not pushy. Just a question and then an explanation. I’ll do a more in-depth blog post on this topic soon, particularly covering the ways that you can modify the “reasons plus reconsider ask” to make it specific to the prospect’s objection. That's all for today! What questions do you have for me? Post a comment with your question(s). If you are interested in working with me directly as a trainer or consultant, contact me here and let’s chat. Comments and questions are, as always, welcomed and encouraged! Cheers, Jessica Cloud, CFRE PS - If you liked this post, you might also like these:
PPS - If you found this article helpful, please comment and let me know. Also subscribe to Real Deal Fundraising so you don't miss a post! You'll get my guide to Call Center Games for Free! Greetings! You might be asking yourself, where in the world has Jessica been?! Real Deal Fundraising hasn’t had anything new since early May! Well, I’ve been doing two important things: 1. I’ve been raising a LOT of money. Our year ended with three big fundraising events in New Orleans. Those events were breakaway successes for our organization. For the entire fiscal year, we tripled overall fundraising, bringing 301% more dollars than FY16. We’ve implemented a new fundraising model this year and I plan to share the details about it with you on this blog soon. (Here's me and my hubby at our Gala celebrating the success of this year.) 2. I’ve been recharging my own batteries. I revamped, redecorated, and organized my office. I went to a three day yoga retreat. I spent quality time with my husband and kids. I re-dedicated myself to my health. I worked on some work planning and worked on my thesis a bit. (I’m graduating with my M.A. in English Literature in December.) But those things were NOT my focus. (Below you'll see me after completing my very first 1 hour long run and then me and my favorite girl at yoga in the park.) And here’s the amazing thing: things have been happening and coming to me.
I got an inspired idea for our fall direct mail and email campaign. My thesis revisions went much more smoothly than I expected. And I have ton of ideas for this blog and for the community I want to build around it in the future. To that end, I have a few announcements:
Here are some of the things that I can help you with as a consultant:
I can look at one aspect of your program (phonathon, major gifts, etc.) or at your entire shop. I could do the analysis via distance (looking at reports and interviewing your staff via phone or video chat) or I could come to you in person. I do have a full-time position though and need to schedule early and work everything together seamlessly. I’m excited about this new opportunity to continue teaching and helping institutions reach their fundraising potential. Contact me here and let’s chat. Cheers, Jessica Cloud, CFRE PS - If you liked this post, you might also like these:
PPS - If you found this article helpful, please comment and let me know. Also subscribe to Real Deal Fundraising so you don't miss a post! You'll get my guide to Call Center Games for Free! This sign hung in my various offices for over a decade. I guess you could consider this a motivational poster of sorts, but I think it was actually a very early meme. These two sentences have become my fundraising mantra. Something I repeat to keep myself focused and to cope when things get rough.
Because I’m both a nerd and a yogi, I looked up “mantra” in the Oxford English Dictionary. The term “mantra” comes from Sanskrit and the root words mean basically: "thought support" or device to support thought and action. This is exactly what this simple sign has been for me throughout my career. Even the repetitive rhythm of it helps in its function as thought support. The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing. Raising money is the main thing. Let me tell you the story of this mantra: To give credit where it is due, the original sign was created for me by Mark Nelson, who was the Treasurer for the Libertarian National Committee (the Libertarian Party) in 2004-2005. So, he was a board officer for the organization I was working for at the time. I was the only full-time fundraiser for the national organization and I was only 23 years old. Their theory was to hire smart young people who would be “cheaper” salary-wise for the DC area. The exchange was that I would get a ton of valuable training and experience and they would get energetic labor. However, I was overwhelmed and I think Mark sensed it. I was managing a conversion from an antiquated custom donor database to Raiser’s Edge. I was producing a monthly newsletter for our recurring donors. I was helping to plan the national convention and scouting locations for the next convention. I was recruiting and training paid callers to renew memberships via phone and managing our intern program. With the help of a consultant, I was managing monthly direct mail campaigns and planning fundraising events. Then, because the LP was a political organization, staff frequently got pulled into controversies and political discussions. I’m tired and anxious just typing about everything I was called to do. As treasurer of course, Mark had a keen interest in keeping me motivated. On a trip to our DC office, he walked in and taped the sign to the wall above my computer monitor and explained what it meant. The “main thing” meme helped me to prioritize my work and keep my head on straight. It also reminded me that the officers of the organization supported me in my main role. My job as a fundraiser is revenue generation. Everything else must fade in comparison. When I left the LP, I took this simple sheet of copy paper with me and posted it in my new office at the University of South Carolina. This concept continued to keep me focused as I was hiring 110 student callers per semester to raise $1.47 million via phone annually. When I took a job as behind-the-scenes project manager with RuffaloCODY (now Ruffalo Noel Levitz), I would see the sign and feel sad. I knew then that I missed frontline fundraising. I missed chasing down a dollar goal. It helped me navigate my career back to raising money. At some point in changing offices, the original paper got ragged and I disposed of it. But, when I was at Southern Miss and we tripled our annual fund income in one year, I recreated the poster for some of our gift processors who were overwhelmed and wanted a reminder of how their work connected to the big picture. It became a bit of an office-wide mantra. Now that I’m back at a small shop, I think of this mantra often. I try hard to “stay in my lane” and keep the focus on fundraising. There is much to do, the need is great, and it is easy to feel like you are never doing quite enough. But, the main thing . . . is to keep . . . the main thing . . . the main thing. And, raising money . . . is the main thing. At any organization, you will be asked to do many mundane things (I collectively call them TPS reports). These include: expense reports, submission forms, demographic changes in database, meetings, etc. Do these things, but strive to automate those tasks as much as you can so that they don’t distract you from the main thing: raising money. At some organizations, especially those that are not organizationally mature, fundraisers will get pulled into political discussions and controversies. Continue to come back to mission and how the main thing (fundraising) supports that mission. When people around you go low, you go high. Keeping focused on raising money is the high road. The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing. Raising money is the main thing. What’s your fundraising mantra? How do you keep yourself focused? Comments and questions are, as always, welcomed and encouraged! Cheers, Jessica Cloud PS – If you liked this post, you might also like these:
PPS - If you found this article helpful, please comment and let me know. Also subscribe to Real Deal Fundraising so you don't miss a post! You'll get my guide to Call Center Games for Free! What if I told you that there was a source of annual fund dollars out there that could cost you 18 cents to raise a dollar and raise those funds very quickly in a short period of time?
And what if I told you that you probably were not currently utilizing this particular source of revenue for your institution? You would be interested, right? Let me tell you what the secret source of revenue is . . . Facebook ads. Yep, Facebook ads. Believe it or not, I recently did a test in which I ran Facebook ads for year-end fundraising and the cost to raise a dollar was as low as 18 cents. In all honesty, this test grew out of the fact that I work for a very small shop and I’m the only fundraiser. I needed to come up with a calendar year-end giving campaign for our social media. Last year I spent a lot of time crafting unique messages to be used for each day in December. This year I was just running out of time and had no real creativity left in me. So instead, I decided to craft three very targeted year-end promotional messages and boost them significantly with Facebook ads. I had a little bit of extra money in my budget that I re-purposed in order to do this. Not a ton. I'm talking less than $1,200 to experiment with. So I divided my ad dollars up between three boosted ads. The first two were to promote general giving. One was targeted to those outside of our normal constituency on Facebook (people who don’t currently like our page). The second I boosted specifically to people within our community (who currently like our page). The third leg of this campaign was a specific boost to encourage our constituents to become “sustainers” (recurring monthly donors). All three of these campaigns were successful. First, our campaign outside of our normal constituency reached over 44,000 people who may or may not have ever heard of the school before but had our affinity with the religious community that we serve. We also garnered 14 new page likes. In the general year-end giving part of the campaign, over 500 people clicked on our giving website. We got 24 gifts out of this campaign, totaling almost $5,000. The results came out to only $0.18 to raise a dollar! This was revelatory to think that we could not only do public relations and communications work, developing our constituencies on social media, but at the same time raise some serious money The monthly sustainer campaign was also quite successful. We did not spend very much on that campaign, only about $100 but we got 4 new sustainer donors. These new donors represent $65 monthly (or $780 more per year). That doesn’t even fully represent the lifetime value of those monthly donors. If you just take the first year of value from those monthly donors then it was 34 cents to raise a dollar for this micro-campaign. I would argue it is well worth it when you consider that most of these donors will roll on from year to year as ongoing monthly donors I was surprised that something like Facebook ads could actually work for fundraising. I think my bias against it is because we want these digital mediums to be a free way to reach people. We know they have power to reach people but don’t want to pay for it. And yet, we know that mail and phone are worth the investment. Why are we not willing to invest real money in the digital mediums yet? Facebook (at least) is here to stay. It’s a reliable way of reaching people and we should start thinking about Facebook (and other forms of social media) with the same mindset we use when we think about phone to mail. Namely, that you have to spend money to make money. We need to start being smart about spending part of our fundraising budget on social media. Run some tests. Look at them with an eye to return on investment. Track the same kind of statistics that we track for phone and mail fundraising, including cost to raise a dollar. If you haven't been utilizing Facebook ads in order to grow your constituency on Facebook and raise real money, I would encourage you to undertake a test. Maybe run your fiscal year-end campaign or use it around a day of giving or some other point of urgency. You can gain new donors, new Facebook fans, and real money. You can do all those things to the tune of 20 cents to raise a dollar. I would argue it is worth the investment. Can you lobby for a little extra money in your budget ($500 or $1,000 or $2,000) to experiment with this medium? If it works, put it into your plan for next fiscal year. Do you already do Facebook ads? If not, is this something you could try? Let me know how it goes. As always, comments and questions are welcome and encouraged! Cheers, Jessica PS - If you liked this post, you might also like these:
PPS - If you found this article helpful, please comment and let me know. Also subscribe to Real Deal Fundraising so you don't miss a post! You'll get my guide to Call Center Games for Free! Building and maintaining a culture of philanthropy is hard work. It is deep work that takes years to build and moments to destroy. But having a healthy culture of philanthropy makes work more fun and makes fundraising easier. It’s worth having a periodic check-up to assess how your institution is doing.
Answer these questions for your institution: Board Support
Staff Support
Alumni support (or Grateful Patient support)
Fun Factor
Communications
Stewardship and Donor Relations
Other questions to think about:
How did you feel about the assessment? Where are you doing well? Where should you improve? As always, comments and questions are welcome and encouraged! Cheers, Jessica PS - If you liked this post, you might also like these:
PPS - If you found this article helpful, please comment and let me know. Also subscribe to Real Deal Fundraising so you don't miss a post! You'll get my guide to Call Center Games for Free! Most fundraisers travel at least some of the time. Many of us are “road warriors” who travel at least 25%-75% of the time. After almost two years of 50% travel, I have found some iPhone apps to be nearly indispensable to me for smooth and safe travel. Here's 10 of my favorites in no particular order. All of these are free to download.
Google Maps I’m not really sure how I would have done this job before Google maps! I would have a stack of old MapQuest print-outs as tall as Moby Dick without it. I’m a bit of a control freak and I hate being late, so this app is great for me because I can plan what traffic is likely to be at the specific time of day I plan to be somewhere. I also like that I can select car, public transport or eve walking. Furthermore, I use this at home when planning a trip to select restaurants convenient to the donor’s home or work, find centrally located hotels, and assess how far constituents live from a metro center I’m visiting to determine whether I could make it that far to see them. Bottom line, it is a crucial tool for my work as a fundraiser. Clio Clio is a landmark and history app. It senses where you are and tells you which historic landmarks and museums are near you. It’s fun when you have some extra time to fill between meetings or when you are traveling with kids. I’ve learned a great deal about cities around the country that I wouldn’t have learned without Clio. Yelp Feeling like Mexican? How about Lebanese? Just type it into Yelp and it will tell you where the closest restaurant of that type is to you, whether it is open now and how much it is likely to cost. The ratings and reviews are good too if you can’t decide. Lyft Lyft is my new favorite app. I’m from the South and wouldn’t know how to hail a cab if my life depended on it. So, when I needed a cab, I would walk to the nearest taxi stand. Now, wherever I am, Lyft gets me to my next destination. I’m so excited that they are expanding into the South now too. Lyft usually arrives within 5 minute or less, shows me my driver’s picture and tells me the make, model, and license plate number of the vehicle. It texts me with a “bing!” to let me know when my driver arrives. I don’t have to pull out a credit card, as it is saved in the app. When the ride is over, I pull up the app to add a tip and the receipt arrives in my email inbox. And if you are traveling with a group or with children or strollers/luggage, Lyft will let you select a larger vehicle so you are sure to have space for everyone and everything. Hilton The Hilton app keeps all my reservations in one place. I can check in the day before I arrive, letting them know when I’ll be there. I usually can select my room in the app. It’s nice to have the addresses and phone numbers of the hotels at my fingertips. Airline Specific Apps United and Virgin have great airline apps. You can check in and even pay for your baggage via the app. Both of these have the ability to use a digital boarding pass on your phone. Delta and American also have apps but they aren’t quite at the level of the others I mentioned. Facetime Quick and easy and more reliable than Skype on the road. Essential for keeping in touch with my kids and my husband when I’m not home. Hoopla Digital I love audiobooks. Hoopla Digital is a service you sign up for using your local library card. With my library, I can “check-out’ 8 titles per month via the app. They have e-books and videos too, but I like to use mine for audiobooks because you get more hours of content per check-out. Being able to download a specific title is a nice feature because then you can continue to listen even in airplane mode. I listen to fiction, non-fiction, business and personal development titles. Camera Your iPhone camera is good for so much more than just pretty pictures. I like to take photos of my parking space numbers at the airport or my hotel room number, so I don’t forget. You can snap photos of posters for events that you want to remember later. I also use my camera to take pictures of flowers and other little things that my daughter would love and I send them to her (via my husband or my mom) to let her know that I’m thinking about her. Notes For the school that I work for, showing up at donor meetings with a notebook or executive pad would be wildly too formal. But often, a donor will get energize and begin throwing out names of people I should meet or follow up with. The Notes app takes the place of paper. I also use it to jot down any ideas I might have when pulling out my journal at that moment would be a pain. I’ll get a ton of ideas as I’m listening to audiobooks (via Hoopla) and I use notes to record those on the go. Are there other apps that I didn't list? What are your favorites? As always, comments and questions are welcome and encouraged! Cheers, Jessica PS - If you liked this post, you might also like these:
PPS - If you found this article helpful, please comment and let me know. Also subscribe to Real Deal Fundraising so you don't miss a post! You'll get my guide to Call Center Games for Free!
Did you get at least 2 good ideas to pursue from this list? Which one was most helpful? Do you have any tips for my readers struggling to make their direct mail copy fresh? Comments and questions are, as always, welcomed and encouraged! Best of luck in your copywriting! Cheers, Jessica Cloud PS – I TOLD YOU EVERYONE READS THE PS! If you liked this post, you might also like these:
PPS - If you found this article helpful, please comment and let me know. Also subscribe to Real Deal Fundraising so you don't miss a post! You'll get my guide to Call Center Games for Free! Tis the Season for Strategic Planning! Now is the time of year that many higher education fundraisers are doing two things:
I totally understand you are busy. Trust me. Between travel, work, and personal responsibilities, I’m stretched too. But, I think you should consider one more project: a benchmarking study. It's the missing piece of your strategic planning process. A benchmarking study is a survey of peer organizations that will give you insightful information about what your program should be doing. I assure you that this process doesn’t take long. The data you obtain will be so useful to you, I guarantee you that you will not regret investing the time. A benchmarking study can help you:
How do I get started? I have no time for this… This doesn’t have to take a long time. If you employ an intern or student worker, have them help you with the process. The first phase of identifying your peer institutions is the hardest part. Just hang with me and you'll find you can fit this in and that the long term benefits (to your institution and your own career) are worth it. Here’s the 5 phase process for doing a benchmarking study:
Phase 1: Research List your “peer institutions”. You know at least some of them. They might be your in-state rivals or other nearby institutions of similar size, age and student population. Your peer institutions are the ones that your boss always asks about in meetings: “What is XYZ College doing in this area?” Note: There is a big difference between a peer institution and an aspirant institution. An aspirant institutions is one that your institution wants to be like but isn’t. They are a significant level-up from you. They may have 50-100 years more institutional history, a much larger endowment, a larger student body or other significant indicators that make them just a bit beyond your organization. Sometimes leadership or volunteers believe a rival institution is a peer institution when it is actually a aspirant institution. When I was at Southern Miss, we were frequently compared with Mississippi State and Ole Miss, but Southern Miss is actually much more like Eastern Carolina University or the University of Memphis than either of those in-state rivals. It’s a bit dangerous to confuse an aspirant institution with a peer institution. You would be comparing apples to papayas. However, you can include them in your study because they are a great source of inspiration and ideas. Just mark them clearly in your data as aspirant and understand that they will likely have bigger budgets and bigger results. If you only can come up with a few institutions, do some internet searches to find similar organizations. You might google, “liberal arts colleges more than 100 years old” or “southern universities with endowments of less than $100 Million”. I recommend you have a list of 10-12 peer institutions and perhaps 3-5 aspirant institutions because not all the institutions will respond. Once you have a short list of potential peer and aspirant institutions, you (or your intern) should do a bit of research. You need to identity the equivalent program director at those places. For example, if your study is for annual giving, you will want to find the Director of Annual Giving at each place on your list. Record this staffer’s name, title, phone and email address in a spreadsheet. Phase 2: Create survey I recommend you ask a mixture of questions in these categories:
You can follow this process to design your survey for any area of development but here is what I’ve used before for annual giving. Annual Fund Questionnaire
Phase 3: Solicit participation Take your own survey for your institution putting in your data and make sure each question is clear and makes sense. When you do this, time yourself, so you have an accurate range of how long this will take. Construct an email to the staffers you recorded contact info for in Phase 1. Let them know that you would love for them to participate and the survey will only take XX minutes. (I would recommend that it take no longer than 15 minutes.) Then, and this is important, tell them that you will share the results of the survey with them to benefit their program as a thank you for their participation. Provide a deadline and let them know that you’ll remind them closer to the deadline. Keep your window not longer than 2 weeks out, otherwise there is no urgency to participate. Remind them 4-5 days later if they haven’t participated and again closer to the deadline. You can even through in a phone call 3 days before the deadline, especially if there is a school that you need feedback from for political reasons. Phase 4: Analysis Review your survey results, noting where your institution does well and where you fall short. What are the great ideas that stick out? What resources do other organizations have that you don’t? How might you get access to those resources? Compose your results into an executive summary sheet of 1-3 pages that can be included with your strategic plan or sent to relevant stakeholders as a stand-alone report. This report will be for your institution. You'll also need to consolidate and package up the raw survey results to send to your peer participants in Phase 5. Phase 5: Follow-Up Be professional and prompt with your follow up. Send a copy of every survey or the consolidated results to all survey participants. Do this within 2 weeks from the survey deadline. Thank them profusely and perhaps include an invitation to establish an on-going professional support relationship. Maybe you start a Facebook or LinkedIn group where you can compare data throughout the year on an ad-hoc basis. These relationships are of great value to your institution and to your own career. Conclusion This process shouldn’t be intimidating and when you are done with it, you will have some important tools in your strategic planning process. I did this exact process at The University of Southern Mississippi to prove my point that the annual fund had historically under-performed. The benchmarking study certainly showed the under-performance but it also showed similar institutions were raising so much more money, which meant there was no reason Southern Miss couldn’t do it too with strategy, consistency and investment. I’m happy to say that’s exactly what happened. I’m pleased to report the program has now exceeded the five year goals I set for it back in 2011-2012 when I did the benchmarking study. If you do this project, you’ll have some persuasive data to lobby for changes to your program. Plus, you’ll be seen as a self-starter not only in your office or institution but in the broader development community as well. It’s worth it. Have you undertaken a benchmarking study? Why or why not? What conclusions came out of your study? As always, comments and questions are welcome and encouraged! Cheers, Jessica PS - If you liked this post, you might also like these: PPS - If you found this article helpful, please comment and let me know. Also subscribe to Real Deal Fundraising so you don't miss a post! You'll get my guide to Call Center Games for Free! |
Jessica Cloud, CFREI've been called the Tasmanian Devil of fundraising and I'm here to talk shop with you. Archives
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