Charity board members and the door-mounted-brain-zappers

Last year I did a bit of work in Singapore. I met some lovely fundraisers who work in what is probably the most conservative fundraising environment anywhere in the world, with some really silly laws that prevent the country being a serious contender for being the nonprofit capital of Asia, something to which the Singapore government aspires.

Whilst there I was especially astonished at the level of interference by volunteer boards in the day-to-day running of charity business.

In one meeting I got up to have a closer look at the doors to the boardroom. The only explanation for what was happening in the boardrooms was that there must be tiny brain-zapping devices planted about head-height into the door frame.

Whoever put them there was clever - they were invisible to the eye, but, although improbable, they must have been there. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle helped me to this conclusion. "Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever is left, no matter how improbable, it must be the truth."

You see, very powerful, rich, clever business people, would spend the day wheeling and dealing, laying off hundreds of people, hiring loads more, spending millions on marketing, buying a foreign telecommunications company before breakfast, and brokering a deal between China and Australia to buy uranium over lunch.

Then they would go to the charity board meeting, walk through the door with the zapping things and turn into absolute gibbering idiots. They would start arguing about the colour of the logo at the charity ball, who would sit next to who and then give the fundraisers grief for not performing miracles and recruiting tons of donors with no money to spend.

On top of that, they would be scared to actually ask a friend for money for their charity.

In Hong Kong I investigated to see if the same thing was happening there. The answer was yes, but thankfully with a few exceptions (more exceptions than Singapore).

I reflected on my experiences of being a fundraiser and director at my previous (UK) charity employers and my experiences in Australia, New Zealand and Canada. It would appear that these zappers are pretty universal in boardrooms around the world.

So, fellow fundraisers, what are we to do about it?

Well the first thing is to understand why charity boards exist. They are there to govern. Not to manage and certainly not to do.

You may have heard the phrase ‘... in America, it is Give, Get or Get off...' which us Australians (and Brits) used to think was the case for all charities in the USA. Well, news flash - it isn't: most charities over there have board members who refuse to ask for money too. Just get over it. It is not their job to ask - it is yours. Sure, you can try and get some of them to help but don't depend on them.

There is a great book, Tiny Essentials Of An Effective Volunteer Board by Ken Burnett. Buy it. It is cheap, and tiny - and takes about an hour to read. Get all board members to read it and it will revolutionise your charity. Whatever happens, it will revolutionise your career.

Ken thinks there are five key roles for boards:

1. Watchdogs (protect public interest, brand [mission] guardian etc)
2. Strategic oversight (help develop strategy)
3. Hire and fire CEO, including monitoring performance / targets etc
4. Support management
5. Understand and approve finances

That seems sensible enough. What goes wrong though is that many boards have a total lack of understanding about fundraising. Fundraising is like a secret that is on view for everyone to see, but non-fundraisers don't actually know what happens.

The non-fundraising people of the world think charities get money from events, companies and possibly just by magic. They don't really think about it.

They don't know that across the sector, government is the biggest contributor.

They don't know that of non-government net funds only about five to ten per cent comes from companies, and about the same comes from events.

They wouldn't be expected to know that bequests account for about a third of net funds, and that those pesky junk mail letters and cheeky backpackers are dragging in nearly half.

They have no idea how expensive it is, or that everyone doesn't do things for free.

They expect charities to get free advertising, free print and free everything else.

Your board members - no matter how clever they are - don't get this either. How can they do any of the five key roles without understanding fundraising?

Logically, a charity board should comprise people with different areas of expertise enabling them to govern wisely, asking the right questions, setting the right parameters, recruiting the right CEO.

Some charities aim for a wide spectrum of board members, but it is a mystery why they never seem to ask fundraisers to be on their board.

I wondered about this; why don't boards ask fundraisers to go onto boards? Maybe they are worried about having a fundraiser from the competition on the board? What about consultants like me then? I would never want to be a board member of a client, that has a clear conflict of interest, but surely I have something to offer?

I thought maybe it was just me - bolshy, agitating, impatient; mathematician fundraisers with my personality would probably be too much. But I chatted with a few other consultants and senior fundraisers and found I was not alone.

Probably this is self-fulfilling; as I said before, boards in general don't get fundraising, so they don't understand the skills they need.

The solution is obvious. Boards need to be taught the basics and economics of fundraising. The reality. We need a board fundraising induction kit. A couple of years ago, I offered free places for board members accompanying staff to fundraising training courses but got hardly any take ups.

A typical master class nowadays will have less than five per cent of attendees being board members of a charity.

But there is a board management and fundraising kit, and I suggest you put it together for each and every one of your board members now and for every new board member appointed. The kit comprises of:

• two books - Tiny essentials of an effective volunteer board (Ken Burnett), Tiny essentials of fundraising (Neil Sloggie)
• a few other publications (listed at the end)
• a presentation (at least annually) about fundraising, not your fundraising but the sector's
  

For your presentation, I recommend you nick bits from Givewell's annual report on giving but keep it simple. Although not written for this purpose, my white-paper ‘Ten tips to fundraising in a recession' has a load of useful charts and a good section on why return on investment is the wrong measure for fundraising.

I asked Ken Burnett for his top half dozen tips for effective boards and he sent me 21.Here is a little selection.

The board serves the organisation, not the other way around.

1. Make sure everyone fully understands the different roles of the board and the management ‘top team'. Management manages. The board governs. Define the different roles, making clear what governance means.
2. Keep the CEO involved (and management team too). Never meet without the CEO, unless in a crisis that involves replacing the CEO.
3. Reduce paperwork. Make sure your meetings serve the need of the organisation, not the trustees.
4. Get the board's balance right: introduce formal terms of service, retirement policy, gender balance, age, representation from the field, regions, retaining institutional memory etc.
5. Run good, enjoyable and informative meetings. Make sure they start and end on time.

If you are a fundraiser, you may feel that you have little influence on the board - particularly as to how it is selected and run. If you are right about that, then it means the board needs you more than it knows. Go through the proper channels (usually the CEO) but make sure they know about the help they can get, and that you are only trying to help your beneficiaries.

Good luck.

The books mentioned can be bought from White Lion Press. My white paper is available by emailing Justine.

Also, check out:
The Essential Trustee: What You Need to Know (Free - UK)
Ten Basic Responsibilities of Nonprofit Boards (USD$27- USA)
Board Membership with Purpose and Fun (Free - UK)
Facing the Financial Crisis - Ten Smart Things Your Board Can Do Now (Free - USA)
A Process For a Formal Governance Review and Evaluation (Free - UK)

I originally wrote this for Fundraising and Philanthropy Magazine and their monthly e-bulletin.

It's a good fundraising rag - even for those beyond Australia's shores.

SOFII Saturday Showcase V: The essential foundations of fundraising

As well as exhibits like last weeks, SOFII also includes pearls of wisdom from lots of different fundraisers in its 'Top Tips from Leading Fundraisers' section.

Ken Burnett, founder of SOFII tells us his 'Essential Foundations of Fundraising' which is a list of 29 'basic principles of our trade' ripped out from his book, Relationship Fundraising.

Here are a few to whet your appetite:

7. Fundraising is about needs as well as achievements. People applaud achievement, but will give to meet a need.

14. You don’t get if you don’t ask. Know whom to ask, how much to ask for, and when.

16. Successful fundraising involves storytelling. Fundraisers have great stories to tell and need to tell them with pace and passion so as to inspire action.

21. Great fundraising is getting great results. If your results are mediocre, your fundraising probably is too.

29. Always say ‘thank you’, properly and often. It’s also a good idea to be brilliant at saying ‘welcome!’.

Ken reckons you should click on his list, print it out and stick it above your monitor. Not a bad idea. Sign up to SOFII and search for 'Essential Foundations' to get the full list.

Relationship Fundraising by Ken Burnett, published © 2002 by Jossey-Bass Inc.

Sean Triner

Great fundraising ideas

Following an inspirational and useful IFC (a fundraising conference) I am now camped up in sunny London before my return to Sydney next week. Whilst here I have had some really great meetings with charity folk and some friends who have just opened up a new UK agency, Open Fundraising.

I have known these guys for quite some time, since they were with bluefrog, another London based agency who I worked with when I was 'charity-side'. bluefrog are well renowned for their innovation and great creative approaches, and thinking about them - and the current economic stuff made me think more about good ideas and where they come from.

My friend Ken Burnett emailed me today about the fact that in times like this, ideas are more important than ever.

"Many currently established methods of donor acquisition can be seen to have arisen as innovations when the need was greatest.

See ActionAid’s insert story on SOFII, and Greenpeace’s development of face-to-face. Plus an array of legacy marketing and other initiatives that arose directly out of fundraising uncertainty.

The whole idea of SOFII itself becomes even more appropriate in tough times. Why trouble to think of your own great idea if you can borrow someone else’s? Why take a risk testing the unknown when you can see how well or otherwise similar initiatives fared, when used by others?

To quote (very reluctantly) Donald Rumsfeld, fundraisers suffer from too many ‘unknown unknowns’, particularly in hard times. So I hope you’ll direct your followers to SOFII, where as many of the ‘known knowns’ as we can uncover are being gathered and displayed to help fundraisers to shed light on the best ways of doing things, however hard times get. And all for free, too."

I am going to pick on a couple of good ideas every weekend for a while, and blog them up to remind people to check it out.

Please, take time to sign up for SOFII- it is a charity, it is free and it is bloody useful with tons of ideas there - just for you.

Sean Triner

The Field of Scoring

This (Northern) summer I attended the DMAW / AFP Bridge Conference in Washington DC, following the IoF National Convention and via a week ‘off’ in France.

I say a week ‘off’ because, whilst in France, I stayed with a friend, Ken Burnett. You may have heard of Ken from his work and books on fundraising including the essential Relationship Fundraising, which I reckon first came out in about 1893. Over a century later, it is still very relevant and promotes a donor-centred approach to maximising lifetime value; i.e. be nice to your donors and they will give you more money in the long term.

Ken actually has a life beyond fundraising. At his place we spent some time walking around his field. But this time the field is a star of his new book, The Field by the River. This is his first non-fundraising published book—a sort of cross between A Year in Provence and Jed Bartlett’s love for trivia. If you haven’t seen The West Wing don’t worry about that reference. If you did see it, liked Jed and you like nature, you will love ‘The Field’.

During my visit, Ken was obsessed with his ‘score’ or rank on Amazon.co.uk. He was checking it pretty much every hour—as I’m sure you and I would be if we had just had a book published—and it was the main topic of all conversations.

Actually, not all, I exaggerate—just breakfast, morning tea, lunch, dinner, after dinner and a quick check of Amazon before going to bed. To be fair, it was the very first week of sales, I am sure he is not checking every hour this week …

So, what has this got to do with fundraising? And how does it bring in British fundraising stalwarts, Tony Elischer (of Think!) and Tim Hunter (of NSPCC)? Well you didn’t know it was going to bring in Tony and Tim but now you do. They only get tiny cameos though.
At the IoF Convention in the bar (of course) with Tony and Tim talking shop (that’s it for Tim, told you it was a little cameo). Tony brought up the ‘scores’ of my speaking sessions at the Resource Alliance’s shockingly named International Workshop for Resource Mobilisation—IWRM—a couple of months previous, in Malaysia.

I had presented a few sessions in Malaysia that had gone down very well, according to the scores, and Tony ‘ranked’ me—i.e. ‘You came in above blah blah’. Mind you, he did leave himself out of the list—I am sure he did very well too.

And this week I got my ‘scores’ from IoF too. As an egotistical, needy, must-be-loved, ‘please like me’ person this is really important to me, and I hope my mum finds out without me having to tell her. But really, the whole scoring system is seriously flawed.

When Tony first told me about the ‘scores’, I accidentally forgot about my ego and instead got on a soapbox about scoring. (OK, it was still ego—just manifesting itself differently). And here it is.
Conference organisers need an objective way of measuring their speakers’ performances. They really need to be able to get the best speakers back and establish a system of good speakers to build their reputation. Seems obvious.

The problem comes from a conflict between the only real purpose of a fundraising conference—empowering individuals to make more money for their organisations—and the fact that people want to enjoy themselves, be entertained, laugh and learn. If you ask, we will always say learning is our priority. But this is not reflected in the scores.

Basically, most people score emotionally. They will score a speaker higher if they like her or him, they will score higher if they have fun. But worst of all they will score them lower if they disagree with the speaker. The last point presents a huge challenge for any speaker trying to challenge the prevailing paradigm, which of course we need to do if we are to create change.

Now bear in mind a few things:

• Most fundraising conference speakers are not paid and are not professional speakers.


• A large proportion of conference attendees are usually first-timers and people new to fundraising.


• Scores are usually very generous—speakers rarely get the worst possible ranking.


• Session attendance can vary from a dozen to hundreds, so a couple of out-lying scores can have a dramatic impact for some people.

As I mentioned before, I have just got my ‘scores’ from the IoF. The marks for each session were broken into two parts—one for ‘content’ and one for ‘presentation’. Content and presentation scores were always within 1% of each other—and yet the marks between different sessions varied much more. So in other words, most people weren’t really distinguishing between content and presentation.

The best learning comes from highly skilled teachers or trainers who really know their stuff, give direct practical information, are willing to adequately prepare before the conference and are engaging and fun. The problem is they are very rare—hence the international conference ‘circuit’ has the same old names cropping up.

So what can we do about it?

Well, we need a paradigm shift about how we ‘score’ at conferences and the decision-making process about how we invite people back.

The organisers of the key fundraising conferences should come together to develop effective and standardised conference evaluation policies and procedures. This includes organisations such as the Institute of Fundraising (UK), Resource Alliance, Association of Fundraising Professionals, Fundraising Institute of Australia, CAF and Fundraising and Philanthropy magazine. Leave egos behind and do what’s right for the fundraising community. They should develop:

1. A much more thorough and data-driven approach to the conference and speaker evaluations. The attendees are customers and should be analysed like a charity would analyse its donors.


2. A way to gather more data on attendees—before the conference—to find out about their years of experience, area of work, etc. and then analyse it to see who goes to which sessions.


3. A process whereby conference organisers can log who came to what session to put post conference feedback in context.


4. An evaluation system that has more emphasis on learning outcomes. This means scoring sessions on more than just content and presentation.


5. A process that measures ‘scores’ in grades of ten rather than four. Marks out of ten (rather than ‘poor, ok, good, excellent’) create more significant gaps on measures and also make it easier to provide feedback to speakers and conference organisers.


6. Evaluation forms that collect more useful written feedback and send this to speakers.


7. A process that takes into account attendance numbers when looking at average scores.


8. A process for following up all attendees using something like Survey Monkey to ask people what they have done with the learning.

Once these processes are in place, we then need a better way to publish and share scores, information and analysis amongst speakers and conference organisers. The challenge is to get speakers to disavow anonymity and share their results with each other, conference organisers and even with conference participants.

Those are some of my ideas—but I know you have lots of experience as a conference attendee or speaker, so I would very much welcome your views and ideas.

Anyway, when I wrote this, The Field by the River is ‘scoring’: ‘Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 3,486 in Books’, the highest I have seen. Oh, Year in Provence is 3,883 and #1 at Amazon was‘Chinese Food made easy’.

When it was about 4,000 I asked Ken what that means in book sales. ‘I have no idea, but it was 7,433 yesterday …’

Bloody typical, no one seems to measure the right thing.

Sean