GivingTuesday : a Global Day of Giving (and Getting Data)

On December 1st, an estimated 34.8 million people participated in GivingTuesday 2020 globally, with impressive results. In Canada alone, $36.1 million raised in 24 hours!

This wave of generosity and kindness allows Canadian charities to continue supporting their communities despite the drop in revenues and near-constant uncertainty that came about over the past year as a result of the pandemic. 

But here at Ajah, there’s another benefit to GivingTuesday we find just as exciting: the data.

The philanthropic data collected and analysed on GivingTuesday helps answer important questions and gain deep insights into giving behaviours in Canada and around the world.

As part of the GivingTuesday Data Commons, detailed transactional giving data is collected and aggregated from more than 60 donation platforms and service providers (like PayPal or Blackbaud) for research and learning. 

This data helps to grow individual giving and motivate new givers because it allows us to measure giving in a granular way, implement new approaches, and identify best practices.

We’ve been working closely with GivingTuesday for nearly three years, designing and managing their technology systems—so naturally, we have a particular attachment to the work they do.

But there’s no question that leveraging this data to better understand and strengthen the resilience, innovation and capacity is pretty awesome for the entire social sector! 

To learn more about the success of GivingTuesday 2020, check out their press release and if you’d like to read more about GivingTuesday’s data collaborative check out their website for more information.

After the ask: 4 tips on building your relationship while you wait

Photo by Amy Hirschi on Unsplash

You’ve done your research, your project concept is solid, you’ve developed a relationship with your prospective donor, and you've finally delivered your ask. 

Now what?

Many organizations spend all their time and effort building up to this moment (understandably), but little thought goes into what comes after the ask. 

A ‘yes’ or a ‘no’ for your proposed project will mean different processes further down the track, but in the meantime you can further deepen the relationship and increase your chances of an eventual ‘yes’.

Here are our four ways to productively fill the time between the ask, and the answer.

1. Schedule your next meeting

During your “ask” meeting, take the opportunity to schedule a follow-up meeting. Aim to set up this chat regardless of when the funder says they will reach out to you (though be accommodating so as to not push them away).

The purpose of a second meeting is to create further contact, but mainly it’s a chance to clear up any concerns or misconceptions about your ask. This “objection handling” will allow you to alleviate any roadblocks that might hinder the deal.

You can also use this extra time together to reinforce the key points from your proposal, and further build the relationship between the two of you. Even a short secondary meeting will help to build trust and grow your relationship.  

2. Keep the funder up to date

It may take your funder weeks or months to make a decision, but in the meantime it’s your task to keep them informed.

Be sure to share milestones, important announcements, news on upcoming events, or new reports and materials. Aim to send interesting or pertinent information so the funder sees value in reading your emails and gets as excited about the project as you are.

These updates don’t have to be strictly related to your organization—they can also be resources or information (like new research) relevant to your focus area. The idea is to foster a dialogue whereby you become a trusted source of valuable information that will feed into their eventual decision.

Naturally you should prioritise any updates directly related to your funder’s objectives. 

However, these interactions should not be used to nag them about your ask specifically—the idea is simply to keep your program top of mind and subtly remind them they have a decision to make. It will continue to establish trust and show your progress.

3. Get to most out of your software

Now is the perfect time to make use of your donor management software, or your CRM. This tool can ensure you’re keeping track of your strategy, and help you decide when to reach back out to potential funders.

When you’re doing it right (maintaining as many potential funders and making as many asks as you should), you’ll definitely need software to stay on top of it all. Using a clear and structured process to manage your external relationships ensures that each ask gets the attention it deserves and that you’re following the pre-set strategies for each one.

4. Take initiative on the process

Generally speaking, donors are busy people and will rarely take the initiative in your relationship. It’s your ask, and you must be responsible for it.

Therefore, if you tell them you’ll do something—such as follow up with new statistics next week—do it! They won’t follow up if you don’t.

They might be your whole world right now but you may be far down their priority list, and it can be unproductive to believe otherwise. Make it your priority to give them the information they need to continue to prove your accountability and trustworthiness, which will continue to deepen your relationship.

These four tips are part of a wider strategic process or strategy to maximize your impact and give you the best chance at getting that “yes” from each funder you talk to. Keeping everything documented is the most effective approach to do that.

If you’re unsure about creating a strategy or are questioning the effectiveness of your current process, don’t hesitate to reach out to us! We offer free consultations and are happy to provide fundraising support.

Why qualifying and prioritizing can make or break your funding

When you search for new prospects, do you begin by throwing a wide net?

A wide net might have looser criteria than you would usually stick to, but will result in a larger selection of potential funders that you can consider on a case-by-case basis and narrow down at a later point. 

For now, the question is: How should you qualify and prioritize your prospects?

It’s a deceptively simple question, which is why some funders won’t spend too much time or effort on prioritizing their prospects when they all have potential. However, it can be critical when it comes to overall fundraising success. 

After all, targeting the right organizations is key to raising more money at the business end of your fundraising pipeline. 

How a small change can mean big bucks 

A slight movement in your rate of success from your initial prospect list can make a difference over the long term. 

For example, making a positive change to a list of 100 prospective funders in the initial stages could mean a 5% greater rate of success when you get to the ask, which could in turn lead to thousands more in funding dollars. And unless you hire and train more staff, you only have the capacity to write so many proposals and follow up with so many leads. So when you can’t do more, you must do better. 

How to do better 

There are two key methods for improving your chances of a final, successful ‘yes’. One is to improve the effectiveness of your ask, but the second is to qualify and prioritize your prospects, and as this step comes first, it can have a far greater impact on your overall numbers. 

So how do you do qualification and prioritization?The secret is to think first about why you shouldn’t approach a funder – not why you should. This will allow you to cut out, or at least invest less time with, leads that are unlikely to result in success.

You can ascertain this in two ways: your preparatory research and your initial contact. 

Preparatory research 

Research is part and parcel of any fundraising venture, and whether you use FundTracker or other services and tools in those early stages, you can uncover essential information that will help you to qualify and prioritize your leads. 

The most important criteria to look for at this point is capacity and compatibility. 

To determine capacity, you must consider: 

• Endowment size

• Total number of gifts

• Average size of gifts

• Average number of gifts 

This helps you qualify organizations that have a large enough budget to say yes to your funding request, and to find organizations that are able to donate larger amounts. 

These criteria will also help you to determine the variability of an organization’s giving. That is to say, if they often give to a range of fundraisers, they may likely be more open to considering a new organization - yours. These types of funders should therefore take priority over those who notably give to the same organizations year after year. 

You must also consider your compatibility. 

Those who give to organizations with similar programming to yours will easily qualify. To some extent, you can also include your research on their publicized giving criteria. However, funders are notoriously poor in communicating their funding strategies, so take this information with a grain of salt and focus more on what they actually do rather than what they say they do for the most accurate representation. 

Your compatibility also includes your current relationship with the funder. If you already have a contact, or your board does, you will have a strong reason to prioritize them. 

Initial contact

Your initial contact will play a large role in deciphering how to qualify and prioritize your prospects. There are numerous strategies for initial contact with your funders, and we will shortly supply dedicated resources to help fundraisers work through these strategies. After the research phase, this is your second opportunity to collect information about funders. It goes beyond what you can find whilst sitting behind a desk, but the goal of finding out more about compatibility is still the same. 

Seek details on how budget decisions are made, how often they’re made, and when they’re made. Find out exactly when is the best time to ask for funding, such as right after a board meeting or at the start of a new quarter. You should also aim to find out when the end of the year is for funders. This can be a crucial time for fundraisers as some funders will have a little room left in their funding envelope at this time. You may be able to appear on their radar at the exact right moment to fill that space. 

To find out if there is alignment between their goals and your needs, you will need to offer a general outline of your program using the same terminology and language that they use. Follow this description by asking if this is the type of program they would typically fund. This is a soft approach as it doesn’t mean asking bluntly if they will fund you, but rather if they might. 

Should you receive a negative response, this is still valuable information you can use. Take this opportunity to ask about criteria they are looking for. This can be specific, or you can ask about the types of programs they have funded in the past.   

Finally, don’t forget that while this initial contact is research-based in purpose, it is also your chance to make a good first impression. This is the time to leave a positive opinion of your work, so make it count. 

In conclusion 

The key message to take away here is that effective qualification and prioritization can have a significant impact on your success later on. 

There are many ways to adapt this strategy to your own fundraising process to ensure your approach qualifies and prioritizes the funders most able and likely to get involved with your work. 

For more fundraising information and support, get in touch with Ajah and see how our service can help your programs get the funding they need. 

Why the real secret to success is not in your proposal

Even as we adapt to the unprecedented situation we find ourselves in, putting many of our personal and professional projects on hold, we could all still use an occasional dose of “normal”. With that in mind, we plan to continue sharing fundraising resources that we hope you’ll find interesting and useful, even as you keep our focus on what matters most: taking care of yourselves, and each other. Please stay safe! 

- Your friends at Ajah

We often talk about how important it is to get the proposal just right, because it’s the moment when you can truly win funders over. 

However, in our experience, we know that the real secret to success is actually in the initial contact – long before you start drafting a proposal. 

This initial contact should be made with most large funders, and certainly with family funders, but establishing that contact can be challenging. Getting it right is akin to stepping through an intricate dance, but when done well, the results can be astounding. 

Here is our step-by-step advice to establish this relationship to improve your chances of success: 

1. Find a connection 

The first step is to get yourself an introduction. Look around your current contacts to see if you have a mutual connection that can make the introduction for you.

Having a third party make the introduction feels more natural, and gives an extra layer of legitimacy to your name. This is a more solid foundation for a good relationship with the funder further down the track. 

2. Prepare a brief 

Write out a brief description of the project. Keep it short—roughly half a page should do. This needs to be something you can relay over the phone easily without going into too much detail. 

Keep in mind that the key to your message should not be focused on what your organization needs. It must be about how your project solves the funder’s problem, and not about how the funder solves your problem.

3. Reach out 

Start with an email before calling outright. Use their public email address, and aim to include just a few lines from your brief. Use your best judgment in determining the most effective messages here, keeping in mind that it should address their needs, not yours. 

The difficult challenge here is ensuring they first read your email, then respond. Carefully consider your subject line, and make it clear within the email that you would like (or even expect) a response so it isn’t ignored. 

4. Have an initial discussion 

Note that it may take several iterations of step three to reach step four. You may need to send several emails to elicit a response from the funder, and they are likely to give you a variety of responses in return as well. 

They may come back with questions asking for clarification, so be prepared to answer these succinctly. They may offer subtle advice on how to change your application, or they may simply direct you to another person or department. 

Fundraisers will learn early on that they will hear another common response often: “No.” But that’s no time to get discouraged! Whether it’s a straight ‘no’ or simply negative in general, it can be a good thing. 

Getting a “No” gives you the opportunity to ask them about projects they would fund, and at the very least might help you learn how you could change to improve your application. 

Any advice that results in a better application takes you a step closer to successful funding, making it the best type of advice you could possibly receive. 

5. Have a phone conversation 

Once you have successfully emailed back and forth, it’s time to schedule a call with the funder. 

Ideally, by this point you will have identified a number of key pieces of information: 

• The right person to speak to

• If there is a solid preliminary fit between the funder and your organization

• The exact needs of your funder, so you can adjust your pitch

A phone call should further build a personal relationship between you and the funder. It should shed light on the information you’ll need to move ahead, such as how much funding is available, the funder’s grant-making philosophy, their program interests, and any other special requirements or criteria. 

Keep in mind that funders don’t usually like to talk about specific applications, but will discuss projects they fund in a general sense. Listen carefully to unearth the specific information you need that will be tucked amongst these general conversations. 

At this stage, the funder might still give you a “No”. They might not be ready to talk about this information, and you may need to spend more time building the relationship. Remind yourself that most relationships with funders do start with a “No,” so it is still not time to give up. 

6. Follow up 

Once you have established a personal contact, you must maintain it. Relationship maintenance is an indispensable part of successful fundraising, as it demonstrates that you are a reliable, trustworthy, and personable organization within their network. 

Even if there are no current funding opportunities, staying in touch can lead to notifications about proposals in the future. 

By following these steps, you will be well placed to build more meaningful relationships, and therefore be able to achieve more funding in future. 

Naturally, initial contact is just the beginning, and the next step will be to write a proposal, which is its own kettle of fish – and another blog post entirely!

Applying a Maturity Model to Fundraising

A key aspect of Ajah’s consulting work is helping organizations and networks of organizations create internal infrastructure and systems to optimize their use of existing data and knowledge. 

A ‘data maturity model’ has been an invaluable tool in informing our work, and in communicating work with clients. 

But when we recently discovered a thought-provoking piece on a maturity model for advancement operations, we realized how applicable this mindset could be to fundraising in a broad sense. 

From the article: 

“Advancement isn’t a factory. Advancement needs all teams, including the so-called back office, to help separate the right things from the wrong things. That’s strategy. The maturity model must take into account the capacity to be involved at a strategic level.” 

This concept is just as applicable to fundraising more broadly, and it highlights a team mentality that Ajah has long advocated. 

(You can read the full article, Early thoughts toward an Advancement Operations maturity model, for more insights and information.) 

Reading this think piece has made us excited about the idea of how a fundraising operations maturity model could be a beneficial tool for fundraisers within their own organizations. 

Applying a maturity model to fundraising operations could help fundraisers to get the support they need across the board for more effective (not just blindly efficient) fundraising. 

The original article suggests four levels of an Advancement Operations Maturity Model, moving from a basic first tier of a team that simply follows processes, to a high level where the operations team is a strategic partner in the organization and actively leads advancement within the establishment. 

Should this model be applied to fundraising, what do you believe each maturity level would entail? 

4 essentials for your fundraiser toolkit

A fundraiser toolkit is an essential requirement for those seeking funding. We’ve discussed what a fundraiser toolkit is and why you need one, but we didn’t go into detail on the key components of what it should include. 

There are four main elements your toolkit should contain: 

• Reusable sections and assets 

• Key messages

• A storybank 

• Proposal templates 

Keep in mind that a toolkit is not limited to these items—you may find you need additional components to best serve your team. 

Reusable sections and assets 

A toolkit should include reusable sections of text that can be applied in communications such as proposals, brochures, emails, and any other interactions.  

These will cover basic topics such as ‘about us’, ‘what makes us different’, and ‘our impact’. 

Having these reusable sections on hand creates alignment within your communications, ensuring that potential funders and other parties receive consistent, focused messaging from your organization. 

Think about which aspects of your brand that you and your team discuss the most often. 

Any regularly occurring content should be formalized and added to your toolkit as a section of text that you can use over and over again. Photos, case studies, and user testimonials are also useful and reusable assets to add to your kit.

Key messages 

Your key messages are the main points of information that you want your audience to take away with them after any communications with your organization. 

You don’t just want them to hear these messages—you want them to be fully understood and remembered. 

These are the summaries of what you do and why. They clearly and simply explain what sets you apart from others in the industry, and they show exactly what your value is for stakeholders. 

Strong and effective messaging is concise, strategic, highly relevant, simple, and above all, memorable. 

Key messaging is important as it serves as part of your organization’s branding and marketing efforts. It creates consistency and helps your team stay focused when speaking to media, stakeholders, and potential funders. 

A storybank 

A storybank is an inventory of anecdotes that highlight your organization’s cause and mission. 

For example, perhaps one of your beneficiaries has shared their own personal story about the impact that your programs have had on their life. This would be a fantastic narrative to share with funders and media alike to exemplify the purpose of your brand, as it goes beyond emotive words and shares an authentic case conveying the real effects of what you do.  

To create a storybank, consider the different types of stories that might motivate your donors. It is best to have a range of narratives to share, as they can highlight different aspects of your programs, different ways in which you help, and ultimately, they can appeal to different motivators for funders. 

Once you have a story written for a specific channel, it can easily be re-crafted to fit other channels. Think about how one media outlet might frame a news piece in a very different light to another outlet, depending on their target audiences. 

Similarly, you can tell your stories in different ways to suit your intended audience. 

Proposal templates 

A proposal template is a master document that includes all the basics of a standard proposal, which can easily be edited in order to best reflect the motivations, style, and preferences of each recipient. 

Investing time in creating a series of proposal templates can save you and your team a great deal of time in the long term, as it avoids writing and creating from scratch for every single proposal. 

It means that you won’t need to rewrite the same section over and over again, as many proposals will include very similar sections, and it helps to keep your messaging consistent from one funding request document to another. 

Essentially, your toolkit should contain everything your organization needs in its regular communications with funders, media, stakeholders, and others. It serves to save you time, make your life easier, ensure consistent brand messaging, and ultimately, encourage the funding you need. 

If you’d like to chat more about your toolkit, or any aspect of fundraising, the Fundtracker team is always ready for your call. Book a free consultation today to discuss how we can improve your fundraising efforts!

The fundraiser’s toolkit: What it is and why you need one

A toolkit is just as important to a fundraiser as it is to a builder. 

Instead of hammers and wrenches, your kit needs a different set of tools, including proposal templates, initial letters, concept notes, letters of intent, and perhaps even a brochure. 

These tools are vital to your team’s work, not just for getting the task done, but for ensuring quality and consistency across the board. 

That’s because in a team of fundraisers—especially with the high turnover in the sector—your communications with potential funders can vary greatly, as can the results. A toolkit ensures that standard practices are in place to maintain consistency from your team, no matter how many staff take part. 

Keep in mind, funding is still a numbers game—even the best toolkits won’t help much if you don’t ask enough prospects (which you can do by working backwards). That said, quality is still critical too—as you make more asks, your toolkit ensures the quality of those asks. 

Pulling together the pieces of your toolkit

When building your proposal template, aim to create an entire list of template sections. 

Rather than writing and using a single standardized proposal for all funders, create common paragraphs that articulate your story, purpose, and successes, which your team can pick and choose from to create a tailored proposal for the prospect. 

It should be a similar story for your eventual ask. While each ask must be bespoke, you can use the same process and guidelines to craft the ask. 

For example:

• Can your team identify words or phrases the funder prefers? 

• Does the client have a certain background, or require answers to certain questions?

• From the funder’s giving history, can you identify any patterns or stories about the funder you can reflect back to them?

• Must your cause meet specific criteria for the funder? 

All of this information should be prevalent in the ask itself, and you can accomplish this funder-ask synergy with structured processes throughout all your communications to create the most promising outcome.  

Once you are done, all of the tools should be ready and waiting for your fundraising team to adapt and send away as needed. 

Creating consistent, high-quality messaging with your toolkit

Relationship building is a key element in the fundraising process, especially for major gifts. 

Unfortunately, no one can perfectly predict these relationships, but we can use what we know to ensure the messaging will always be on brand. 

For example, we know that a conversation with a prospect will change and grow throughout the stages. You will find yourself covering similar points, and you’ll often be asked the same questions time and time again. 

Therefore, you and your team can develop common approaches, messages, and responses. With your collective knowledge, experience, and communication skills, you will find the strongest stories and cases to support positive relationship building throughout the stages. 

Just think of them as templates for conversations, ensuring your team has quality, meaningful messages for every question and talking point during the process. 

The next step is to ensure that everyone on the team has access to your kit and is able to deploy the tools inside at any time.

How do you implement toolkits? 

Once you have done the legwork of creating a toolkit, it’s time to put it to use – it won’t help anyone if it’s left to collect dust. 

Start by keeping every aspect of the toolkit in a single place, and make sure you have a version control system to ensure there is only one copy of each tool. This will ensure staff are clear on the final, current version, rather than searching through documents with names like ‘Final final actual final proposal template 7’. 

Implementation can also require foreplanning in the tool creation steps.

When you make it a collaborative effort to ensure you find your best stories and messages, you’re also establishing engagement from those who will eventually use these tools. 

This means setting out tools as a group, even involving those in the business not directly involved in the fundraising efforts – and perhaps even including the board. 

This buy-in is a fantastic ancillary benefit, but keep in mind the key takeaway of the group effort is to find the best messaging. 

Embedding in processes 

Everything about your toolkit should be embedded throughout your processes for maximum success. 

Whenever anyone on the team has an opportunity to gather information from a funder, the templates must be at hand and ready to be implemented. 

Additionally, no proposal or funder meeting should begin without fundraisers first consulting your templates, so it should be a standard process to review the templates before each meeting or event. 

As always, happy fundraising!

Team Ajah

PS. At Ajah, we live and breathe fundraising processes. We think about how to create them, how to improve them, how to implement them, and how to review them on a regular basis, so if you’re looking for  help with your fundraising efforts, book a free consultation with us today. 

Myth-busting: Is what we “know” about donor fatigue wrong?

Photo by Ben White on Unsplash

Ajah regularly gets involved in projects and studies at the crux of fundraising and technology in Canada. We’re partners on a few academic-community research partnerships, and invest our time in helping build more evidence about the sector.

For the past year, we’ve been working with the #GivingTuesday initiative on their Data Collaborative, and want to share some of the intriguing things the initiative has uncovered about fundraising and giving. 

There are lots of interesting findings coming out of the project, thanks to the unprecedented amount of data it is bringing together. We’ll be sharing more of these as we continue working with the initiative.

One of the most interesting findings so far has been about the concept of donor fatigue. 

Some of the more recent analysis of the data gathered through the Collaborative is pointing to a surprising (and useful) revelation - the widely accepted notion of “donor fatigue” may be more myth than fact. This has some (potentially) big implications for how we approach donors.

The teams working on the #GivingTuesday data has been looking at donor fatigue specifically over the last year. To test this concept, they looked at the individual donations and transactions before, during, and after big spikes in giving - namely, #GivingTuesday and humanitarian campaigns after natural disasters. 

The idea of donor fatigue implies that giving would drop to below normal levels following the spikes in giving on these dates. Donors, having given more, would give less for a period afterwards, because they’ve already exhausted the amount they were going to give. 

However, we found that giving levels simply return to normal after a spike—they don’t dip any lower, and each of these events results in a net increase to total giving for the year. This pattern suggests that donors don’t get so tired out after all, and can give more if they are incentivized. 

This finding not only goes against the grain of common sense, it also defies accepted industry ‘knowledge’ of donor fatigue. 

Not to mention, it could change how we approach donors. 

What is donor fatigue? 

Donor fatigue is the long-held belief that should you message your prospects too often, they will grow tired of hearing from you again and again, and will subsequently lose interest in making a donation. 

This conviction is at the forefront of “obstacles” for fundraisers, and there are countless articles and advice blogs out there explaining ways to overcome this “massive” hurdle. 

Fortunately, it looks like this may be a misconception - and that donor fatigue may have more to do with the wrong message, rather than too much messaging. 

Why donor fatigue doesn’t exist 

The key tenet of donor fatigue is that donors perceive their funding as some form of sacrifice. 

Essentially, if a donor considers their generous giving as a selfless sacrifice, and an organization constantly messages the donor asking for even more sacrifices, then that donor will (supposedly) come to view the organization as irritating, and potentially undeserving. 

However, this new information may suggest this belief may not be so well-founded—perhaps donors don’t consider their funding projects as sacrifices at all. 

Instead, donors may think of their donations in the same way they think of shopping, because rather than simply giving up something valuable for nothing in return (a sacrifice), they instead see it as giving up something valuable—and getting something valuable in return. 

In reality, a donor sees it more as a transaction or exchange than a sacrifice. In return for their donation, they receive the knowledge that they’ve made an improvement in the world in some way. 

Like making a purchase from a favorite store, regular advertising will not stop you from making repeat visits and purchases when you receive something of perceived value in return for your spend. 

This shift in our knowledge of donor perceptions—from sacrifice to exchange—makes a world of difference for fundraisers. 

But wait! You can still exasperate donors with your messaging 

Knowing that reaching out to your prospects regularly will not irritate them will change the game for many organizations. 

However, there are still ways to quickly exasperate your prospects—they just don’t lie in regular messaging. 

You will likely irritate prospects not through regular contact, but through poor contact. 

This could be: 

• The same message or content over and over

• Useless messages that don’t offer new information

• Unhelpful content that offers zero value

• Avoiding sharing how past donations have been spent (lack of transparency)

• Poorly communicated messages (such as bad spelling and grammar, or hard-to-read sentences)

It’s a rule that works in many forms of advertising: the more you talk to your target audience, the better your results are, provided your messaging is high-quality.

Insights From Fundraising Day 2019, Part 2

Two of Ajah’s fundraising experts recently participated in the Association of Fundraising Professionals’ Fundraising Day in Toronto, and came back with a number of insights we’re eager to share with you. 

Here’s a report from Fundraising solutions manager Raymond Soussa:

I found Fundraising Day in Toronto to be a very informative experience, and wanted to share a few highlights that I took in from the sessions I attended. 

One topic I found particularly interesting was how to use metrics to provide the framework for fundraising success: 

• Even though giving patterns can be unpredictable, quantitative metrics and measurements can play a big role.

• Try conducting a trend analysis to see which months bring in the most donors, and to set monthly objectives accordingly, rather than work on a quarterly basis.

• Donor diversification is needed for sustainability. Focusing too much on major gifts can be dangerous in case a big giver pulls out.

• It goes without saying, but tracking every action of the prospect research pipeline in a donor management software is essential, with the same amount of energy dedicated to each stage (identify, qualify, cultivate, solicit, steward).

• Interestingly, the ask-to-answer time for major gifts (gifts of around 100k) is around three months whereas the ask-to-answer time for medium-sized gifts (from 10 to 25k) is around 8 months. 

• Disqualifying prospects should be celebrated as much as qualifying them!

And here are some key takeaways from discussions on best practices for prospect research:

• It’s important to find a balance between planned giving, annual giving and major gifts giving.

• When writing a proposal, having a clear budget is important because funders want to see a return on their investments. Knowing exactly what you will do with the money you are asking for is vital.

• Don’t neglect US foundations. A lot of them have a history of giving in Canada, and they have the capacity to give bigger gifts.

• Use all the social media platforms when researching prospects. Twitter is very useful because it’s usually the first platform where individuals record their interests. 

Of course, another topic organisations are increasingly grappling with is digital fundraising:

• Investing in a high-quality website (at least $30,000) and a professional photographer is very important and beneficial in the long-term

• A good story is what will lead the way to raising money. However, digital memory is shorter than print memory, so once a story becomes popular on the website or on social media, you can invest in it to get the most out of it

• Use Google analytics to figure out exactly who your audience is. A good exercise would be to actually create an imaginary person that you would like to target (you can even name them!)

Finally, I gained a number of practical insights on how to amplify your ability to close gifts:

• 78% of donors have never been asked to make a planned gift. Even if you have a great relationship with a donor, don’t expect to be in their will without asking.

• The future of giving will be the transfer of assets, not cash. Canadian donors are older rather than younger and “Boomer” donors fear running out of money more than death. 

• The most important highlight of this session was about encouraging fundraisers to form relationships with the financial advisors of their donors. They will be the ones having the conversations that the donor will never have with the charity, and this relationship is extremely useful for setting up planned gifts, of life insurance in particular.

We hope these insights can help you find greater success in your own efforts. Happy fundraising!

Insights From Fundraising Day 2019, Part 1

Two of Ajah’s fundraising experts recently participated in the Association of Fundraising Professionals’ Fundraising Day in Toronto, and came back with a number of insights we’re eager to share with you. 

First, here’s a report from Fundraising solutions manager Isabella Flanagan:

I so enjoyed my time at AFP’s Fundraising Day conference in Toronto. I learned a few interesting and helpful tips from the best, and thought that they may be beneficial for you and members of your team! 

Denise Dias and Katie McMillan of Toronto’s own Royal Ontario Museum ran a fantastic session on building a strong and empathetic relationship between marketers and fundraisers. They suggested that these teams should work closely to cultivate a working relationship that is “more partnership than service centre,” to avoid falling out of touch with the demands of each other’s workloads. 

In particular, they suggested that fundraising and marketing teams collaborate at every stage of a project, from initial brainstorming sessions to the final product. This way all stakeholders on staff the opportunity to be heard and to address problems that may arise due to a lack of communication between departments.

I also really appreciated McMillan and Dias’ focus on developing and using thorough forms to track project progress, and of course, their suggestion to rely on using this data to inform future processes. (Click here to see their presentation.)

I was also intrigued by the values-based marketing session presented by Farrah Rooney and Chris Carter. The main takeaway: just as brands take advantage of values-based marketing, nonprofits can do the same, marketing causes by attaching them to our core values. 

Much like how Nike capitalized on the ethos of Colin Kaepearnick and Black Lives Matter to sell sneakers, charities are uniquely positioned to cater to the values of their prospects in hopes of gaining interest and support. 

The key to successfully carrying out a values-based marketing campaign is to use demographic data to understand the values of your prospects. Start by understanding what is important to your prospects. What is valued by your organization’s donors? How can these values be linked to what it means to be a donor? Can this then be transposed into a campaign? 

This process becomes especially useful, according to Carter and Rooney, when it comes to appealing to younger generations. Millennials and GenZ are tough nuts to crack - unlike their boomer predecessors, these younger prospects are significantly less likely to choose to support nonprofits. Again, looking into demographic data could provide the key to capturing the attention of this elusive audience. 

Most young people tend to define themselves as being liberal, so using imagery that connotes a left-learning identity could attract the younger set.  

This being said, as a millennial, I see brands attempting to cater to my alleged values daily, and more often than not, it comes off as opportunistic and skeevy. We don’t care that our sneakers are “liberal” - we care that they are comfortable, cool, and if we’re lucky, climate and wallet friendly. The same goes for supporting not-for-profits - we just want to know that our money is going to work in the most effective way possible. 

We hope these insights can help you find greater success in your own efforts. Happy fundraising!

How to Make Funder Research as Painless as Possible

Everyone may have a different name for the first stage of the funding process – what we call lead identification – but most of us have the same issue with this essential step in the fundraising pipeline: It’s a chore.

We know research is critical, yet it can feel less critical than other stages of the process. There’s no relationship-building aspect and there isn’t the action of ‘the ask’. It’s merely a list of names or organizations on paper.

Much like flossing, it’s a necessary task that most of us don’t enjoy.

Why efficient lead identification is vital

The research stage is essential to ensure fundraisers have sufficient prospects to drive the rest of the process. Effective research helps us build enough relationships and make enough asks to secure enough funding commitments in the final stage.

In our previous post, we discussed how working backwards through the fundraising pipeline can help us plan our targets and ensure we have enough initial prospects  to eventually meet our fundraising goals. This strategy can also help to guarantee that fundraisers don’t spend too much time coming up with more names than necessary.

All fundraisers understand that the better their research is—i.e, the better they match funding prospects with their programs and a history of giving to organizations like them—the more likely those initial prospects will eventually say yes.

In fact, better research in this first step can mean more money for less effort.

For example: If 10% of initial prospects typically make it all the way through the pipeline and result in a successful ask, increasing that number through better prospect research, even by only a few percentage points, can generate significantly more funding for the same effort.

The four components of a successful Lead Identification Strategy

There are four clear requirements for successful lead identification, starting with what fundraisers are looking for, all the way through to the order in which you approach them.

• Clear criteria: Fundraisers must start with a clear list of criteria for funders. This can include basics such as where those funders are based geographically, and what causes they typically support. This is especially important on teams, where consistency is key.

• Clear sources: Knowing where to go to identify leads can cut down on time spent in this stage and increase the quality of prospects. A service such as Fundtracker can guide you straight to the kind of quality prospects you need, and save you from running countless (and often fruitless) Google searches to find leads.

• Effective segmentation: Even if all leads meet the same criteria, there can still be a large amount of variation between them. These differences require tailored strategies, messages and approaches for the ask, follow-up, and relationship.

• Effective prioritization: Working through a list of prospects alphabetically might sound practical, but it’s a good way to waste time on less likely funders. Instead, prioritize your outreach list by those who you believe are the best candidates. Keep the “80/20” rule in mind - 80%  of your funding might come from just 20% of your funders.

At Fundtracker, we understand that lead identification is often a major pain point for fundraisers. Our data-driven funder research service is designed specifically to make this step painless, quick, and easy.

We also like to give out free advice! For help setting up your own lead identification and research strategy, book a free consultation with the team at Ajah Fundtracker.

How backward thinking moves fundraising forward

There’s a growing trend in the fundraising sector (and in other sectors) towards being ‘data-driven’—and many professionals in the non-profit sector are feeling pressure to incorporate data into their work. Fundtracker is a great example, but data-driven service shows up in many other areas of fundraising and other work, beyond prospect research.

But, being ‘data-driven’ doesn’t necessarily mean being technical, or using giant spreadsheets. At its simplest, it means orienting your work around simple calculations, based on what works. A fundraising ‘pipeline’ is an excellent example of applying data-driven approaches to your work and enjoying its benefits - without learning how to code.

Most organizations have a fundraising process, and the concept of using prospects, pipelines, and targets are already familiar. However, if you’ve been following the same strategy as always and aren’t seeing the results you need, it might be time to think backward.

We’ll show you how designing a data-driven fundraising pipeline can help your work—and it all starts with thinking backward.

We have previously discussed each of the stages in the fundraising pipeline, and how having a clearly defined set of steps can help coordinate fundraising efforts. Now, we’ll illustrate how to use those stages to design a data-driven pipeline—by approaching it backward.

This is a data-driven process that begins with the final stage of any fundraising pipeline—success. By starting here, fundraisers can use a numbers-based approach to determine how many prospects are required at each step to ensure a successful outcome.

Step one is to determine how many successful asks are needed in order to meet funding requirements.

Let’s keep things simple for now and say we need one successful asks.

The next step is to consider past experience to inform estimations about how many prospects fall out of the pipeline at each stage.

Perhaps prior knowledge suggests that for every prospect asked, 80% will engage in follow-up conversations, and of those only 25% will commit to funding. This means that to obtain that one successful asks, you’ll need follow-ups with 4 prospects, which means you need to make 5 asks.

From here, it’s a simple process of using best estimates to continue backwards through the pipeline to reach the prospect identification step, and attach a quantifiable number required at this preliminary stage. In our example above, roughly 20 prospects must be identified at the first stage in order to land one grant.

As goals, industry knowledge, and pipeline stages are unique for each organization, these steps will differ from one fundraiser to another. However, the overall objective of this ‘working backwards’ system to the same—to determine an informed estimate of the number of prospects one must begin with in order to work forwards with confidence in reaching fundraising targets.

And for help creating a promising prospect list in the first place, Ajah is available to assist with Fundtracker—or with free advice through a free consultation. A well-designed pipeline will help to concentrate efforts where they are needed, and ensure you have the time to achieve fundraising targets.

Get in touch for a free consultation so we can help drive your fundraising forward.

The 5 Critical Stages of Your Fundraising Pipeline

In our last post, we explored the elements that make up an effective fundraising process.

We also introduced the concept of a pipeline as a way of visualizing and tracking your progress towards a specific fundraising goal.

In this piece, we’ll examine the stages of a fundraising pipeline, and the role they play in supporting the fundraising effort. By grasping the purpose of each stage, you’ll be better able to visualize and plan the layout of your own project’s pipeline.

1. Prospect Identification (Research)

This initial stage of the pipeline is where a fundraising team’s information and intelligence will be pooled prior to any outreach, with the goal of putting together the largest possible list of prospects with any realistic chance of donating.

If we think of the fundraising pipeline as a donor “journey,” then this stage is where provisioning and planning for the entire trip begins.

Fundraisers will use database tools (such as Fundtracker) to pull together lists of the most likely prospects from public information, review correspondence and emails for hints of interest or engagement, and search for giving patterns among their contacts.

By comparing the size of the donation target with the giving capacity of each prospect, we can determine the scale of the prospect pool that we need to build.

2. Qualification / Prioritization

Again, this stage is focused on planning and preparation, before any contact with a prospect.

This stage of the fundraising process consists of establishing how to qualify prospects identified in the first stage, and prioritizing certain prospects with the most potential—essential steps that will help support later efforts to establish interest and approach the right prospects at the most opportune time.

By assessing the pool of prospects, and the time available to spend on each prospect, we can establish important aspects of qualification. These include:

• Does the donor have the annual giving capacity you’re looking for?

• Is there a demonstrated pattern of giving to your sector or area of focus?

• Do they give within your geographic area?

• Do you have any established connections with someone on their Board of Directors or other key decision makers?

The priority planning aspect will ensure that qualification efforts are applied to the most likely prospects without delay.

3. Initial contact

The important work done in the two preceding stages have prepared the fundraiser for this next stage of the pipeline, where actual initial contact with prospects begins.

Now that the fundraising team has a pool of prospects and established criteria for qualification and prioritization, it’s time to start reaching out in earnest.

This stage consists largely of gathering the right contacts and building relationships.

It’s a relatively straightforward process – calling a prospect and establishing contact with a decision maker through polite questioning and persistent contact.

Scheduling regular call-backs will help drive the progression from cold calling to qualified contact or non-prospect. Likewise, working down through the priority call list will help qualify prospects in the most effective order possible.

4. The Ask!

Once you have a fully qualified prospect, the next stage in the funding pipeline is to approach for a material ask.

This stage is where the fundraising team shifts to the all-important question: is the prospect able and willing to donate as per the parameters of this project?

The ask could take the form of a proposal, a letter of intent, or a simply verbal request. The fundraiser must deliver their message in a clear, succinct, and productive way, and most importantly, in a way that addresses the priorities of the funder.

The message needs to be compact, yet cover the all the important aspects of the project in a compelling way. Asking effectively is a whole topic in and of itself, but the most important part is to make sure that you are actually doing it, and that your process ensures you send out enough asks to reach your targets.

Once the ask is made, the journey will not stop for a prospect. Even if the ask is not successful, your relationship with them has just started. They’ll need to be cultivated and then re-engaged for a future project – into the Prospect Research stage of another pipeline.

5. Relationship Building Strategy (Post-Ask Follow-up)

Once an ask is made of a qualified prospect, a prompt follow-up process should begin. Until funds have been received, fundraisers should follow up diligently, with a firm timeline in mind.

Finally, when a prospect fails to progress along the pipeline for whatever reason, don’t give up on them -- consider them possibilities for another project at a later time.

A Successful Conclusion

Once the process has been successfully completed, you can review your progress through the pipeline, and better judge the time and effort that each stage requires. Experience will help inform how you manage each stage.  

By grasping the purpose of each section of a fundraising pipeline, you’ll be better able to use this tool to strategically advance your relationships with prospects, and close more donations.

Are you looking for help in improving or restructuring your own fundraising process?

Get in touch with us to book a consultation—we’ll discuss your fundraising objectives, and provide advice on developing processes and adopting helpful tools that will help you reach those goals.

And as ever, happy fundraising!

Team Ajah

PS. Keep an eye out for an upcoming post where we’ll explore how to visualise your fundraising pipeline to make as effective a tool as possible.

The Six Critical Elements of an Effective Fundraising Process - An Overview

In our most recent post, we discussed how a strong fundraising process can dramatically improve your organization’s ability to secure funds.

An effective process improves time management and use of resources across a fundraising team, while making it easier to identify issues and pain points.

In this post, we’ll look at some of the key components of a fundraising process, which you can use to build out a process for your own team.

1. Setting up a Pipeline

A funding pipeline is one of the most common and most effective tools for understanding and implementing a consistent fundraising process.

It’s purpose is to provide a framework for planning, managing, and understanding the process from stage to stage. Once it’s created, it’s also provides visual insight into what’s needed to hit a specific fundraising target - by charting the progress of fundraising prospects through each stage.

Let’s say that your organization is looking to support a specific project or funding campaign. A target has been set, so now it’s up to the fundraising team to get there.

This fundraising target is the end goal, and it exists at the end of your fundraising pipeline.

To achieve this, you will need to work backwards from the end-goal, and estimate, in numbers, what’s needed in terms of prospect numbers, employee time, calendar time and success rates in order to progress. The pipeline acts as your guide as to where any blockages exist.

It can act as a very effective way of adding structure to your overall process.    

2. Setting Roles and Responsibilities

An essential part of your process should include locking down roles and responsibilities within your organization.

Are the right people assigned to the right roles? Does everyone on your team have what they need to succeed? Are board members prepared to add their contribution and build relationships?  

Team members, respecting their other responsibilities and levels of experience, should be all working to help progress donations down the pipeline.

What matters is that you’re not wasting time and effort. Duties and resources should all be well-established prior to initial contact. Lessons learnt from your most successful previous drives can be used to inform this role-delegation.  

3. Utilizing Dependable Templates and Materials

Having a trusted set of templates on hand, including proposal documents, should form part of your adopted process.

Having these kinds of resources ready will more clearly outline the project for the potential donor, and better support the fundraising drive. More importantly, it helps you make more asks in less time.

In addition, it also ensure that you consistently use well-crafted and compelling messages across your team. The time spent ensuring the clarity, tone and, crucially, the messaging of these resources is well-spent.

Crucial documents, such as letters of intent, are what help a proposal progress from one stage of the pipeline to the next. By ensuring you are using trusted templates, progress can be more easily achieved, and you can factor the need to continually re-produce these documents out of your workflow.

4. Research / Lead Identification and Qualification

Funder research is the first step in your process, and is the foundation of your fundraising. This initial research is crucial in ensuring you reach your fundraising targets.  

This part of the process involves engaging with all the available information that you have. Previously successful campaigns, databases, networking (and Fundtracker, of course) - these can all be used to build a pool of prospects who may fund the project.

It pays to take the time to identify the kinds of donors that should be at the top of your list for any particular fundraising project.

Are you approaching the right funders? Are you sure the most promising and likely funders are prioritized in your team’s call list?  Are there a set of funders, who are publically approachable, who are likely to fund this project?

Similarly, have you ensured that your qualification process is sufficiently robust? Does it reflect real funder interest and is it providing enough of a base for progressing the ask?

5. Activity Targets and Scheduling

Fundraisers are some of the busiest people out there. They often work at organizations where resources and time are scant - and have to get the maximum out of their hours.

However, donations can take time to come to fruition. This can often take months or even years of sustained effort.

Your applied process should account for this, and ensure that it is clear on:

• What is the funding required, and what scale / number of donations needed to reach that amount?

• What is the timeline? What should be achieved by what date?     

• What is the amount of time team members can put towards each activity?

Once this has been ascertained, you will be better able to break down the activity rates (e.g. number of letters of intent per month) that need to be achieved in order for the project to be viable.

Ensuring that scheduling is both realistic and regular enough to achieve this is another important aspect of the process.

6. Technology and Tools

As a fundraiser, you should take advantage of all of the tools that are at your disposal.

This includes the tools that can provide you with better intelligence and outreach regarding likely donors, and those that will better support your overall organization and time-management.

Those background tools can range from completely free resources, such as adopting collaborative online spreadsheet sharing for better collaboration, to more advanced cross-team use of advanced CRM-style applications.

These tools can help inform your process, letting you know exactly where a donation prospect is in the pipeline, when to follow-up, and what was achieved.

FundTracker is just  one example of those tools, as it enables the research and identification pieces of the process..

Through its donor-centric "Follow the Money" approach, it’s been developed to help ensure your initial prospects include all applicable prospects, so you stand a far better chance of achieving your end-goal.

Conclusion

The above are some of the most important elements of building a good fundraising process.

However, there is of course variation and differences between how different organizations tweak and set-up their processes to achieve success.

Are you looking to develop or improve your own fundraising process?

If so, get in touch with us to book a consultation—we’ll discuss your fundraising objectives, and provide advice on developing processes and adopting helpful tools that will help you reach those goals.

And as ever, happy fundraising!

Team Ajah

The Benefits of Building a Fundraising Process

Why should your busy organization take the time to establish a fundraising process?

Because doing so will result in more efficient planning, and more success in reaching your fundraising goals.

A dependable process will add structure to your efforts, allowing you to better budget time and resources, plan your activities accordingly, and get everything done!

Better understanding your process will also allow you to create your fundraising pipeline (a topic we’ll explore later), a crucial tool to help you keep your multiple fundraising efforts organised.

Here are some of the benefits of implementing a good fundraising process:

1. More Effective Time Management

Fundraising can be a time-consuming process, and securing a single donation can take years.

Establishing a fundraising process provides you with better perspective on the time required for each step, from prospect research to securing funding, helping you allocate sufficient time to meet your objectives.

An organised process lets you understand and chart the progress you’re making—you’ll know all the things you need to secure a gift, and give yourself the time to do them.

2. Better Visibility into your Performance

With a dependable process in place, you can map out all the steps you need to take and gain visibility into what you’re doing, and how well you’re doing.

You can better identify pain points where your efforts are stalling, identify patterns, and take steps to address any specific issues that may be hindering your success.

A good process is a yardstick for assessing your performance and progress, and where extra resources or a new approach may be required.

3. Better Resource Allocation

Your organisation may have many individuals working on different aspects of your fundraising--prospect research, initial donor approaches, preparing grant proposals, and so on. Beyond your team, you might also be lucky to have some dedicated board members at your disposal.

Once you have an established process, you will gain a better insight on how to manage a fundraising team and allocate their time efficiently and effectively.

Establishing a good fundraising process allows teams to be more organized and provides structure to the team’s efforts, using team members’ strengths in a more effective way.

4. More Consistent Application of your Best Practices

Once you have a process in place,  it also helps ensure that the best tactics are being consistently applied across your entire team.

Strategies such as a timely presentation of an impact story, media coverage, or even sending out thank-you cards can be applied at the right time to be most effective.

The process help ensure these practices are applied smoothly and almost automatically. Making the right move at the right time will be ingrained in the process, rather than just one individual.

Looking to develop or improve your own fundraising process?

Here at Ajah, our fundraising experts have the knowledge and insights on how to establish and maintain a successful fundraising process, and we’d be more than happy to share them with you.

Get in touch with us to book a consultation—we’ll discuss your fundraising objectives, and provide advice on developing a process that will help you reach those goals.

The best part? We offer these consultations completely free of charge, no strings attached.

As ever, happy fundraising!

Best,

Raena Marder

Customer Success Lead @ Ajah

Launching the Global Register of Nonprofit Data Sources (GRNDS) and hosting the NGO Data Workshop

This week we’re launching a new collaborative initiative to create the first comprehensive catalogue of national data sources on nonprofits and charities. Many national governments require nonprofits to register and file annual reports. That information can be a valuable tool for policy-makers, researchers, and nonprofit practitioners, as long as it is made available to them. In collaboration with Dr. Elizabeth Bloodgood from Concordia University, we are launching the Global Register of Nonprofit Data Sources (GRNDS) to track what information is collected by each national government and what - if any - of the collected information is made public.

Why us? Canada is a leader in this space (the detailed collection and sharing of data about its nonprofit sector), and here, at Ajah, we’ve been using that info to power our online fundraising service, Fundtracker, as well as custom business intelligence applications since 2009. We’ve been working to harness the potential of open data and open government policies to increase the availability of data and about the nonprofit sector since we developed Powered by Data in 2013.

We’ve been working with Dr. Bloodgood and her students over the past year and we’ve catalogued on the data collection and sharing practices of nonprofit registries 25 countries. We’re launching the project publicly this week because we’re fortunate to be hosting experts from around Europe and North America to gather their input on the project.  These experts come from academia, government, and the nonprofit space, and will discuss how GRNDS can play a supporting role in the ecosystem of information infrastructure being created about, and for, the nonprofit sector, as well as common needs that exist across the various projects participating. These projects include research-focused initiatives like Open Data for Nonprofit Research and practitioner-focused projects like the International Aid Transparency Initiative. (For more information about who is attending, their projects, and the workshop agenda - click here)

GRNDS is just a small part of the larger information infrastructure for the nonprofit sector. We’re excited to use an open data, collaborative approach to this work and we’re appreciative that the participants of this workshop are bringing their expertise as leaders of other national and sector-wide data projects to advise this new collaborative initiative.

We will be tweeting during the workshop using the hashtag #GRNDS2018. If you don’t use Twitter, we will also be posting the key learnings from the workshop here next week.

3 Ways the Ideal Funder Research Solution Delivers

A funder research service is an important tool for professional fundraisers looking to secure more donations.

When you're looking at getting a service, it's important to evaluate the tools to find one that will be most effective for you.

But, these tools have lots of different features and approaches—how do you evaluate which one will work best for you?

Below, we outline some of they characteristics you should look for in a tool. These aren't necessarily obvious at first glance, but fundraisers find that these aspects make the biggest difference in the long term.

1. It Helps You Follow the Money

First, and most crucially: How effective is the tool in helping you find and connect with the prospects most likely to support your cause?

Many tools provide lots of general information along with large databases of donor organisations and individuals.

But if these don’t produce actionable leads for a fundraiser, the tool’s value is questionable.

The most useful tool will facilitate you in a “Follow the Money” approach -- that is, it will allow you to identify and prioritize funders who have donated to organisations just like yours.

Any tool that can't help you find funders based on who they fund (not what they say they fund), may be more of a burden than an asset.

2. It Provides Key Insights into Recipients as well as Funders

At a minimum, the ideal tool should provide the complete listing of all Canadian foundations, including the estimated 50 percent that do not maintain a public profile. Partial or curated lists won’t be as helpful as a complete listing of all potential funders that exist on record.

However, it’s just as important that a tool provide a complete listing of Canadian charities and the donations they’ve received, allowing the fundraiser to make connections to potential funders based on their donations to organisations similar to theirs.

Complete listings of donors and recipients will help ensure all ideal donors can be identified, but also enables you to more accurately and efficiently identify and prioritize the right matches for your organisation.

3. It Saves You Time

As a fundraiser, what type of work eats up most of your time?

Given the sheer number of potential funders out there, digging through funder lists and profiles can often take far more time than it’s worth.

Your prospect research tool should do some of that digging for you.

It should bring together all the relevant information, but also help you make sense of that information so you can more quickly focus on the right potential funders.

Once it’s helped you make important connections to both potential funders and charities similar to yours, your tool should also monitor any changes to your fundraising landscape and alert you to any important developments.

The right tool should mean less time researching and more time asking.

To sum up, a charity or nonprofit operating with limited funds and time should look for these characteristics when weighing possible funder research solutions:

1. A donation-oriented “Follow the Money” approach that prioritizes useful donation patterns.

2. Complete listings of all donors and recipients on public record in Canada.

3. Data-driven, time-saving features that allow you to spend less time being more effective.

Here at Ajah, we’ve carefully designed Fundtracker Pro and Benefactor, our primary funder research solutions, to satisfy these needs.

They put all the essential information on both donors and recipients at the fingertips of Canadian fundraisers.

For more information on FundTracker Pro, simply download our comprehensive Funder Research Guide (it’s completely free).

And as ever, happy fundraising!

Best,

Raena Marder - Customer Success Lead / Team Ajah

The Fundraising Trends That Are Taking Off in 2018

With the busy fall fundraising season about to commence - it’s an ideal time for Canadian charities to take stock of new trends in the fundraising sector.  

Below, we’ve outlined three emerging trends that effective nonprofits are pivoting towards. 

Strikingly, these trends include small changes in the use of resources and new tools that can translate into major boosts in donor engagement. 

1. Increased Use of Digital Solutions

Workers at nonprofits are squeezed for time - and prospect research is especially draining. However, many organisations are making use of digital solutions to lighten the load. 

In July, James Plunkett of UK nonprofit Citizens Advice outlined how newly adopted digital tools and databases are offering a path to real time-saving, and ultimately help staff by slotting in alongside traditional engagement. "You invest in digital to make all your services better, because ultimately it’s about people.”

Nonprofits using digital solutions to help with fundraising can rely on a faster, more efficient way to identify ideal partners, as well as organizations similar to themselves that are landing donations.

Tools like Fundtracker Pro can help fundraisers cut through this workload, giving front-line staff more time to successfully engage donors. 

2. Better Supporting the Donor Journey

The complete donor experience is increasingly referred to as a "journey". Fundraisers that examine how previous journeys began will be better informed on how to portion out the resources needed to support successful future donations.

“A lot of the work we do focuses on creating user experiences and designing supporter journeys that engage people across advocacy and fundraising campaigns” stated Eugene Flynn, digital strategist with NGO 54 Degrees at the beginning of the year. 

“The data that large organisations have gathered on their supporters [can be used] to learn and predict what actions and asks are going to be most relevant to supporters, and elicit the best responses” notes Flynn. 

An effective fundraising tool helps identify the previous donation patterns of a donor in a simple and informative manner - proving an invaluable help in supporting the donor life-cycle.

 3. Recruiting Millennials While Retaining Older Donors

The way that Canadians give is changing. 

The “Millennial” swing towards online giving is only increasing. This generation of donors is more likely to give to a modernized, digital-savvy organisation that is committed to efficiency. 

Meanwhile, a report just released this summer by Indiana University cements the concept that individuals who establish a pattern of making charitable donations before retirement are just as inclined to keep giving post-retirement. 

This means that those organisations who want to engage both emerging donors, and retain established ones will be facilitated through the intelligence provided by effective prospect research tools.

A organization will do well to continue to engage with its champion donors, while considering ways to track the new generation of donors through digital means. 

So what does this have to do with Ajah?

These trends indicate that Canadian fundraisers can benefit considerably from: 

• Choosing the right prospect research solution that actively eases the prospect research workload.

• Assessing the data patterns behind individual donor journeys to better support those journeys.

• Tracking emerging and long-term individual donors on an ongoing basis.

Here at Ajah, we’ve worked hard to incorporate these important points into the design and latest updates of our core products, FundTracker Pro and Benefactor. 

These two solutions will help any Canadian fundraiser better grasp the trends outlined above, having been specially designed help meet the needs of the nonprofit sector. 

For more on how Canadian charities can best position themselves in the current donor environment, download our free Funder Research Guide or simply sign up for a free demo of these tools.  

And as ever, happy fundraising!

Raena Marder - Customer Success Lead / Team Ajah

Grasping Open Data with Both Hands - How Canadian Charities Are Capitalizing

Powered by Data is a nonprofit that was started by Ajah’s founders (and is now part of MakeWay's shared platform), and works to help the nonprofit sector benefit from data.

They’ve just released a new report, produced in consultation with stakeholders of Heritage Canada, that recommends ways the government could use its data to enable its stakeholders (namely, the nonprofit sector).

The recommended approach is to engage with charities directly to build their understanding of Heritage Canada’s available data, identify the needs of the charities, and then work on publishing open data to address those needs.

The report is interesting for charities because it allows them to better understand the motivations of major government funders like Heritage Canada, and offers another avenue for charities (Heritage’s open data efforts) to engage with them.

What are Stakeholders Concerned About?

• A real need for government to provide more open research and statistics that could inform program and operational needs—for example by releasing data on successful funding applications and amounts.

• The need to make data and information easy to find, rather than requiring users to scour different areas of government websites.

• A need to move beyond open data sets and make data searchable and filterable through a web application, allowing the organisations to easily pull out the requisite information without having to do much data-crunching themselves.

What does this have to do with Ajah?

The report focusses on how Heritage can enable data-driven solutions to the immediate needs of the nonprofit sector, its grantees.

Fundtracker, Ajah’s dedicated prospect research tool, is exactly that type of solution. We built it to solve the immediate fundraising needs of charities by bringing together all relevant public-domain data on funders and recipients, and making that data searchable and filterable, allowing fundraisers to quickly and easily find out who is funding organizations just like yours.

We believe there are many other opportunities for applying data-driven solutions to the needs of the nonprofit sector, especially with government data. That’s why we started Powered by Data—to help the sector take advantage of those opportunities.

If you’d like to dig a little deeper into Powered by Data’s findings and recommendations, please click here to see the full report.

And for more information on FundTracker, please download our comprehensive Funder Research Guide (it’s completely free).

And as ever, happy fundraising!

Team Ajah

3 Steps to Building a Sustainable Prospect Pool

By Raena Marder, Customer Success Lead @ Ajah

To reach its fundraising goals, an organisation must start by identifying and compiling a host of prospective funders. Here are a few things that we’ve found have worked best for many of our clients as they establish a dynamic, diverse, and sustainable pool of funding prospects.

1. Consistency is Key

Building your prospect pool is an ongoing exercise that works best if it’s part of a weekly routine.

Try to establish a dedicated time in your schedule for prospect research. Some fundraisers like to do it on a specific day of the week, others prefer to do a little every day.

Choose what works best with your schedule and your organisation's—the important thing is that prospect research is a regular and consistent item on the weekly calendar.  

2. Evolve and Diversify

A prospect pool is an organic and dynamic list. It should grow and change over time. There is no “correct” number of prospects to have, and your pool is never final.

Funders can often change their focus, new funders may appear on the scene, and your own organisation’s needs and priority areas may change. Prospect research as an ongoing process because in reality the funding landscape is fluid.

That’s also why we strongly recommend ensuring diversity within a prospect pool:

• Be open to funders with different funding interests beyond just those that seem most obvious at first. An organisation’s work may address issues beyond its core mission—for instance, an organisation focused on “education and youth” programs might find additional funders by highlighting their work’s impact on “community health.”

• Some funders are more interested in supporting organisations in a specific geographical area rather than tackling any single issue.

• It’s important to seek out different types of funders, including foundations, corporations, and individuals.

Finally, we recommend casting a wide net—a prospect pool should be a bigger and broader list than first seems obvious. Think of ways to identify any and all funders who may be interested in giving to your organisation:

• Who’s funded you in the past?

• Who’s funding other organisations similar to yours?

• Who else is funding other charities your own funders are also giving to?

• Which prospective funders have the most recipient charities in common with your current funders?

(For more please see our Tip Sheet on finding funders you’ve been missing)

We also recommend ensuring that your prospect pool has a good mix of individuals, companies and foundations, and enough of each, so that you can generate adequate funds from a diversity of sources to make your organization sustainable.

3. Pick, Prioritize, Plan

Finally, you’ll want to refine your list and prioritize the prospective funders in your pool.

First consider how to “qualify” your prospects to be sure it’s worth your time to reach out to them:

• Does the prospect’s financial capacity match your project needs?

• Does their recent giving history suggest an interest in your organisation’s work?

• And of course, have you made certain your organisation meets all of the funder’s eligibility requirements?

Once you’ve figured out which prospects you want to approach, we recommend establishing a system of tiered priorities to stay organised and manage your time in a way that lets you make all your most important asks.

Here are some questions to ask yourself when prioritizing funding prospects:

• What is the schedule for each funder’s application process? Any looming deadlines?

• Are there any “volunteer connectors” that could leverage their relationships to give you a better chance at funding (e.g., a member of your Board with a connection to someone on the funder’s Board)?

• How likely is this prospect to fund your organisation? For instance, have they provided funding to you in the past, or to many organisations similar to yours?

• Is there anything coming up on your organisation’s schedule—new programs, capital improvements, anniversaries, or special events—that would appeal to particular funders?

I hope you find these ideas useful! If you’d like help building or refining your prospect pool, please don’t hesitate to reach out to me or my fellow fundraising experts at 514-400-4500 or info@ajah.ca.

You might also be interested in downloading our more comprehensive Funder Research Guide (it’s free!).

And as always, happy fundraising!