However, we make a huge mistake when we make metrics our focus.  Much like teachers who end up “teaching to the test,” when our focus becomes the measurement, we miss the point.  And we don’t achieve our goals.

At the core, development is a qualitative enterprise.  We build and strengthen human relationships. We inspire.  We educate.  We create and communicate institutional vision.  We support mission and the work of others in a variety of ways.

However, metrics are almost always quantitative.  We quantify.  We count.  We add.  We classify.  We compare.

The point is not that quantifying a qualitative enterprise is impossible.  We can quantify our work – e.g., number of visits, number of moves, number of proposals, dollars raised – and more and more, we must.

The point is that our focus should always stay on the qualitative.  Keep the focus on building the relationships with donors.  Keep the focus on inspiring others with a compelling vision for your institution’s future.  Keep the focus on educating people about the opportunities to give and support your work.

When we focus on the qualitative work, all of the quantitative metrics take care of themselves.  If we attempt to do the reverse and focus on “meeting the numbers,” we find we can’t.

This distinction is important.  Understanding where donor wealth comes from tells us a good bit about the donor.  However, it tells us little about her willingness, passions, interests, and goals for giving.  And asking for a major gift without obtaining clarity around these more personal assessments is risky.

So, prior to asking a prospect for a major gift, I suggest you make 3 Appraisals:

1. Wealth Appraisal – At what level could the prospect make a gift if she were motivated?
2. Philanthropic Appraisal - In what ways has the prospect evidenced a willingness to make major gifts in the past?
3. Interest Appraisal – How specifically do our mission, vision, and values align with the donors interests, values, and giving motivations?

In order to make these appraisals, the gift officer must learn more about the prospect’s personal life.  For instance, what other non-profits does she support?  Or, what hobbies occupies her interest and time?  Or even, what are the life circumstances of her children?

Major donors, by definition, must have sufficient wealth and we must obtain clarity on the wealth appraisal.  However, by understanding better our prospect’s philanthropic motivations and interests, we give ourselves a much better opportunity to successfully cultivate, solicit, and steward every major gift donor.

Focusing on the content to gather up 3 good ideas is fine for the short term.  If the presenters and the content are of good quality, we usually can come up with 3 ideas of consequence.  The problem is that content can sometimes be time limited.  The ideas – the strategies or tactics – may have a short lifespan.  The environment changes and so can the longer term value of the content.

Here’s another thought about how to enhance the value of conferences:   set a goal to meet and begin relationships with 3 successful professionals and/or colleagues.  These may be conference presenters or conference attendees.

At breaks during most conferences people run for the door to text, return emails and calls.  Resist that urge.  Stay in the moment of the conference.  Use the opportunity to follow-up with a presenter or continue a conversation with a fellow participant.  Exchange cards and make the commitment to follow-up after the conference.

If the conference covers meal times, plan to eat every meal with someone with whom you wish to get to know better.  In other words, purposefully use the opportunity to broaden your web of perspectives and influences.

Your long-term personal and professional growth will depend far more on your relationships with mentors, coaches, and other successful professionals and colleagues than it will on the 3 ideas you brought home to implement.

“The heavy hitters,” I heard recently when I asked this question.  ”These are people of influence and affluence.”    Great!  To our Boards we attract leaders from business, the clergy, political players, and other people of social and financial importance.

And then, if we aren’t careful, we take these typically highly-experienced, big-thinking leaders of men and women and during Board meetings invite them to discuss how to plan a special event.  Or we focus them on a line item in the budget explaining how we are keeping the supplies expense lower than last year.  Or we spend 1/2 hour talking about how we changed the script of our phonathon.  Or any number of tactical, operational concerns.

Is this a good use of their time and capabilities?  Will tasks such as these bring deep meaning to their Board service?

It’s not that planning a special event or analyzing the budget is not important.  Both are.  But when we have these “heavy hitters” sitting around our table, shouldn’t we spend the bulk of our time asking them to help shape the strategic vision for the institution and then ask them to think with us about who else may have an interest in our good work?

Yes, creating Board agendas that spend more time in generative and strategic activities is not easy.  But it’s partly the role of administrators to help craft such agendas.  Yes, it typically means more thought and maybe even more work to craft agendas that ask Board members to consider and discuss topics of consequence.  It’s much easier to have an agenda filled with “report outs.”

Pull out a recent agenda of your Development (Advancement) Committee.  If more than 50% of the time in committee was spent on agenda items that fail to engage them meaningfully (e.g., progress updates, report outs, tactical issues), you probably need to rethink your agendas.

When we regularly tap the creativity and passions of our Board members – when we focus their energy and capacities away from the details of operations and onto the strategic, generative, and visionary – we allow them to truly lead.  We bring more meaning and fulfillment to their service.  And we give our institutions the opportunity to truly advance.

I believe there are 3 types of basic meetings that every development team must implement in order to keep the program running smoothly and exceeding goals.  Before we get to the meetings, though, I want to list 4 key guidelines for all standing meetings.

1. All meetings should be as short as possible while achieving their stated purpose.  Typically, this means no meetings are scheduled to go beyond one hour.
2. All meetings should have a written, distributed agenda.
3. All meetings should be “calendar sacred,” meaning that they are scheduled and only rarely skipped or moved.  They hold priority.
4. Meetings should be scheduled together to occur during one part of the week.  Typically, having meetings grouped together at the front end of the week is most advantageous.  This allows for the remainder of the week to meet with donors.

If you follow these guidelines for each of your meetings, you will notice marked improvement in productivity during and beyond the meetings.

Now, let’s move to the types of meetings each development team should implement.  There are 3:

1. General Information Meeting – The purpose of this meeting is overall team communication.  This is the meeting with the entire team (teams with over 25 people should divide this meeting up based on smaller work teams).   I encourage teams to hold this meeting once per week, preferably first thing on Monday morning.  Each team member reports on the top 2-3 items they will be working on during the week, with special emphasis on any projects/initiatives that involve others around the table.  The VP or DOD leading the meeting alerts team members to any organization-wide developments that are important for development professionals to know.
2. Prospect Management Team Meeting – The purpose of this meeting is to discuss major donor strategy and outcomes.  This meeting is with every person on the team who is an identified Prospect Manager and manages a portfolio of donors.  I encourage teams to hold this meeting either every other week or monthly.   During this meeting, key successes (i.e., major gift commitments) are communicated and each Prospect Manager discusses her top 3-5 most recent activities with donors and her upcoming plans and strategies for 3-5 donors she will be working with next.
3. Individual Meetings – The purpose of these meetings is to strengthen the relationship between individual staff members and their manager.  This meeting should occur once every other week.  The agenda should change each meeting based on the team member’s annual work plan.  This meeting gives individual team members an opportunity to discuss any professional as well as personal issues that may be challenging.  Mentoring and coaching happen best during this meeting.

In addition to our work with major donors, as leaders we should bring passion, creativity, and organization to our teams.   Implementing these 3 meetings, based on the guidelines above, provides us with the structure to achieve results, increase morale, and enhance the sense of synergy among all on the team.

I’ve visited with Bruce since that first meeting at UT. Not long ago, he spoke at one of our GGTS Workshops.

Among the questions I have asked him, the one about ego still resonates with me. My question was simply, “Tell me about the role of ‘ego’ in leadership. How much does a leader need?”

His wise words still reverberate in my head. “A leader needs a tremendous ego,” he said with the omnipresent twinkle in his eye. “But the ego can’t be for self, it must be for the institution.”

If you ever wonder how you can enhance your leadership effectiveness – re-read that answer.

Twisting the phrase just a bit, I wish more non-profits could easily define their Unique Giving Proposition (UGP). The UGP is the impelling reason why a donor would make a gift to your organization. It separates your organization from the others serving similar constituencies.  Below are a few ways in which your organization could develop it’s UGP:

• Programs – Serve or meet a need in a way that other organizations don’t.  Offer a program or service that has the promise to make a meaningful difference in the lives of those you serve and is not currently being offered by other organizations.   An example might be the higher education institution that utilizes every professor and professional staff member to serve as mentors to first-year students.  Such a program would evidence uncommon concern for students during the all-important first year.
• Philanthropic Experience – Give your donors an experience that other non-profits don’t.  How is the process of giving to your organization a unique experience?  Are there multiple and thoughtful thank yous offered once a gift is received?  Does your organization host over-the-top events to engage and thank donors?  Is the process of making a gift to your organization one in which a donor could say, “Wow, I’ve never experienced anything quite like that!”
• Volunteers – Involve people that other organizations wish they could.  Who is involved in your organization?  Who serves on your Boards and on Advisory Councils?  There is the old saying, “You are known by the company you keep.”  If you want to strengthen your UGP, get more people of influence and affluence involved.

J. Paul Getty is quoted as saying, “No one can possibly achieve any real and lasting success or get rich in business by being a conformist.”

There are currently over 1.5 million registered 501 (c)3 organizations in the U.S.  Competition for the charitable gift dollar is strong.  Can your organization do more to be distinctive?  Most can.  And by establishing your UGP, you can help ensure that your distinctiveness turns into more donors and more charitable gift dollars.

With all respect to Covey. . . I think this isn’t completely right.  Here’s why:

What is it that we plan that ever ends? I mean really ends?  Stopped. Completed.  No more.  Finished.  Finito.

• A successful ask simply leads to stewardship, cultivation, and, hopefully, another more successful ask.
• The conclusion of a special event simply evolves into post event evaluation and cultivation of prospects – and planning for the next event.
• Campaigns?  Ending?  Uh, yeah, you get the drift.

Even in our larger lives, there isn’t much that we plan for that truly, really ends.  Graduation from college may mark the transition into adulthood and the world of work, but, if our professors did right by us, we have adopted an attitude of continuous learning and will be “students” for the remainder of our lives.  Rearing children never really ends.  And for many, death itself is simply a transition to another “life,” not an ending.

If we really think about it, most nothing “ends,” but everything does evolve, everything changes.

So, why not begin with the journey in mind?

How might you engage differently with donors if, instead of trying to get them to bend to the “end” you have in mind, you start by valuing the journey with them?   The journey in which everyone creates, molds, massages, compromises, enhances, adjusts, mentors, listens, teaches, learns, and, builds a stronger, more effectively institution in the service to the greater good?

When we value the journey first – when we cherish the journey as the true “end” –  we just might find that we will far exceed any goals we could set for ourselves or our institutions.

Recently, I had the privilege of sitting down with AI for an interview which was published in their ”Higher Ed Impact:  Weekly Analysis” e-newsletter.  I discussed 3 development concepts that new academic leaders must master if they are to be successful in the development process.  Even if you aren’t in higher education, these 3 concepts can help you prepare other leaders of your organization to be successful in development work.

And if you are in higher education and are interested in strengthening the ways in which you partner with deans, department chairs, or other faculty, check out Session 2 of the webcast “50 Things Every Department Chair Should Know” on March 19.  I’ll be answering 10 important questions about fundraising for academic leaders so that they will better understand, appreciate, and participate in your work!

Here, then, are my 5 principles of encouraging major gifts.   Donors will give your organization more major gifts when:

1.  They are involved in your organization.  They are asked to volunteer – on your board, on an advisory council, for a project, something.  Or perhaps you aren’t ready to ask them to serve in a formal way.  What about setting up lunch to ask them for their advice or counsel in an informal way?  The idea is that giving of themselves (their time, advice, etc.) is an important precursor to making a meaningful financial gift.  There is a saying that the most valuable thing a person can give you is their attention.  Donors who make meaningful charitable gifts, typically give attention and become involved first.

2.   Your organization’s work is in alignment with their values.  Simply put, they understand that your organization does the kind of work they believe is needed in the world.  This is the question of mission-fit.  In their eyes, your organization’s work is important.   Perhaps their family’s life was negatively impacted by a disease and they value seeing the production of a cure.  Or maybe it is the belief that having an educated society is the best possible path toward lasting global peace and prosperity.  Whatever their beliefs and values, they view your organization as helping to advance them.

3. They view your organization’s vision for the future as compelling.  Donors make meaningful gifts when they come to believe that such an investment at this point in time and for a specific purpose will advance a cause they care about in a substantial way.  Our job, then, is to create a vision – clear and convincing “proof” that their gift will serve to accomplish a big impact.

4.  They believe they will receive something else from the gift.  Let’s start with the notion that a major donor believes she should give to you because it is simply a good thing to do.  Most donors hold this belief at some level or they wouldn’t give at all.  However, to believe that such altruism is the only reason for their giving is a mistake.  Most major donors are encouraged to make large gifts based on the presence of additional benefits.  What are those benefits?  It could be personal/familial recognition, it could be wanting to give at a level which gains them entrance into a particular social circle, it could be to honor a teacher or other influential person.  Our work is to know them well enough to uncover and address these additional needs.

5.  They are asked by the right person. In my experience, the case for support is important.  The timing of the ask is important.  The location of the ask is important.  But the person doing the asking is critical.   Who has influence with the donor?  Who can encourage the donor in a way that will be heard?  Who is a leader through their own giving?  Answering such questions is key to choosing the right person to be involved in the giving conversation.

Our job as development professionals is not to raise money.  Our job as development professionals is to create environments within which donors are encouraged to act generously.  If we understand and act upon these 5 principles regularly, our organizations will receive more major gifts and will attract more donors.