If we want the most helpful evaluative process for our development program, an important first question to answer is, “what are we using as our comparison?”
For example, we might make the following evaluations,
“Overall, our fundraising results haven’t been very productive.” Or,
“We are making great progress with our fundraising.”
But, neither of those evaluations is especially helpful until we understand the response to the “compared to what?” question.
How did we arrive at our belief about our strong productivity, or our lack of progress?
One point of comparison could be our perceptions of how our peer or aspirant organizations might be performing. But that type of “us vs. them” comparison has 2 fundamental problems:
First, while our list of peers or aspirants may be filled with organizations that have a lot in common with us, there almost always is significant and important differences – especially for our development results. For example, if the average tenure of the CEO is 4 years with your peers, and your CEO started 4 months ago and has no development experience, your results may dip by comparison because of that difference.
Second, we train our minds to assess “the average” of a group and look for opportunities to be “above average” – which isn’t the most compelling or aspirational comparison for your organization.
So, while it can seem logical to immediately compare ourselves to “what everyone else is doing,” that comparison, usually, is not the most helpful.
Instead, when attempting to evaluate our progress, we should start with three questions:
- Where do we want to go – what are the fundraising goals we need to achieve to fulfill our mission and achieve an exciting vision? What are our aims?
- What are the 2-3 metrics that will best describe how much progress we are making toward our fundraising goals in support of that mission and vision?
- What is our current starting point with respect to those 2 or 3 primary metrics?
If you want to gauge real progress and productivity, it’s far less helpful to compare ourselves against what everyone else is doing or not doing.
To get a far better sense of how we are doing, it’s about where we are today, where we plan to go tomorrow, and how we can easily translate the amount of progress we are making on that journey.
