The Aha! Moment in Campaign Management October 8, 2009

Every other Wednesday I teach a GiftWorks Campaign Management course to our customers.  And every other week I get the extreme satisfaction of hearing people have the Aha! moment. 

Do you know that moment?  When you finally see the big picture that brings clarity to all of your busyness?  When you have a major insight that can bring everything you do to a higher level?

Here's how the Aha! moment often comes about when teaching GiftWorks Campaign Management. 

First, we review the GiftWorks definitions of Campaigns, Funds and Appeals and how nonprofits can plan and chart their fundraising efforts better in light of these definitions.  Your campaign is your overall fundraising objective - from an Annual Campaign for your operating budget to a multi-year Capital Campaign for a new building and new programs.  GiftWorks Funds align with your budget line items - General Fund for unrestriced operating and specific funds for restricted purposes.  GiftWorks Appeals are established for your specific means of asking for support - each mailing is an appeal, your phone-a-thon is an appeal, an event can be an appeal, or a series of direct asks can be an appeal.

Then we show how we can set up the plan in GiftWorks and ensure that resulting gifts have at least these three fields (Campaign, Fund and Appeal) captured consistently.

Now we get to the fun part:  By planning and tracking this information in GiftWorks, you have new power to actually understand what is happening in your organization.  In just a few clicks, you can see how your phone-a-thon is trending from year to year.  You can know which solicitation letter generated better results.  You can see which activities are effective and which might be a poor use of your valuable time.  You can check in seconds how your board's annual giving is trending and see if your staff has met their 100% campaign participation goal.  You can tell if your active volunteers are more likely to donate than your inactive friends.  And on and on.

When people see that they can actually have the power to UNDERSTAND and KNOW and make their important decisions accordingly, that's when the Aha! moment occurs, and it's a great feeling. 

Comments

I see many AHA! moments with my clients and technology. When nonprofit development staff invest the time in "training" in order to learn to manage easy but powerful software like GiftWorks, the rewards are astounding.
In the new world of fundraising (post Fall 2008) best practices will be critical for success. The most fundamental best practice is analysis of campaigns and goal setting based on those analyses. GiftWorks and similar products show us the way.