The Silver Lining: Pandemic the needed Crisis to Develop a Sustainable Fundraising Practice

It is said that to bring about a change, facing a crisis can be a great opportunity to create the required sense of urgency to act. The current pandemic brought serious crisis for many civil society and humanitarian organizations in their (rather unsustainable) fundraising practices: many of the individual donors dropped their contributions, many companies supporting humanitarian causes stopped their support, and many institutional donors and foundations re-directed and re-distributed their available funding to directly focus on combating the impacts of the COVID-19.

Facing this crisis could be the first step in bringing about the much-needed change in the fundraising practices of the development sector that are, at present, far from sustainable. The emergence of a sense of urgency that is needed to develop a sustainable fundraising practice, could be the silver lining of this pandemic for many civil society and humanitarian organizations.

This sense of urgency forces us to examine the realities of the fundraising landscape: A landscape in which we – civil society organizations – are competing with each other over limited sources of funding, regardless of our domain of work or the fact that our missions might be?complementary. Moreover, out of facing this reality, we might be able to identity major opportunities.

The Power of the Collective!

To move towards more sustainable fundraising, we need to create a guiding coalition, from within and outside our organization, with enough power and expertise to lead the needed change. This should be a group that can optimally work together as a team and lead the organizations throughout the process of change. This guiding coalition needs to have the pulse of the market, understand the dynamics of the policies impacting the landscape of funding, and predict the upcoming venues of funding. And perhaps even more importantly, it needs to be creative, able to think out of the box, and utilize existing skills and resources available to the organization in an innovative way.

The power of this collective, leads us to the next step: developing a vision that helps directing the change effort towards sustainable fundraising and corresponding strategies that help achieving that vision of change. This vision cannot be business-as-usual. We need to re-imagine, re-invent, and re-design our vision and strategies to construct the base for a sustainable fundraising.

Communicate, Communicate and Communicate more

When this vision and corresponding strategies of change are developed, they need to be widely communicated; not only with our staff but also with the broader community of our stakeholders. We need to use every vehicle possible to constantly communicate the new vision and strategies, and the guiding coalition has to act as a role model to the staff and community with regards to the behavior associated with the new vision. If the guiding coalition continues to behave as if it is business-as-usual, our change efforts are doomed to fail.

For bringing about the change for our sustainable fundraising, we need to empower our organization and staff for broad-based action. We need to get rid of obstacles and change our systems or structures that undermine the change vision. We need to encourage risk taking and consider non-traditional ideas, activities and actions.

The Small Glimpses of Happiness!

It is in our nature to look for glimpses of happiness and satisfaction – to look for small achievements and short-term wins. The fine line between individuals or organizations that thrive and the ones that fail is that the former generates these glimpses of happiness and short-term wins. And in order to generate these short-term wins, we need to plan visible improvement in our performances and, after realizing these improvements, visibly recognizing and rewarding those who made the wins possible. Make sure the little wins are seen, shared and celebrated.

With the increased credibility obtained from those short-term wins, we can start changing all systems, structures and policies that are a burden to our transformative vision.?By consolidating gains and producing more change, we will be reinvigorating the process with new projects, themes and change agents.

Shifting the Fundraising Paradigm: Anchoring New Approaches in Organizational Culture

Lastly, we can move to anchoring new approaches to sustainable fundraising into the culture of our organizations. We create better performance through donor- and mission-oriented behavior, more and better leadership and more effective management. We can articulate the connections between new behaviors and organizational success and develop means to ensure leadership development and succession.?

The current pandemic has had an enormous impact on the development sector. In fact, the degree of this impact is yet to be fully realized. What can already be observed, however, is that business-as-usual will not be the way forward in many domains.

Our understanding of philanthropy and our practices in fundraising require a much-needed change and this crisis has created the urgency which is the first stage for bringing about that change. The organizations which seize this opportunity have a higher chance of sustaining their work and impact throughout the pandemic and beyond.

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