How COVID-19 Has Changed Fundraising – and How It Has Not

by Diane Marty, M.A.L.S., CFRE
Senior Search Consultant, The Moran Company
“We Find Great Nonprofit Executives”

Since March, numerous clients have asked – by text, email, and panicked phone call – “What do we do about fundraising?” When leaders begin asking questions like this, it’s important to understand the context driving the question. So let’s start with the most often-expressed concerns.

Individual, corporate, and foundation donor priorities will change during COVID-19. Yes, some have and others will – including increased focus on social justice funding. Yet our donors have always possessed that prerogative. As with pre-pandemic times, you have to continue earning donor attention and trust through transparent communication, financial stewardship, and impact demonstration. Agency messaging is critical, and donors can tell the difference between authentic, relevant communications and those that are simply mimicking a trending message. Tell your organization’s narrative of purpose and impact, not someone else’s.

Healthcare agencies will gain the lion’s share, and I work in [not healthcare]. Still, the everyday services your organization provides remain important and worthwhile to your champion donors, regardless of where your agency falls within the Giving USA pie chart of charitable allocations. If you’re not a religious organization, you’ve been receiving less than the lion’s share for quite some time now. If you are with a religious organization, an April 30 Pew Research Center survey reported 25% of U.S. adult respondents “say their faith has become stronger because of the coronavirus pandemic.” As with pre-pandemic times, “retention attention” should be a top priority regardless of your service sector.

We’re just focused on surviving – we can’t think strategically when we don’t know what’s going to happen next week, next month or next year. Yes, there’s a lot of unsurety. Yet no one has ever had all the answers, nor have there been risk-free alternatives for change. Pre-pandemic, leaders made decisions based on the best information available. This hasn’t changed, only now shorter-term strategies will suffice for navigating unprecedented conditions. Concentrate on doing what you do – providing services to your beneficiary constituents – in the best way you can under present circumstances. As with pre-pandemic times, nonprofits will continue to rely on their resiliency and creativity.

To address each of these concerns, keep up another well-advised practice:  rely on frontline staff to share what your constituents are experiencing and how your agency programs mitigate or ameliorate affective conditions. A May-June 2019 HBR article highlighted research showing that decentralization, or providing more discretion to frontline operations, was characteristic of companies surviving macros shocks, because those were the companies able to be “more aggressive in adjusting their product offerings in response to changes in demand.” Similarly for nonprofits, place the same faith in your frontline staff as you ask your donors to:  namely, trust them to advise operational changes to create and deliver impact. Your job as the leader who retained their talents remains to leverage their evolving services and solutions in powerful narratives to secure enabling resources.

In summary: As long as you remain transparent fiscal stewards and continue services at any level to your clients/customers/collaborators, you probably have stories of perseverance, permutation, and progress to share with donative hearts and minds. Pair those with a direct ask for support. That is (and always has been) the magic fundraising formula.

Only the method we use to make charitable requests may look different as we connect by phone, email, or video conference in order to limit in-person meetings. The silver lining is that you may even be able to reach more donors when your time is not spent on the road traveling from place to place. Time gained can also be used to thank supporters.

So what do you do about fundraising during COVID? Just as during pre-pandemic times – in fact, dating all the way back to Aristotle – it starts with making sure you have the right individuals doing the right things at the right time to do the job well. And then trust and support them in doing the job you hired them to do.

And if you don’t have that right person? We’re happy to help. Recruiters at The Moran Company have decades of nonprofit leadership and fundraising experience. Contact us today for a free 30-minute consultation.

© 2020  The Moran Company, “We find great nonprofit executives.” We specialize in searches for nonprofit executive directors, directors of development/fundraising staff, and other top nonprofit leadership. www.morancompany.com