Every team needs great reports. Successful and effective reporting is essential to advancement efforts. Your team’s report framework may be different than others, but you should have some set principles. I’ve written about the critical importance of great reporting for operations efforts.
The look and feel of reports should be similar in font, format, etc. to make users more comfortable.
A simple way to determine if your team’s reporting environment works is to determine if it is FACTual. In this approach, reports should be:
Formatted. Users trust data (and experiences overall) that are consistently delivered. Just as a brand promise helps ensure that, say, every Coca-Cola will taste the same as the next (and apparently make the consumer happy), the report consumer should trust the facts and understand the familiar formatting.
Accurate. Users must receive accurate reports. In addition to reports relying on tested programming to yield consistent results, “accurate” reporting also requires that all users share common definitions and understanding.
Complete. Reports (and the reporting environment) must contain all records and details expected by the user and defined in the parameters of the report. This principle requires that data be reported from a central, comprehensive source.
Timely. The ideal reporting environment requires that information be readily available. In the absence of timely reporting, many offices will resort to highly inefficient, hybrid reporting solutions that increase room for error and inconsistent formatting.
Want to see how your reporting environment stacks up? Check out my “confidence calculator” to test whether your reporting environment is FACTual.
The trend toward online, and more specifically, mobile direct response fundraising continues. My colleague and mobile strategist, Molly Kelly, blogged about this very point recently (click here for Molly Kelly’s Mobile Donation Form Blog). Of course, big campaigns are still won with the biggest of gifts. However, if you’re strategies aren’t engaging 20- and 30-somethings who are immersed in mobile access and apps, your current participation rates and future campaigns will suffer.
If you’re having a challenge getting investment into mobile technology, take a look at Molly’s piece. Mobile donations: no longer a fad; they’re a fact!
In the last few weeks, I’ve been interviewed regarding trends in our industry’s technology sector and how this will affect the future of fundraising. We have a challenge: we don’t have the funding for the technology we want to use for fundraising. It’s a market issue. At the same time, we are faced with changing trends among 20- and 30-something donors, new, innovative, and possibly disruptive technologies, and a concentration and transfer of wealth that’s nearly unique in human history.
Have a look at this article in TechTarget to get a sense of how our industry is shaping up. And, be on the lookout for additional posts on these vitally important topics.
Check out this fun session here. We covered a number of nuanced situations that affect our ability to handle data more securely. Those little computers people carry around in their pockets–with access to, more or less, the entirety of human knowledge via tools like Google–create some unexpected issues. Breaches and data sharing complicate matters. It’s a fast-moving world we are trying to control, and this session pin-pointed a few tricks to put in place.
$1 Billion Reasons You Can’t Always Get What You Want.
$1 billion–it sounds like a lot, doesn’t it? But, we have a problem: fundraising technology demand (in the form of fundraisers’ expectations) is much greater than fundraising technology supply (in the form of vendor offerings). Put another way, our industry’s annual $1 billion fundraising technology budget doesn’t get us what we want.
Cannon Estimates our Industry Spends Around $1 Billion a Year on Tech, Which Isn’t Enough.
This demand derives from consumer experience. On our way to work, we all have computers in our pockets and access to billions of dollars of free technology, software and online experiences from the likes of Facebook, Amazon, and Google. Then, we clock in, boot up, and, voila…1997 is delivered by our 6-year old computers. We suffer from what I call the iPhone problem: we want work resources based on our consumer experiences, but these are far too expensive to replicate given our fundraising technology market and budgets. It’s relative deprivation at a high, costly level. It results in wasteful workarounds, decentralized data and systems, and dissatisfied end users. And, in the end, these things keep us from raising more money.
Why are we in this predicament? The short answer is there is not enough incentive to supply great fundraising technology that matches consumers’ expectations. Why don’t we have enough incentive? That part is a little more complicated. One might charge (as I did in February) that our industry is hamstrung by narrow thinking around investment. Another might suggest that, while the industry appears quite large, it is unsophisticated and relatively immature. A third might notice that our industry isn’t really large enough as a market sector to warrant the kinds of innovation our colleague-consumers would like.
All of these observations inform the infographic above, which depicts the problem: we are typically a $300 billion industry per annum that can only spend about $1 billion on technology each year. When we consider how much fundraising is done without the benefit of technology (referred to here as “plate and gate” efforts that reflect more grassroots, manual efforts prevalent in certain religious organizations and new and smaller nonprofits), then calculate what we get to spend, then determine where we get to spend it, the market just isn’t that big because our budgets are so small. Note that even a very strong 2014 is likely to bump up available dollars by around $250 million…$1.25 billion is better but still not enough.
Of course, there are some exceptions. Leading software providers do their best and it is, frankly, often good enough. I’ve helped organizations leverage nearly every fundraising system and they are all passable. These systems collect addresses, store gifts, provide institutional memory, and support programs. Are they efficient and user friendly? Not particularly. Are their add-ons, such as reporting tools and online functionality, what we’d like? Not usually. But, behavior and poor user adoption are often bigger problems than the technology itself.
The issue is not with the core functionality supplied by the market; these tools do what is “necessary”. However, they tend not to deliver on what we define as “neat”. What’s “neat” is shaped by what Apple, Google, and a bunch of other billion dollar corporations bring to the market. It feels like we are destined to have a large gap between demand and supply.
While it’s unlikely you will be able to re-direct the market’s “Invisible Hand”, there are three steps that can help:
Manage expectations. You need to persuade your users that you don’t get to invest like a Silicon Valley start-up, so the tools are a little less nifty. But, they still (should!) work. Convince team members that what you have supports their programs or make commitments to better align what you have with current needs.
Illustrate value. Where you see a gap in programs or productivity because of a lack of functionality, quantify the real and opportunity costs. Are donors failing to complete online transactions because of poorly designed forms? Are reports re-worked in Excel at the cost of hundreds of hours a year that could be focused on new donations? Show how the gap deserves to be filled with better technology.
Do-It-Yourself. Out-of-the-box solutions will solve some needs, but not all. You may need to partner with specialists and experts to address an opportunity that vanilla systems can’t handle. The market for innovative solutions in between and beyond core systems functions may be in reach, but the same vendor that delivered the vanilla solution may not be able to deliver the customizations you need.
Our industry is trapped in a Catch-22: to get funds, we need appropriate technology, but we can’t get the technology we need without these funds. Or, more simply: $1 billion isn’t enough. The fact remains that many of us will have to make the most of what the market has to offer. Those of you with means and vision to implement more custom solutions will likely need to create your own solution when expectations are high and ROI is clear.
This year’s CASE Gift and Records Conference is underway and there is a lot happening in this space. Gone are the days of rote typing. Paper files aren’t going away yet, but digital imaging is on the move. Here are three great takeaways so far:
Outsourcing is the new black. While it’s not for everyone, it’s on everyone’s mind.
Metrics can work for the back office. Having data gets your team some skin in the game (and can help improve outcomes).
Perception and exception management remains a core challenge. If we can control the anecdotal distractions, we can better serve our donors.
Have a look here to see the prezi I presented on what’s next for the industry. Happy fundraising!
P.S. For those at the session, click here for a listing of charity registration firms.
Jennifer Liu-Cooper and I had a chance to present some ideas on becoming more persuasive in the office place. Have a look here and let us know what you think.
The BBCON conference brings together professionals from across the globe to discuss how to leverage technology (and related processes) to support our vital missions. Within each fundraising team, integrating functions and increasing results requires thoughtful collaboration and shared understanding. Technology, communication and training, and organizational culture issues must be aligned to help the team spin like a top.
Click here for the presentation materials from the forum. And, good luck with your efforts to integrate processes and perceptions.
Different groups perceive fundraising operations differently, and this greatly affects advancement services.
How do I know this? While it’s an intuitive aspect of fundraising operations work, the data are pretty clear. I completed a study in the last few weeks. The survey is an extension of work I conducted for An Executive’s Guide to Fundraising Operations, which explored how differently fundraising executives and operations professionals perceive their data, reporting, technology, and processes. Here is a summary of those 2011 responses. These show that, on average, operations professionals are more confident in their work than their bosses.
Cannon’s study shows the executives aren’t as confident in their operations as those doing the work.
My July 2013 study focused on understanding how those with and without a “portfolio of prospects” perceived their organization’s operations and their inclusion of operations in their work. A group of 334 respondents (two-thirds of which maintain a prospect portfolio) shared their perceptions.
The results mirror the responses from 2011. In general, those with a portfolio of prospects were less satisfied with their operations than those without a portfolio (typically, operations professionals) were confident in their services.
The most interesting contrast in the 2013 study was not simply a difference in confidence (as above), but just how much more confident operations professionals were in their services and their inclusion in strategic planning compared to the satisfaction of their colleagues with prospect portfolios. That is, operations professionals are fooling themselves a bit and, conversely, those with prospect portfolios are likely being a bit harsh. You will also notice much less satisfaction in technology and reporting tools among gift officers than operations professionals. (Click here to find the detailed study.)
Cannon’s 2013 study shows that frontline and operations professionals have much different perceptions.
So, what do we make of this? Both groups need to take a walk in the others’ shoes. Operations are probably better than gift officers think and could be improved more than operations professionals would like to believe. Communication is essential, too. We need to work on managing expectations, while delivering as solid an operations environment as our resources, hard work, and good thinking allow.
There are more recommended next steps about dealing with this new data in the report. Click here to read more.
