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This webpage is for trust fundraisers with three or more years’ experience. Beginners should USE THIS PAGE INSTEAD.
Review your strategy
Most people’s strategies seem to end up in the drawer, bar the KPIs and income targets agreed with management. There are a few related issues, here:
1. The pressures of the work
We’re all busy, usually and expected to be productive. Stepping back runs against that.
The chances are that we’re doing what we’re doing because we think it works. Strategies represent course corrections, or trying out new ideas. It’s hard enough to meet target doing what we know, never mind experimenting with something else. My experience as a manager is that it’s been easier for some staff to say they’d like to try out a whizz bang new idea that may raise more and be interesting to do than to follow through when the chips are really down.
However, we aren’t always going in the right direction. Going hard in the wrong direction isn’t an intelligent idea, if you stop and think about it. It’s hard with our work to see clearly what’s going on at any speed, but the adage “fail fast, fail small” is often good practice. That means reviews.
As to the new ideas that we’re never going to implement, as a manager/as someone coming up with them or myself, I need to push my reports/myself as to whether we really believe in this enough to change.
2. The “sunk cost” fallacy
Once people have committed to something, they want to keep going. Having a clear direction is a good thing. However, the sunk cost fallacy is a tendency in people’s reasoning to keep going simply because you’ve put a lot of effort into that approach. If you think about it for a moment, that’s clearly nothing more than an emotional bias. The past is past. If your project doesn’t work, you’ve already lost what you put into it and going any further in the hope of recouping it may be just throwing more good time after bad.
When you look at “white elephant” projects like the aircraft Concord (which famously went massively over budget and never came anywhere close to making money) it’s easy to wonder what on Earth were they doing? But – what about your strategy to increase the number of cold applications, target that different kind of funder, prospect for contacts at the charity? Are you facing teething problems or pursuing the wrong basic idea?
3. Biased thinking, reflecting your buy-in
I don’t know about you, but my experience at the start of the year at some charities can sometimes be to look at the budget and think “No idea where that money’s coming from,” then to try things out and find my confidence has gone up – until later, when I start to see the fruits of my work. If you compare people’s level of confidence before and after they’ve made a commitment, it goes up notably. That doesn’t mean you were right, though – it means you made your best guess and if you weren’t sure before, you need to keep an eye on where things are.
4. We were never that serious about strategy in the first place
Many trust fundraisers are do-ers much more than strategists and a lot of the strategies I’ve seen were the ideas of their senior managers, not themselves. The product of maybe a day’s work, that is somehow supposed to shape the next year or more’s work, is it any surprise if it’s not a document of great interest, weighed against pressing deadlines?
I think the answer to this is to fight to make the strategy about things you actually need to know and to be rigorously realistic when you set it down. If it’s about important, real world improvements rather than pipe dreams, you’ll be more committed.