Involving senior management

Photos: Cottonbro on Pexels and (insert) Christina @ wocintechchat.com on Unsplash

This area of the site was written for very experienced trust fundraisers.

This is one of the harder things to do, in some charities. Senior managers are very different animals and it’s well worth reading the webpage on “Managing senior managers”.

The dangers are: 

  1. They avoid speaking to you until late in the process, so you don’t know where you are
  2. When they get involved late, they try and radically change what you’re doing 
  3. When they get involved late on, they turn out to have very lukewarm support – meaning that the project is at risk of going of the rails when it faces a challenge

What you need from them to: (1) be available early and (2) be supportive.

Initial conversations

During the evaluation, you need: (1) to gauge their level of support; and (2) to get them to commit to a model that can be fleshed out.

It’s better for someone within Fundraising to gauge their support, because they are more likely to be objective than a Services manager, who’s (hopefully) excited to be working the bid up and who may not be as sensitive to these things as a trust fundraiser / fundraising senior manager.

On the other hand, a wider range of people can get a commitment on the model. The best way to do this is something that shows a degree of commitment of their time, because that indicates that they care about the work. So: either a sit down meeting, or reading and actively commenting on a 1 page synopsis of the work.

The best is for them to either be proposing the work or to have made one or two changes to the model, because people buy in more to things they have proposed changes to (as Professor of Influence Robert Cialdini recommends).

Changes to the idea due to fundraising feasibility study

The trusts feasibility study will quite often come back to say things that haven’t come out of Services: we can’t do the work at the proposed scale; we’d like to break it into bits and try applications for them separately; the key funder will only come on board with the following changes…

It’s a risk to leave to chance the senior manager’s buy-in to significant changes. You might have unknowingly opened a can of worms, or left them feeling snubbed because their idea has been compromised.

At this stage, a quick word in the corridor or feedback from the Services manager is lower risk – you’ve previously established there’s commitment, this is just being on the safe side and ensuring the shape of the project is right before you develop it.