Things are Looking Up

It appears as if things are beginning to look up. I’m not talking about financial changes or return to “normal” from an economic perspective. I’m talking about the vantage point of fundraisers as they look into the future over the next 18 months. 

The Association for Fundraising Professionals released its third fundraising confidence survey recently. The survey asked 14 questions about how optimistic fundraisers are regarding their goals, their opportunities with donors, what they view as their donors’ interests/abilities, as well as other related items.  AFP conducted the same survey twice in 2020 and again here in the mid part of 2021. What they found was dramatic increases in the confidence that fundraisers have been meeting goals and having donors be optimistic about fundraising in general.

One thing that I found interesting in the article (which was something many people said a while ago including myself as the pandemic began) is that donor retention was the most important aspect over the next six months. During the beginning parts of 2020, many of us who have been through different situations in our career indicated that staying close to the people who believe in your organization the most is/was critically important. That seems to still be true. 

The next two biggest priorities for gift officers to deal with are changes that we saw escalate during the COVID-19 pandemic. The first was how do we better our communications through virtual/online opportunities and also how would direct mail be incorporated into the future? Those are outreach communication questions that are tactical that certainly support the idea of retaining donors.

I think having a workforce that feels better about their future is incredibly exciting. However, the devil is in the details. The ability for all of us to continue building relationships, listening to donor input, talking about our missions, and most importantly engendering relationships based on trust will really be the winning solution to continuing Philanthropy for the rest of this calendar year.