Customer Reviews

Ten Steps to Fundraising Success: Choosing the Right Strategy for Your Organization

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I was extremely impressed with the content and format! I have read other fundraising books and found the ten steps to be one of the best, a necessary guide for anyone involved in a not-for-profit organization's operations. It concisely captures the necessary fundamentals involved in successfully empowering an organization. The CD-ROM was a great bonus and it was quite easy to manuever through the comprehensive worksheets and exercises - I especially liked "Evaluating your Executive Director" and the other assessment tools. I highly recommend this guide!

This workbook was OK. It is a companion book to another book the author wrote: The Five Strategies for Fundraising Success (ISBN: 0787949949). I think there is some good content included here. But I think the writing is just too muddied. It comes close to be a worthwhile read, but it misses its mark. At least in my humble opinion.

I believe there is one and only one fundraising process or strategy that all nonprofits use to support their annual budgets and strategic plans. That process includes an Annual Giving Program (AGP). And it may include special fundraising campaigns such as capital or endowment campaigns. I disagree with the author that there are five strategies to successfully raising funds for nonprofits. He calls them GIVES: growth, involvement, visibility, efficiency, and stability. See page 38 of the workbook. These are not strategies. They are stages in a nonprofit's life.

A newborn or fledgling nonprofit will focus its AGP on growing its donor base (growth). A toddler nonprofit will continue its growth efforts since those efforts must ALWAYS be performed by a nonprofit at any stage of its life. Donors come and go, so efforts to attract new donors are always required. But a toddler nonprofit will start to nurture some of its donors in order to build a relationship with them. This requires getting some donors "involved." As a toddler nonprofit ages into a young adult it must continue its growth and involvement efforts. But it probably will also work toward becoming "visible" in the community. And young adult nonprofits eventually want to be recognized as being good at what they do: they seek "efficiency." And as a nonprofit becomes efficient, it develops a comfort zone for itself (stability).

The bulk of this book is nothing more than an application of basic strategic planning principles to the AGP of a nonprofit. Unfortunately this book doesn't even get that correct. The following ten steps are my version of the approach I think this book was TRYING to convey:

1. Establish a benchmark: What does your NPO do to raise funds now?
2. Evaluate the benchmark: Determine what are your organizaton's fundraising strengths and weaknesses.
3. Set a new benchmark: Establish higher fundraising goals.
4. Formulate a better fundraising game plan or strategy: Create options for a new game plan.
5. Evaluate the options: Consider your organization's strengths and weaknesses, and consider costs and benefits each option will provide.
6. Pick the best strategy: Choose the best options that will provide the biggest bang for the buck.
7. Convert your strategy into objectives: Strategies are fine, but the completion of concrete tasks (objectives) is what is important.
8. Establish tactics to meet objectives: Create action item lists that will force you to meet objectives.
9. Set deadlines for completing the action item lists.
10. Monitor progress.

I purchased this workbook back in 2004 when I was acquainting myself with nonprofit fundraising while working as a consultant to nonprofits. There are a lot of pencilings in my copy of this book because I found it to be illogical in many places. Basically, I found this tome to be very poorly written and outlined.

If you are looking for books on strategic planning that might help you in your nonprofit organization's endeavors, then consider taking a look at: 60 Minute Strategic Plan (ISBN: 0978645200), Strategic Planning for Nonprofits (ISBN: 0471445819), or Strategic Planning for Public or Nonprofits (ISBN: 0787967556). And if you are looking for a nice book on AGPs, then consider taking a look at Fundraising Fundamentals (ISBN: 0471209872). I have posted book reviews on Amazon for all four of these books. 3 stars!