Episode 234: How Philanthropy Offices and Leaders Can Appropriately Push an Organization Toward Needed Strategy
Right now, too many nonprofits are frozen in place—boards and CEOs so paralyzed by funding cuts and political chaos that they’ve stopped thinking strategically altogether. When organizations stall, donors lose confidence, talented development staff grow frustrated, and transformational gifts slip through the cracks. In this episode, we unpack four practical ways fundraising professionals can respectfully ‘manage up’—from reframing strategy as a leadership duty to enlisting donor voices and phasing in focused roadmaps. You’ll hear real-world examples of how anonymous donor feedback and targeted feasibility studies have reignited momentum and unlocked six- and seven-figure gifts. Tune in to discover how to break the paralysis and turn chaos into catalytic, strategic philanthropy.
Welcome to another edition of Around with Randall, your weekly podcast for making your nonprofit more effective for your community. And here is your host, the CEO and founder of Hallett Philanthropy, Randall Hallett.
It's a wonderful day. Every day, hopefully for you. But in this case, for me. For you taking a few minutes of your time to join me, Randall, on this edition of a run with Randall, we want to delve into one of the issues I'm seeing quite often right now when it comes to driving philanthropy in particular, probably at the highest levels.
As we talk about often transformational philanthropy, opportunities on a number of zeroes are where the decimal point fits, but where people's gifts match their heart, their intent, what they really want to accomplish. That issue that I seem to be finding more often than not is with the merging of philanthropy into strategic planning. And really, what I'm addressing here is the fact that strategic planning may not exist in the world in which we live with chaos in Washington, a lot of decisions being reached, certainly, that those decisions are affecting nonprofits across the United States.
Well, I can't change what's going on in Washington. One voice, one vote. And I'm not sure anybody's listening. They tend not to listen in my own house, let alone anywhere else I can have a conversation with you about what we can do to press strategic planning initiatives. What I'm discovering more and more often is, is that organizations are not stagnant, not slowly moving.
They are stuck that people are terrified of what's going on. And what's beginning to become more evident is that boards and CEOs, instead of adjusting strategy to meet long term goals, are just stopping the organization from doing anything strategic at all. They tend to say, well, we're going to hold right here. And so they pull back on initiatives.
They pull back on staffing. I am not indicating that decisions aren't necessarily important when it comes to making finance decisions because of immense revenue cuts from, let's say, government funding. We're also watching donors pull back somewhat because they're trying to figure out what's going on as well. And I'm not saying the board can adjust for that, as in terms of their fiduciary responsibilities.
But when there is a paralyzation, when organizations are paralyzed, then philanthropy becomes paralyzed with them. Donors don't want to invest 99.99% of time just because, well, it's a good thing. What's the strategy? What's what are we trying to do behind that? Today we want to delve into how we can, as development professionals, fundraising professionals, push our CEO and our board with respect and with appropriateness, as well as the boards that we work with, to be more strategic.
So if you're looking for some basic things about strategic planning in philanthropy, that's episode 225. Excuse me, 25 you can go back and listen to that. And if you want to find out, how do I find the right board members who will push the things we believe in strategy, engagement, introductions, things of that nature. Episode 197 deals with how to be more purposeful when it comes to board member selection.
In the process, they're up. And then here recently in episode 224, we defined strategy. I'm not going to really relive any of those maybe small pieces. I want to talk about what we can say, what we can do that's respectful but also affirming the idea of we need strategy to be able to go out and raise money. So let's start with the bigger picture and then we'll get into the tactical.
Why is this so important? Well, some of you may be experiencing this. Some of you may have experienced it at other times. Is that when there's a lack of strategy, strategic planning, a vision, where are we going when there's no plan? What happens inside of the philanthropy world are what I would think of is three things. The first is, is that our donors become disengaged.
They're looking for clarity, direction for. Or they want a sense of confidence that the organization is going to do what it says. And when we say, well, you know, we're not we're just going to hold on for a year and see what happens. It's really hard for us to develop relationships that are meaningful and transformational, that drive towards philanthropy opportunities.
Number two is, is that internal credibility erodes when philanthropy begins to drive too much or the fact that fundraising is just become so reactive to the immediate needs. It's not strategic at all. What ends up happening is internally philanthropy leaders. So your chief development officer, major gift officer, principal gift officer, executive director, however, you want to tell yourself that upper middle management, they might look for another opportunity.
And those who are on the front lines may not move quite as quickly, but they become more frustrated because they're talking with people or saying, well, what are you trying to do about this? And there are no answers. And so our internal assets, our people become stagnant as well. And when that happens, I tend to find that people go.
I'm either pushing too hard and I'm alienating people, or I'm just bored and want to move on. There are exceptions. There are certainly people who aren't really interested in raising any money, but like the paycheck, I'm not saying that's a predominant number of our industry, but we all can think of times where like, I really want what they do all day.
And that's because there's no strategy, no accountability, no direction. So internal decay erosion is number two. Number three is, is that there are missed opportunities. Philanthropy is always to me on a timeline. The problem or challenges is that there are multiple timelines at any one moment. There's our timeline from a philanthropic perspective, driving those discussions, conversations, relationships, looking for passion for people.
There's the organization timeline, meaning they're maybe operating on a totally different timeframe in terms of what they're trying to do. But the most important are donor timelines. And if you don't have a strategy for a long period of time and you see kind of an internal, you kind of erosion, and on top of that, donors begin to disengage.
What you end up with is donors are making decisions to give money away to other places, that the momentum that an organization needs to build in the community is lost. And if people really want to give, they'll find another place to give. They distanced themselves and we can only carry that relationship so long without there being some type of high level philanthropic strategic investment conversation.
Where do we get the gift or not, that people are interested in what we're trying to do as an organization? I don't think I have to spend any time just but a mention about whose responsibility this is. It is the CEO and most more importantly, the board's responsibility. It's their fiduciary responsibility to set a strategy and vision that produces better opportunities, growth, development, more precision outcomes.
Impact. Based on the mission. But the question becomes, what do we do when there's nothing when literally somebody is so petrified, the CEO, the board, they just are stagnant. They're paralyzed. There are really four things, maybe four and a half, that I would say are things we can affirmatively do, things we can say, things that we can introduce that would not be overstepping our bounds, but yet would help the organization towards strategy.
Thought before jumping into those, I want to spend just a second talking about overstepping those bounds. As frustrated as we might be as challenged as we might feel, as just sometimes just we're beguiled by what are we doing here? There is an organizational chart and organizational structure. It's not our job to say to the board or the CEO, you're not doing your job.
Even if it's true. It's not our job to undercut our CEO with the board. I have a client that I work with where the head of their philanthropy area is incredibly frustrated by the lack of strategy. And in doing so, we had a conversation recently where they indicated he or she indicated that they were having outside communication without the CEO's knowledge of the CEO's governance board.
And I said, you have to be careful. It's not your board. And some of the things that were being said were not positive. There is a balancing act here. What I'm advocating in these four, four and a half things to kind of think about is working into the system, not around the system. If you are finding yourself working against your CEO, against some of the things that they're trying to accomplish in undercutting them, then you, your, your part of the problem and our job is to push through the process and help them get to where they can go.
They eventually can't get there. Sometimes you got to leave, but I don't want to create an environment or an advocacy where we're working outside of the process. So let's jump into inside the process. What are some things that we can do? Number one and now we move into the tactical. Number one is to reframe strategic planning as a as a leadership duty, which we all know it is.
We know that the board has to set vision. The CEO is a part of that conversation, and that begins at execution. So how do we do that? From the philanthropic perspective? It sounds like things maybe. Is this our donors? I have a number of donors that I work with that are really ready to give. They've indicated that the timing of what they're trying to accomplish is good.
But they need something to give. Two, it's a affirmation that unrestricted giving is, for the most part, larger dollar figures. And number two, that we're doing our job i.e. building relationships, listening to our donors, talking them about what's going on, talking about the community. But our donors are indicating a lack of connection to that the organization, because there's no strategy.
And then you can from that, frame it with the leaders to understand things like risk mitigation, opportunity cost and institutional reputation. If these donors don't sense that we have a plan, it's my thought listening to them, that they will not undercut us, but they can choose to give to other places. We're back to that sense of timing. You can also reference the fact that maybe a donor has chosen to give to another institution because they have a plan, or other institutions that stayed stagnant, and their donors all boycotted, left.
This is dissociated. What we need to do is reframe this from a strategy standpoint that philanthropy and donors. Can be failed by the organization's lack of strategy, and that if we don't give donors something to believe in, something I want to say new but enhanced, improved, impactful, then our donors may continue to give a small gift, but we're never going to get to the larger gifts.
So the first part is kind of reframing this as leadership duty. You have to be soft here because again, if you're doing your job correctly, you work. Unless you are the CEO or jack director, then it's about working this up the chain, managing up into your board. You work for somebody else. Now, if you're the board member and you're listening to this, you're saying, we're not doing it.
Well, then you need to put your nose in the middle of the board and say, what are we doing here, folks? Which is actually one of the things I probably enjoy the most as I get older and become more become more engaged as a governance board member rather than just a fundraiser, when the organizations I believe in, I'm the one pushing my nose in.
So number one is reframing a strategic. Number two is let donors become part of the voice as to the need for strategy. So when we think about this, you can do this one of two ways. You can anonymize the data. Or you can put donors within a confined environment right in front of board members, right in front. The CEO.
I recently had a feasibility study that I was conducting with a client where the strategic initiative really was needed and is still needed by the organization, but there's no philanthropy tied to it. It's an internal operational problem, and the CEO kept pushing. They will give us money. And what we ended up doing there was some cost to it, to the organization because I did the work, because we did a strategic feasibility study where we put the case of what this organization needed in front of a lot of people.
And guess what I mean? All I did was anonymize keeping the confidentiality of the of the conversations that I had and we did about, you know, somewhere around 50, 40, some of them said, are you insane? We're not giving any money to that, but we might give it to other things. And what that's done is by anonymous using that feedback and then presenting it back to the CEO, the board, the foundation board, you know, the greater community of leaders within this institution.
They're now realizing we got to change what we do. And there's a strategy conversation starting. I've also seen it done where when I think about my own time frame, when we were thinking about oncology at Nebraska, at Nebraska medicine Medical Center, and that we couldn't raise the money, and it was a donor, a community leader, a philanthropist who said, why would you want to do that?
That's plants not big enough. It doesn't have impact. And by listening to that strategy, reflection or lack thereof, strategy reflection by this amazing community leader, we were able to in to go back, reposition it at a dollar figure 3 to 4 times bigger but with greater impact, purpose and direction. And the money came instantaneously. You can do either one.
How do you get this in front of them? Well, you might use this kind of terminology. You know, our donors are giving us a blueprint, a direction. They want impact. They want urgency. They want to fund plans, not just ideas. And I think there's something important in that fund raising should be for plans, not ideas. Now, there's always people who want to try to invest in that research of tomorrow and innovation and technology.
I'm that's not we're talking about here. We're talking about our organizations that are a plan, a business plan. I've got another client that I work with where I heard, the CEO there talk about the vision that he had for the organization. And I sat there for 2.5 hours, and I literally afterwards came up to him, been their consultant for a number of years and said I would almost leave my current role to go raise money for that.
It's brilliant. It's earth changing human level change of immense proportion. But that was two years ago. And I told him at the time, I said, the next thing is you need a business plan. How much? What's going to look like? How are you going to fund it? What are the expenses? How are you going to measure it?
They still don't have a plan. And guess what they haven't done. They got a great vision, great idea. How do our donors help our organization build strategy and strategy? It just isn't a direction. It should be a plan. Number three possibility. Propose some type of practical phased in approach. Maybe it's too much to do everything at once. Think about it this way.
Maybe it's something you're able to articulate to your advanced committee chair, or make your gifts to the chair, to your CEO respectfully behind closed doors, not throwing them under the bus. Maybe we could draft a directional roadmap, even if it's not final, that would engage us in a direction, a strategy that our top donors could then weigh in on.
It's almost like in health care. What I'm moving on to more and more often is the idea in many cases. Maybe we don't need an organizational wide strategy. Maybe we have strategy in oncology or cardiology. Well, let's really push that then. While the rest of the organization figures out all the other aspects, maybe it's the law school that has a strategy for what it wants to be, but the med school on the university campus has problems.
Challenges break it down into something more manageable. The kind of the interim priority documentation of a smaller aspect of the organization. This then allows for collaboration, allows for development of operational leaders to sketch early kind of visions. It talks about momentum. This is something we can say pushing into this challenge. You know we don't need everything to be perfect to get started.
We just need a direction. And from there, additional steps will come. So sometimes it's the old adage, how do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time, sometimes the bite too big to start. And our leadership, based on a lot of external factors, maybe not willing to do all of it, but can we get smaller chunks? So number three, break it down.
Smaller phased approach number four. And this is kind of tied to the idea of, of of something we talked about a few months ago is using strategic planning through the donor engagement stewardship process. In episode 225, I addressed the idea of systematic feedback loops. How do you go to your donors, both big and small, and ask them for their opinions about the gift, about the organization, about the usage, about impact?
Well, if we did that more regularly, that would give us feedback of things that our donors are telling us that might help our organizations on a more regularized basis, be able to function with strategy if we're feeding not only what we take them from a philanthropic perspective, but back into the organization much more widely about what they want.
What's important, what it begins is positioning the donors as your advisors, and then it becomes more natural to do something that I talk about an awful lot, which kind of ties into being the the voice of the donors in the room. So there's a connection here. Is it positions the donors advisors that you'd like their input more naturally.
I've learned over the years that sometimes our internal executive leaders want the full plan. They should. That's what a good leader does. But as the plan is being developed, there's nothing wrong with confidential conversations, you know, hey, we're not pushing this out publicly. Going to your donors and saying, hey, we want to do this. What do you think?
It's 50% of the direction, 60% of the direction. Would you talk? Hello. That's what a feasibility studies for. Think about the client I was talking about a few minutes ago where literally if the conversation had been, we're going to go forth with this no matter what. And they weren't willing to listen. They'd have been trying to raise money for something no one was going to get to.
So using the feasibility study, thought process, the mentality on a more regular basis. Episode 225. That system systematic matic feedback loop can be critically important to providing an emphasis, a push into the strategy, conversations.
You can use this kind of verbiage. Maybe strategic planning doesn't slow down philanthropy. It is fundraising. It is philanthropy done at the highest level of donor engagement. Let's use the vested interest of our donors to better know what they think. And by the way, this goes back to the idea of our CEOs coming and going and board members coming and going.
But the mission that we have that we are really, truly owned by the community. Now there's representatives who are on the board, community representatives who are board members. But at the end of the day, community really owns us. It's like the green Bay Packers, the only NFL team that's not owned by a family or a person, somebody's community.
That's who we are getting them to buy it. I mentioned four and a half, which probably some of you thought, well, what is he talking about? The half of this is the business case. And I mentioned this a few minutes ago about the idea of a client that I'm working with who has a vision, the idea that it's not ideas that drive philanthropy, it's plans based on those ideas, is if you can force your organization to conduct or to complete or go through the process of a business plan, it's going to force strategy, particularly if it's a large enough issue.
All too often, and you may know this and have experienced this, we're given this idea, but there's no framework. How many people you know, how much is going to cost, how long will it take to see a positive ROI? How many people are affected? How will it be done? What are you purchasing? What's the infrastructure? Has it fit into the kind of the current operations of what you're doing?
What's the overlap? All of that comes from a business plan. The half is, is that creating a business plan, whether it's a small phased approach. So smaller things, smaller case statements, larger things like getting donors into the room, listening to their voice they give to plans and ideas that business plans are what drives successful philanthropy in the long run.
I didn't start this company. My company. How IT philanthropy without a plan. That business plan I literally take with me home every weekend. It sits on my desk five years into this and I'm checking things. Not every day, but probably once or twice a month of what I'm doing versus the five year plan. And about a year and a half or two is things have gone well.
I created another five year plan. Now I'm checking against a second plan, but that all stemmed from a formalized business plan. All too often, we guess. And that's why business plans are important. Because what it does is it causes us to have hard internal conversations about expense and revenue. What is our ROI? How are we going to measure it?
What can we pay? What can we take in terms of risk? What can't we deal with? Are we doing too many of these at one time because we got this? Is that smaller many case? Are there other too many things going on. So we're leveraging too much risk all based on business plans. How much money is going to take?
How much do we need to raise. What are the expenses personnel costs? Create a business plan that articulates the ROI. Strategic planning is about being the highest return on investment, and to do so it aligns with should with the people. The priorities and the things that are needed, and a business plan will develop that. So if you're looking to push into strategy to push your CEO, your executive team, your board, whomever with respect appropriately, sometimes behind closed doors, one of which way is to reframe the idea of strategic planning as a leadership about our donors are ready to give.
But they need something to give to that. Fundraising doesn't fail because donors aren't generous. It fails because we don't have a thing for them to give to. That's that's transformational or impactful. Number two is bring donor voices, either anonymized or in-person small groups, whatever, into the room to show them a direction that 60% or give them an input on on the constant feedback loop.
Number three is that practical phased approach. Many campaigns find what we are okay with moving forward on, but not all of it at once. And lastly, the fourth one is the idea of that donor engagement tool, the idea of constant feedback. So that comes through the voice of the donor individually or constantly over time. But build a case statement with a business plan or support the organization to do so.
I'm not promising, guaranteeing or advocating that there be a riot and we all run, you know, for the hills, when there's no strategic plan or strategy or vision. But what I am saying, it's our responsibility as philanthropic leaders to do everything we can that's appropriate, respectful, to push these ideas of why strategy so important, and helping organizations understand that just being paralyzed eventually will cost you big.
Remember, you're either growing or you're shrinking, but you're not staying the same. And there's some truth to that. Helping your organization figure that out is critically important. Be respectful. Don't just sit and wait, because the longer you wait, the hard it's going to be to do what you need to do, which is build relationships, have conversations, find those gifts and really build out a fundraising plan that can support what should be something that is more natural than it is the strategy of the organization.
Don't forget. Check out the blogs at Hallett Philanthropy two per week three this last week. But you can read about different things from how I view certain leadership issues to experiences that I've had both personally and professionally, and what I took away from them. How it philanthropy.com backslash blogs two per week in RSS feed right to your inbox.
If you'd like to, you can reach out to me at. Podcast. The Health ministry.com. The more we don't just accept mediocrity, the more in a respectful way, but the more we don't accept the idea that, well, there's nothing we can do about it. There are things we can do, and that's what today's all about. And this pertains directly to my all time favorite saying, some people make things happen, some people watch things happen.
And there are those who wondered what happened. This is a moment where we can be somebody who makes things happen internally with strategy, with the CEO, the executive team, boards, committees, other things to get them to think about strategy because maybe they're paralyzed. And our people are wondering what happened to what we used to do all of these things, but those things aren't happening anymore.
Or they are paused or they're changed. What are we going to do to adjust? I take this as my last thought. My son and daughter hear me say, probably way too often, that life isn't about what happens to you. It's how you deal with it. All you do is sit back and just wait and say, well, it's not my problem.
That's the board's problem. Then you become someone who is just wondering what happened at a time and a place where you need to be someone who makes things happen, and that while you can't control everything, you can't control what you do. And what you do is in those moments about what is it that I can change? Push into some of these suggestions today to make strategy even more effective in your organization, because your organization needs to continue to get back into, to increase, to engage your community, because the community needs what you do.
Don't forget we're here each week. One subject answers solutions and I look forward to sharing with you the next series of thoughts on the next edition of around with Randall. Don't forget. Make it a great day.