Never Let A Good Crisis Go to Waste

If the disaster in this bogus TV report (that we created for a tabletop training exercise) actually happened, would you have the resources and expertise to tackle it?

How can we obtain those resources for our organizations and at the same time have them do the double duty of serving to build the totality of our organization during all the times when our main focus is on another disaster, the daily disaster of hunger.

Wait! This is the Hunger into Health blog. Education and empowerment. The blog that never met a vegetable it didn’t like. What have I got to contribute in the specialized disaster world of tough looking men and women supping coffee and barking into sat phones as they tap on crush-proof laptops?

Especially since my main experience of natural disaster as a resident of Santa Barbara prior to 2017 was this: 

June Gloom. A time of year when the sunny every day climate goes away for a little while and everyone goes into a major depression.

But then in Dec 2017 that all changed. Hell came to Paradise – the Thomas Fire.

We’d had a few large-ish fires before, but nothing like this.

• Went on for a month and burned 440 sq miles.
• Largest CA wildfire in history at the time.
• 2 dead and over 2.2 billion in damages.
• Destroyed 1,063 structures
• 104, 607 residents forced to evacuate in SB and Ventura Counties.

And one of evacuating families was mine.  Here’s my daughter Mia ready to face the dangerous air quality. 

We figured the major inconvenience of evacuation was going to be the end of it. But then, fate, like Steve Jobs, threw ‘one more thing’…

Torrential rain met burned soil loosened from the fire and swept down the hillsides of Montecito.

• • 23 dead 
• 129 destroyed and 307 damaged residences
• Main 101 freeway closed for 12 days, requiring 260 mile detour to get to SB from Los Angeles.
• Sister food bank, Foodshare in Ventura resupplied our Carpinteria program.

Even Oprah was affected. But rest assured that Ellen’s Llama’s were evacuated.

That’s what we faced. My mantra in this post is that disaster brings great opportunity. We live in a world that is not big on preparation, but if something bad happens then large pots of money can potentially be coming your way and you need strategies to maximize this and make the best use of it.

We had a big windfall in 2008 with the crash, and we used the money to propel ourselves to the next level as an organization, and the same is true of the Thomas disaster.

Disasters, like everything else have their seasons and cycles that we have to be able to understand to benefit from and to avoid doing the wrong thing at the wrong time, which could alienate supporters at a time when they may be extra sensitive.

Here is the standard cycle of preparation.

Of course human nature and the human experience do not fit into this. So maybe we better consider this continuum as well…

You need to understand the deep emotions that are raised by disaster. If you hit the right notes at the right time, you are golden. Hit the wrong one and ouch.

The other thing to say is that there are two distinct arenas of disaster fundraising. The response phase and the preparation phase.

Readiness is a lot more interesting to people when there is a disaster fresh in their minds. There is an 18 to 24 month window to capitalize on it before memory submerges.

When there is no recent disaster in memory, you have to pitch it as building community resiliency and seeking funding from those foundations and others who prioritize this.

DISASTER FUNDRAISING

Let me explain how we raised funds in the aftermath of the disaster and how we built that into an ongoing platform for support.

The first thing we did was try to promote our existing disaster plan. We simplified it into an aspirational document – that therefore needed funding, because there were things on it which we hadn’t done yet.

We also produced TV ads that reminded people about our disaster credentials.

During the disaster, we discovered that our relationships with government and key emergency players were not sufficient to enable us to do our job. We needed to build these relationships and also make a statement of our leadership potential within the disaster environment.

 And so when you want to make friends, you have a party.

We held a major conference bringing together the broad spectrum of disaster professionals and NGOs.

It also included a sophisticated table-top training exercise organized by a disaster professional out of MIT. This helped us set out our stall as movers and shakers in this area.

Successful nonprofits and their Executives interact with the community as subject matter experts. Consequently, we spun a white paper with learnings out of the conference and so gave us an additional opportunity to put ourselves forward as conveners and leaders.

Nine months on from that conference, we are keeping the momentum going by launching into developing a disaster feeding plan for our service area.

In your own relationship with other disaster professionals in your area, you have an ace in the hole which will get you a seat at any of the tables you are being denied access to – a network of member agencies – who have real, daily relationships with you, not dusty old MOUs. You have boots on the ground all across the area. Add to this your network of sister food banks, as well as national support, and it puts you in a formidable position.

Your programs, your network and your community network are the perfect point for disaster preparedness training, like here with an emergency preparedness fair that we are involved in. Resiliency is a key message for us and that is something that binds food insecurity and disaster preparedness together as one message. It also plays well with community foundations and strategic-thinking donors.

Of course it is tough to be selling intangibles all the time, so it pays to have a physical product to make your point. Our disaster food box has the value proposition of ‘ buy one and low income family gets another one free.’

Again, this builds the resilency theme and interconnects it with a charitable activity – I can help others while helping my family. We don’t make a dime on these boxes, but the value in terms of seeking sponsorship and grants is far in excess of anything we could get in selling them. They also have a shelf life of 25 years. Who of us can say that?

I talked about disaster working double duty to strengthen our ongoing operations. One area that is key for us is that of Food Literacy.

 

Here we aligned it to community resiliency and seek disaster funding to do what we would want to do anyway.

The same approach underscores our desire to build a specialized cadre of disaster volunteers to help with new distributions (like when agencies can’t operate during a disaster).

The idea is that this will help us build up our existing volunteer structure with new training and new resources – and again, all in the name of disaster resiliency. Our first stage will be to use existing CERT trained volunteers.

Following on from this is a specific volunteer area that we needed to address, based on our Thomas Disaster experience – the lack of sufficient PIOs.

These days we seem to be living in an all-disaster all of the time type of world, so you can use these principles to deal with other community challenges that come up. Like the Federal Government workers furlough.

These short-term challenges allow you to keep building your message of the food bank feeding EVERYONE in time of disaster.

In summary, here is the secret formula that will lead you to increased support in the disaster sphere.

May all your disasters be small and have large silver linings.

Hunger into Health – The Book

 

Six happy years ago, the Hunger into Health blog was born. 2012 was a different time for food banking and for most everything else. I had 5 kids, not 6 and the world seemed a simpler place!

The blog is focused on looking at any and all strategies for improving long-term health and food security. We considered a wide array of different ideas: from using public health strategies to community leadership; empowering clients to how to raise money in new ways.

This month is my tenth anniversary at the Foodbank of Santa Barbara County, and I figured now was the perfect time to write a book drawing on many of the lessons learned and lessons we are still struggling to learn.

I’m very excited what I’ve been able to pack so much into a highly-readable book. It’s a full color extravaganza with plenty of ideas and strategies for you to try. I’m putting in a few spreads from the book so you have an idea of what to expect.

You can purchase the book or the Kindle version at Amazon, at this link:

Or you can order it directly from our Foodbank at https://donate.foodbanksbc.org/hungerintohealth

Turn hunger into health – this book shows you how!

Here’s a couple of the colorful graphics form the book:

 

Time for a Change?

Today I will be attending the third biannual Closing the Hunger Gap conference. This is a group that comes together to explore, test and execute sustainable food security strategies and to build a national movement to enact systemic change.

I went to the first one, six years ago in Tucson and at that point we were the ‘wild-hearted outsiders.’ Today’s conference, with well over 500 attendees is much more like a gathering of the clans. Things are happening, and those things are speeding up.

I have been posting less frequently on the ‘From Hunger to Health’ blog over the last couple of years. Part of that is a recognition that these mediations – about the future of food banking, emergency food and the role of our organizations in making lasting improvements in people lives – have gone mainstream. They are no longer a ‘that would be nice’ consideration, or something that only ‘organizations with money coming out of their ears’ have the time and resources to undertake.

At staff meetings they were proud to take things to a granular level

Only organizations who truly have their head in the sand can avoid conversations at some level about “what happens beyond the food.” These are the opportunities to take complementary approaches to building and maintaining long term food security in a communities, whether they be rural, urban or increasingly, suburban.

In this blog, I have been encouraging us to leverage this food machine we have created, and invest our food and networks in more long-range ends. Simplicity is so appealing and we clung to it for so very long, but the world is not getting any simpler. The lives of those we work with and the maze they face to try to find a way out of poverty or poor nutritional health are ever more complex.

If you think I’m sitting in my rocker with my corn cob pipe looking back on a job well done, then I’m not. The work is only starting. Now is the time to dream bigger and enlarge the nature of the discussion about what it is possible for us to do together.

In the past, I had hoped for a national campaign against poverty with organizations cooperating at a local level to help people with an interconnected range of life challenges. At the same time we would hold the local/national politician’s feet to the fire. This would force the political infrastructure to understand how tens of millions of their fellow Americans are living now, and that we can’t just continue blaming them for everything about their situation.

Movement in this direction still seems slow, retarded by individual national organizations’ desire to maintain their ‘USP’ (unique selling point) with supporters and to stand out from others occupying a similar space. We still need to continue this work, but to succeed, I think we cannot purely rely on the moral indignation of Americans – who once aware of the need – will approve swift action to end food insecurity and create pathways out of poverty through living wage ordinances, health and child care subsidies. If the last nine months have shown anything, it is that the way people receive messages around poverty and food security are more complex than we imagined.

This was focusing on a national movement about a negative. What about a national movement focused on a positive: helping each other be healthy.

This means a partial pivot to a focus on the positive advantages of maintaining and improving your health through good nutrition and related activities. In our work in Santa Barbara, we’ve seen the benefits in terms of empowering those we work with by changing the daily conversation of our interactions to be about ‘how can we help each other be healthier so we can live more joyful lives’ (sorry, I live in California. Joy is not an option.)

This approach has shaped the steady evolution of how we deliver services from the ‘here’s your bag of food, thank you for waiting and good luck!’ of previous times, by the wrap-around education and services of our Healthy Community Pantries. These will be gradually superseded by the ‘place-based’ community-building activities of Community Food Access Centers. At each stage, the relationships with those we serve have deepened – not as a way of fostering dependency, but as a way of building healthier communities.

We always knew that the food alone was only part of why people came to us, but we have also discovered that empathy is only a starting point. How can we be truly empathetic if we are not trying to help that person change their situation. I am not talking about the proud senior taking a food box or the mentally-ill homeless person who is desperately struggling to keep things exactly as they are. I am talking about the vast majority of food insecure families who are one slip-up or financial setback away from eviction, bankruptcy or incarceration.

Empowerment is hard to give someone.  Ultimately, they have to take it for themselves, but we can create the conditions where this is possible. In one of our ‘Nutrition Advocates’ groups (peer to peer nutrition education and leadership) the group really wanted to be ‘led’ as opposed to figuring out what their focus project might be. So empowerment is also a process where people have to see what is possible and dip a toe in before jumping. Especially in situations where jumping never worked out well in their lives in the past.

The next stage of evolution for our organization is contained in the slogan: ‘EDUCATION FOR ALL, FOOD FOR ALL WHO NEED IT.’ We are proposing a pivot where the Foodbank becomes the recognized hub of food literacy, food knowledge, cooking and general health knowledge. To make a change in the health of our service area, we offer to help everyone in it.

Yikes.

That’s enough to give everyone the shakes. However, I don’t really see any logical alternative progression for the road we have already begun on. The idea is that we would provide both online and in-person training for kids, families and others. If you can pay, you pay. If you can’t, your training is free. If you want to pay it forward, then you sponsor others as well as your family. Each interaction would contain a service element and some general education about the local food system as a whole.

People are always complaining about donor fatigue. So here is a good way of engaging donors from an early age in the joy of food, the joy of working alongside each other and the joy of helping others. (See, there’s more of that joy creeping in…)

This is not something that be launched immediately, it needs to be built up to. Groundwork is required to build knowledge and receptivity to the Foodbank’s expanded role in the ‘food life’ of the community. We already have the trust of people – donors, volunteers, local infrastructure and services –  and that is something we can use as a strong foundation. Our first stage in this ‘change the conversation’ about the Foodbank was our leadership in the Santa Barbara County Food Action Plan. This groundwork will also include increased partnerships with schools, children’s museums, farms.

The word will be out there that the Foodbank cares for the nutritional health of all, and they put their food where their mouth is (or some other unfortunate metaphor) by providing food for those who need it. The total package.

But, you scream, this will muddy our USP, and people will stop donating to our organization because they don’t want to pay for the education of those who aren’t ‘needy,’ ‘indigent,’ or any other of those ugly, ignorant words. Our experience thus far is that we can operate successfully in two spheres. We hit the food insecurity message strong and trumpet the work through the usual channels. These other messages use different channels, sometimes requiring the creation of new ones.

New ‘public health’ funding models are required too for an endeavor that will be nothing if not expensive. Think what success looks like though. Nutritional health becomes a common endeavor, not just for the well-off. It becomes something that binds the community together, rather than one more thing that splits it apart.

Call me a dreamer, but the dream starts today. In 2008 we began this journey, at a time that people told us to ignore those distractions and focus all our energy on the urgent challenges of today. In 2017, the same calls are going to come again. SNAP is on the chopping block, there is a basic lack of understanding of the drivers of poverty by those clutching the levers of power. Surely, now is the time to retrench and struggle with now, now now.

If history has taught me anything, now is the time to strike out anew.

I’d welcome your ideas and experiences.

Game of Thrones: Keeping your Zest for Leadership over Time

The E.D. had sacrificed a lot to get to sit in the big chair, though maybe it was time to trade it in for an Aeron. This one gave him a crick in the back. Or was it a dagger??

Three years ago, I commented (in a post on strategies for opening up leadership possibilities in your organization) that leaders in the food banking world tend to stay in their positions for a very long time – decades in some cases. I wondered out loud how good a thing this was.

Now I find myself four months away from having served nine years in the CEO position and I guess I’m in danger of becoming part of the woodwork myself. Consequently,  I thought it would be a good time to consider what strategies the leader of any nonprofit organization can utilize to avoid becoming stale.

A wise Buddha or just part of the woodwork?

The challenge that we may face is that our organization might be humming along perfectly well. We might be steadily increasing service by whatever measure we use and so why would we mess with something if it isn’t broke?

Yet, leaders are like sharks. They stop moving and they can’t breathe and begin to suffocate. Leadership has to constantly evolve or else in a world that never stops changing it can do nothing else but start to stagnate. That is bad for the organization and bad for you as a person.

The E.D. took full advantage of the company dental plan

So, what are the strategies you can employ?

1. First you need to conduct a simple audit of where you are as a leader.

Because none of us have enough audits in our lives already, right?

• Do my staff feel challenged and stimulated by my leadership?
• Do I have a cozy ‘identity’ in the community which has not changed significantly in years?
• Am I enlarging the world that my organization is operating in?
• Are we perceived as a forward looking organization prepared for the challenges of the next decade?
• What are the real areas of challenge remaining for my organization?
• What is the tangible legacy I want to leave behind me?

Hopefully thinking seriously about these questions will reveal an area for you to either concentrate or taken a new interest in.

2. Do the Opposite of what you are currently doing.

In my own situation, my focus as a leader has always been on the strategic and programmatic side of what a food bank can achieve in terms of shortening the line. I wanted to turn hunger into health. I’ve never been a trucks and facilities kind of guy.

What better way of forcing me out of my comfort zone than to move the organization into a capital campaign for a new facility? Sure I will already leave a legacy of a major pivot in the function and community perception of the organization – but the next CEO could screw that up in a year! A new facility will last. (Earthquakes, mudslides and forest fires permitting).

So, maybe this is a time for you to explore what is the yin to the yang of your current focus. If you are more interested in the mechanics of how the machine runs, then how can you unleash energy in the organization to enable that machine to take those you serve in a new direction.

3. Consider a new approach to your leadership

Yes there are plenty of seminars and conferences and billable by the hour consultants waiting to suggest to you the latest approach to leadership. It’s great to be open to this, it is also worth considering a more significant revamp of your leadership.

A few years back I took a year-long set of retreats called Courage to Lead, Run by Leading From Within and developed by Parker J. Palmer, Ph.D. and the Center for Courage & Renewal, the Courage to Lead retreat series model focuses neither on technique, nor on society’s needs, but on renewing the inner lives of leaders.It also helps provide you with a peer group of other nonprofit leaders. I found the series so rewarding that I invited all of our leadership team to attend, and they have been able to utilize the benefits.

Yes, I’m the one with the hat. Stripes are thinning, don’t they say?

This is just one example. You could find something else that would give you a new framework to operate within.

3. Take a Helicopter Perspective of the Issue your organization is engaged in.

Give a person a Go Pro and watch them find their inner idiot

 

We get so caught up in the day to day of our ‘mission’ and how to fund it that we often miss the bigger picture. Are we being truly effective? Are we caught up in competing with those who have similar missions? Are we doing what we are good at doing rather than what needs to be done? Presumably if you have been running your organization a while then maybe you can afford no to be so insecure about branching out and trying to convene discussions on a higher level where the day to day needs of your own organization become secondary. This will enable you to build new partnerships within the community and beyond, which will enable your organization to grow in the years to come. We did this with our leadership of the SB County Food Action Plan.

4. Take a Micro Perspective of the Issue you are Working On

I really wanted to help them and understand their situation close up. But all I ended up doing was setting them on fire!

Change the world by changing your understanding of it, and do this by connecting with those who you serve in a more intimate manner. Get to know the true situation of clients or those affected by your issue. Understand their needs, not your perception of them. I tried this in a small way with my yearly Food Security Challenge, when I live on food stamps for a month and meet clients and promote their situation. You could find some other way of getting into the same weeds you’ve been carefully avoiding these past few years. We all forget why we’re doing what we’re doing, and we need to be reminded.

5. Make a list of things that don’t work and systematically fix them

Every organization has programs or initiatives that seem to function despite themselves. They grind along and kind of get the job done, but you have the feeling that they could be done better with better results. One of our challenge areas has always been our Brown Bag senior nutrition program, providing groceries and produce to seniors in need. There are conflicting needs: for efficiency and standardization from operations, the need for long-term volunteers to do things their own way, the need for the USDA to ask for overbearing reporting! We actually brought in a knowledge philanthropist a few years back, a skilled project manager, who analyzed the problem and we implemented the recommendations. And yet the world refuses to stay fixed for long and here we are again. What are the thorny areas in your organization that you could take an interest in?

These are just some of the approaches you could take to reinvigorate your leadership and cast it in a new light. I will just say that all of this is secondary to the primary business of identifying and growing new leadership within the organization to replace yourself.

Be kind to yourself. Your energy and focus will ebb and flow. Sometimes we are giving 120% t the organization, and at other times it might be a less than dynamic 72%. As long as you think these are balancing out on a monthly basis, then you are probably in good shape.

Leadership is tiring in a way that people who do not have such a great responsibility do not always understand. You are just the person sitting behind the desk who other people have to be vaguely nice to and who smiles badly when a giant (sized) yet modest (monetary value) check is presented to the organization.

It’s a beard thing.

Good luck with whatever new changes to your leadership the new year brings.

Of course you can just let things go on and on as they are as regards your leadership, but remember how that turned out for Ned Stark!

The Board of Directors have asked to see me. I’m sure everything will be fine …if I can just keep my head.

Building Food Security Street by Street

 

Hunger is always perceived as a hyper-local issue. Smaller scale cash donors within a city or town in your service area are often very concerned that their dollars are spent for food within that community. They don’t want it to go to those folks fifty miles away who might as well be in a whole other universe. We might consider this as a parochial attitude and believe that these people don’t see the bigger picture like we do.

But, what if they’re right?

What if we’re so obsessed with total impact / poundage / meal gaps and systemic change that we can’t focus on the type of grass roots neighborhood level work which can be truly successful and sustainable?

Laying our own astroturf has been easier but this stuff grows!

That’s someone else’s job, right? A partner agency who can get into the weeds while we keep that big food machine humming. But we used to say that about a lot of things, like SNAP outreach or nutrition education. I’ve also always been concerned that we’re accidentally creating a ‘new norm’ of food security in that people will get increasingly used to saying: “Yes, of course I’m food secure, because I can go to this pantry on this day and then that pantry on the other day.”

No kind of security.

In Santa Barbara, we are ready to pilot ‘Healthy Neighborhood’ programs designed to be sustainable local solutions to food security and food literacy at the micro level. They represent the next step in the (occasionally painful) realization that we can’t make or keep a community food secure by only working with those who most need our services.

Ouch, what did I just say?

Do you think we have resources to just spray around? Unlike you, we’re not in ritzy Santa Barbara with sun and sand and aging movie stars. We live in the real world and we have to concentrate resources on those most in need.

Someone just out of the picture is filling in their SNAP application. We serve one in four of the population.

Yes, I get that perception, but we are a medium-sized food bank with a modest $4 million cash budget where cash is always tight. It would be easy for us to walk away from such an approach, but we can’t. Let me make clear that our food resources unquestionably go only to those who really need them. But educational and community building resources are going to have to be offered wider than that. Those that can pay will pay or subsidize others. While this creates short-term financial pain, it will also broaden and deepen the donor base and introduce new perceptions of the organization as a good for everyone in the community, not just those ‘disadvantaged others.’ (aka ‘the needy,’)

Consequently, Foodbank of Santa Barbara County’s Healthy Neighborhoods Initiative marks a major pivot in approach, transitioning our work in neighborhoods of high poverty and food insecurity from a client-based to a family-based model. This initiative is designed to bring together a whole neighborhood of families in the effort to build a resilient and nutritionally healthy community, where food and health become the focus for community engagement, education and economic development.

You don’t have to build it for them to come. There’s plenty of buildings sitting there.

Each pilot will be based around key physical locations, operating as Community Food Access Centers, which are place-based, food-centric neighborhood revitalization efforts, uniting multiple educational, nutrition and community development functions. These centers will have a family-based focus. You may be familiar with The Stop in Toronto Canada. At this stage of the initiative’s evolution we don’t have the luxury of building one of these or utilizing a facility just for this purpose, so we have to make use of existing places with their own range of activities – community centers, schools etc.

Initially, the center will only operate one day a week, but it will be intensive. Food and age-appropriate education will be provided for the whole family to attend at a time convenient to them. Childcare and basic food literacy training will be provided for young children; culinary skills will be provided for teens. Education will be culturally as well as age appropriate.

Though there is one day per week where education and services are focused, other satellite activities will happen at other times. There will be regular communication across a number of media and communication platforms to keep the neighborhood informed and involved in the effort. Centers in targeted neighborhoods will provide low-income families with a specific place to go, where people that you know and trust will be teaching and learning with you. The idea is to break the cycle of poverty and food insecurity by including all generations; they will also work to channel partner services in a more culturally-appropriate and culturally-tailored manner, in an environment in which families and neighborhoods feel comfortable coming together and learning with each other.

Providing the life-blood of the Community Food Access Centers and supporting community involvement are neighborhood networks of volunteers – Nutrition Advocates – that provide  bi-lingual peer-to-peer education, empowering community members to improve their health. Food-related programs offer the “idea bridge” for others to provide skills and knowledge training.

Other elements of this strategy are:

Small Food Business Incubator – Encouraging entry into local food economy by providing business, food safety and marketing training to Nutrition Advocates and food entrepreneurs, and the opportunity to develop small businesses.

Food as Medicine Programs – Diabetes Education/ nutrition education/diabetes specific food support programs.

This approach builds on existing geographically local impact groups that we have been working on for the last couple of years and the relationships that have come out of them.

Collective impact projects come and go. Funding comes and goes. The idea here is to find a low-risk approach, because it involves empowering the community to help itself. Networks and relationships will grow, increasing community cohesiveness and requiring less outside stimulus.

Ultimately, a neighborhood approach does not rely on the desire to help ‘others’ but on the practical need to help ‘each other,’ by living in a neighborhood where mutual support to obtain and keep good health reframes how people engage with each other. This is incredibly challenging to our ‘big’ way of operating, but it is also exciting, representing the opportunity for a much more inclusive and empowering approach to our work, and the opportunities for new approaches to how we fund that work.

I’ll let you know how we get on.

In the meantime, why don’t you consider taking a walk and building food security street by street.

Practical Advice for Shaking the Money Tree

“The Development Department would take any meeting in their desperate search for funds”

Last time on ‘From Hunger into Health’ we visited with some experts on the nationally evolving situation around funding the non ’emergency food’ side of your activities, those that are designed to move communities on from a state of dependence on food pantries. Wally Verdooren looked at how you can begin to align your strategies with those of funders, and Barbara Andersen gave us a peek into the mindset of funders and how it’s never too late to begin a whole new relationship.

As a follow-up from ‘the trenches,’ I am sharing some of my own experience in shaking the money tree – what has worked, what hasn’t, and how you can move forward the whole happy band, including board, different internal departments and the community itself toward a shared vision of a healthy and food secure future.

“The first meeting of the local Collective Impact group, was beginning to feel more like trial by jury.”

For a number of years I have been somewhat of a parrot,  repeating endlessly that ours are community health organizations. In that case, the first job of a doctor is to ‘do no further harm.’ In a fundraising sense that means making sure that you do not lose your current funding base as you reach out for some bright shiny new funding opportunity.

CURRENT SUPPORTERS

It’s a numbers game. 70% of your existing supporters are locked into the hunger / charity message that you have been espousing for years. They want to help ‘the needy’ and we have relied on their love, generosity and donations of aging cans of weird food since the beginning. You should accept their lack of desire to hear a new approach and keep pumping out the old hunger message. You should take their money and keep using it.

“For some, you will need to keep singing from the same song sheet.”

This calculation still assumes that 30% of your supporters will be open to something new. This is a beautiful flower  you must nurture and grow. These supporters are typically younger, more interested in getting directly involved, and want campaigns with end results that they can feel good about achieving.

As you begin to think through your new approaches, don’t feel you have to have everything figured out before you take it to supporters. They want to be co-creators with you. Consider having visioning lunches or events that could bring in a third party expert/speaker to validate your new approach. Consider program tours that take your supporters to programs run by other organizations that you want to emulate. You needn’t be afraid they’ll jump ship. If you have the relationship with the donor, they will appreciate you being honest that you don’t have all the answers and be excited about the possibility of learning from success elsewhere.

“Embrace those novel partnerships.”

FIND NOVEL PARTNERS

As your aspirations to do new things become known in the community, you have the opportunity to build novel partnerships that will enhance your legitimacy about venturing into health or community development or nutrition or any other area. One new partnership for us was with CEC, an environmental nonprofit. We came together to seek funding and community interest in a local Food Action Plan that would look at the possibility of food as an economic and health driver in our community.

These novel partnerships are going to excite funders because they are a more realistic response to the total picture that they see out there rather than us staying burrowing away in our one little corner of expertise.

One thing that many of us have to base new relationships around, is our access to clients/friends/neighbors (whatever term you like to use) who come to our programs because they trust us to not let them down. You have the potential of offering access to this clientele for health screenings or the provision of other services for low-income people.

You will get your fingers burned with some partnerships, where some groups might not want you ‘invading’ their area, so it is important to have limited objectives that allow trust and true partnership to grow over a period of time.

NEW TOOLS TO MARKET YOURSELF

You should be ensuring that your strategies for the community involve the input of the community itself. These can be stakeholder interviews, meetings with other non-profits or public meetings. You will get a clearer idea of community priorities and that is gold with funders – you have done your research and are not guessing what people need.

“One screen from our online Guide to Nutrition Programs.”

So in our case, part of this strategy includes utilization of our ‘Guide to Nutrition Programs’ a GIS mapping solution that shows areas of need on a neighborhood level, as well as what services and programs are provided by our member agencies and others. What information do you have about the community or needs of it that might be valuable at establishing your credibility?

REBUILD YOUR NARRATIVE

The research that you have done in the community will reveal a new narrative, one that is not just based around ‘we need your help and more and more of it.’ Communities have found ways to come together and help each other through hard times for millennia. If your new narrative focusing on Asset Based Community Development (ABCD), then there are many positive narratives that can fit into your new view of the world.

“Asset Based Community Mapping”

If you are not familiar with ABCD then here is a helpful powerpoint: Asset Based Community Development, Health Warning: Guard your eyes and souls from the hot pink text on turquoise background…

Realistically it will take years for the community as a whole to view your new mission differently. Every Thanksgiving, people give you a frozen B-52 bomber of a turkey and press the mental reset button as to what you can do as an organization.

Don’t panic. Keep engaging journalists and providing more positive client stories that show the self-sufficiency that arises out of other programs that you may be running.

“Complex issues needing systemic change can all be resolved with a barrage of Butterballs.”

You only need one foundation or major donor to give you a bit of money for you to hold this win up to the naysayers and to show them that your plans are the wave of the future and that the money will surely flow if you build it. When I wanted to hire a dietician to move my organization towards embracing good nutrition as our most basic value, I was able to get a single grant for $7,500 from a foundation for this purpose. This was nowhere near enough to cover the whole cost of the salary for even a year, but I still hired the person and kept pushing the process forward. It was the dietician’s job to be ‘singing for her supper’ in a variety of local funder settings. Here was proof that we were doing what we were talking about, and money followed this ‘proof.’

Your first efforts are going to deeply imperfect, but as Barbara suggested last month, the more you can share your process of evolving and learning with foundations, then they will appreciate your honesty and flexibility.

CONCLUSION

It comes down to having a larger vision of a food secure community, to engage the community to add to that vision, and to clearly articulate it to funders and donors. I know you can do it!

 

 

Money Does Grow on Trees: Funding your Evolving Mission

New opportunities to make long term impact on health and food security require a fresh approach to fundraising.

You’ve had enough of me mouthing off about my views – even if I am moving perilously close to the mainstream with the passing years. This time From Hunger to Health is drawing on two experts in the field to look at how we can take a new look at that money tree.

Wally Verdooren was until last year working as head of foundational relationships at Feeding America. Keen to see action in the field, Wally has joined Roadrunner Foodbank in Albuquerque New Mexico as their Head of Development. He is the perfect person to have a clear picture of the national situation and how the focus of foundations is changing.

We also have the opportunity to peer behind the curtain and speak to a former grantor. Until last year, Barbara Andersen, was head of strategic partnerships for the Orfalea Foundation, an influential local foundation that focused on food literacy. Barbara is now the Principal at All Points North Consulting ( bandersen@allpointsnorthconsulting.com) and she will be considering how you can develop your relationship with funders.

In the second part of this lavish two episode ‘mini-series’ of a blog post, I will look at what hard-won lessons have been learned by one food bank (my own) in order to give you practical tips on shaking the money tree.

THE CHANGING FUNDING SCENE

At the recent Closing the Hunger Gap conference in Portland, Oregon, Wally Verdooren took part in a workshop with me on this issue. He looked at the national perspective, considering how we can broaden and expand philanthropic support for ending hunger.

Wally believes that expanding and deepening your donor base does not require a shift in mission, but a broader expression of an organization’s identity/profile and a fluid and responsive advancement of your mission.

And it’s not just how your organization presents itself to the outside world. You need to eliminate an understanding, assignment, and evaluation of fundraising staff members as principally donation solicitors.

That’s a change of mindset for many of us. We want to keep poring the pressure on the fundraisers to live or die by last quarter’s figures. Wally argues that successful fundraising has become far more demanding and complex than simply preparing for and conducting requests for philanthropic contributions.

We need to advance and support an understanding and assignment of fundraising staff members as being:

• Relationship/partnership builders (internal & external)
• Project managers
• Program development partners
• Conveners
• Deal-makers
• Translators

Wally sees the need for this as having been heightened and accelerated by the 2008 Recession. It has also been spurred by both the admitted and unacknowledged failings of past financial support received from foundations. Now the desire is to emphasize OUTCOMES rather than OUTPUTS. More than ever, foundations are seeking new systemic, sustainable, and scalable strategies and solutions to persistent problems.

You know, like food insecurity.

Wally provided a thought-provoking ‘Golden Rule’ for Expanding Philanthropic Support:

“Whatever you’re buying, we’re selling.”

While that might initially sound like desperation or the first symptoms of mission drift, what Wally is really suggesting is that you focus FIRST on the donor’s/prospect’s motivations and goals for giving and not giving towards your organization’s needs, interests, and programs.

You should also go long and go deep in your prospective funder search by assessing motivations and goals for giving generally and specifically and then aligning them with what your organization actually does. This requires not only knowing your organization well, but not letting others define it.

What then are the fundable activities that are interesting foundations these days?

Key Trends/Priorities in Philanthropic Goals and Motivations:

• Promoting Health
• Advancing Community Economic Development
• Providing Direct Services to Stabilize Vulnerable Populations
• Engaging in Collective Impact
• Building and Strengthening Networks
• Conducting Data Tracking and Evidence Building
• Advocating for Public Policy Reform
• Ensuring Environmental Protection and Sustainability

Our job is to build cases for how these Trends/Priorities align with both current  and planned anti-Hunger Work.

Wally put together a matrix that took some of the newer ‘evolved mission’ food banking activities and put them into buckets that foundations are going to be receptive to funding.

THE FUNDER PERSPECTIVE

That’s what we think funders are thinking…but what is really going on in their minds? At the same conference, Barbara Andersen, previously of the Orfalea Foundation http://www.orfaleafoundation.org and now the Principal at All Points North Consulting  (bandersen@allpointsnorthconsulting.com) allowed us to peer inside her cranium and consider how to develop your relationship with funders

Barbara Andersen

THE FUNDER PERSPECTIVE

The day to day reality of the funder can be overwhelm from the sheer number of inquiries and applications for resources. The dilemma is that most programs deserve support. One way that you can break from the hungry pack is to demonstrate:

• Your initiative is Strength-based vs. deficit-based. The former are positive, community-driven efforts that go behind the behavior to look at the drivers of that behavior. Deficit based efforts just respond to the behavior. Research has shown that strength-based interventions are sustainable, whereas deficit based activities are ineffective and may make the situation worse. This is all fruit for another post on Hunger into Health, as to how it applies to our specific work around the ‘deficit’ of hunger, but for now, those interested can also check out this short monograph: strengthsvsdeficitrb.

• Open and honest communication is vital. We all want to wear the happy face for foundations, but if there is a ‘situation’ then they will appreciate being kept in the loop, even having their advice sought. You can also offer your perspective as a peer, on the broader nonprofit environment in your area.

One of Barbara’s most helpful pieces of advice is that failure is an option. If you go back to a foundation and say, ‘we tried this and it didn’t work, but as a result of what we learned, we think this will be a better approach,’ then that is something that they can get behind.

Barbara also did us a service by teaching us the meaning of a few helpful phrases in the language of funders;

FUNDERS ARE PEOPLE TOO

It’s all about the relationship, so if your organization has evolved, you need to re-introduce yourself:

• “I would love to share with you our new vision for ending hunger…”
• “Your support has been so valuable to us. It would be very helpful to hear your thoughts on how our organization should position itself with other funders…”

• Relationship-Building
  • “I would love to hear more about your new initiative in school food reform…”
  • “Congratulations on your new position! Can we grab coffee? It would be great to learn from your past experiences in nonprofit management…”

WHEN IT IS A DEAD END

Sometimes it is important to understand when you need to move your efforts elsewhere, say if you have a foundation that is repeatedly shifting its focus or if you have to do too much work to apply for the grant compared to the support you would be receiving.

As I am fond of asking: “Is the juice worth the squeeze?”

And ultimately, if you organization is compromising its values, mission and/or program objectives to chase after some random dollars, then you need to be able to let go of those crumpled bills and watch them blow down the road.

STAY TUNED FOR THE NEXT POST, DEAR READER

Now that we’ve looked at the bigger picture and the new opportunities to gain support, it will be time to consider what strategies we as organizations can enact to shake the money tree.

Available March 01 

HIPPIE BANKING OR THE FUTURE OF FOOD BANKING? – Thoughts from the Closing The Hunger Gap Conference: What strategies will enable you to have the longest term impact on your communities? And what opportunities can Feeding America grasp at a time of new leadership for the organization?

In the past, food banks often treated non distribution-based activities as ‘window dressing.’ Something bright and shiny for the pickier funders who don’t love trucks. 

These programmatic activities were often viewed with some suspicion. Their outcomes were harder to measure than pounds. They were too ‘summer of love,’ while we were up to our necks in hunger, trying to deal with the ‘winter of discontent.’

The situation is changing, and you don’t have to be blissed out to be aware. These feed the line activities are  moving increasingly into the mainstream.

What’s going on? Has someone slipped something into our pallets of Capri-Sun?

Yes, someone did find something in their Capri Sun…mold.

What has changed became clearer last month, when I attended the second biannual ‘Closing The Hunger Gap’ conference in Portland Oregon. The name is misleading – designed to lure in wary food bankers with the reassurance that the traditional language and attitudes towards hunger relief will be maintained.

But don’t be fooled! Read the small print.

The main focus of CTHG (the name’s even worse abbreviated) are all the initiatives that don’t fit into old school meat and (sweet) potatoes food banking. This includes food access / food justice / systemic change / food as medicine / nutrition / gardens / food hubs and more.

Typical scene of Portland life

These areas are touched on in passing at other conferences, but at CTHG they’re front and center. This also means the event draws a wide variety of small and large organizations who operate in worlds beyond emergency food distribution.

It was a chance for us to come together to better understand and leverage the ecosystem of organizations trying to make progress in this field. The vibrancy and range of other organizations now working in the food access/justice and nutrition field is staggering. These organizations never had a warehouse of food to base their interventions around and so have had to develop different strategies. We have as much to learn as to teach.

The outside world has changed to move ‘shorten the line’ activities from the periphery to the leading edge of many food bank’s activities.

How’d that happen? One uncomfortable fact is a lack of sustainable success. We are not in the starvation business, where volume of food has a life or death impact. We are in the food security business. And plying that trade, we have largely failed to move the needle on national levels of food insecurity, despite heroic increases in the quantity of food distributed.

It’s not a stretch to conclude that classic food banking is an ineffective tool  to sustainably lower food insecurity. Rather we have increased the levels of ‘food dependency.’

Food banks and member agencies have become de facto grocery stores for an increasingly poverty-ridden society. Instead of money, you pay for your food with your time by standing in line. Consequently we have carved ourselves an increasingly large niche on the lower tier of the national food chain. We are an artificial correction to the system.

I have seen this ‘new normal’ solidify over the last few years and not to mince words, it sucks. I didn’t sign up to be a tool to facilitate the depression of wages to maximise shareholder value. Are we asking people for money to feed people or to fuel the business of those who do want to , or believe themselves able to pay their workers enough money to survive on?

Whatever your feelings on this issue, the reality of the situation is that food banks have benefitted enormously from this situation. It has meant more resources and more security for our organizations. 

We have felt good about bringing more food into the system figuring we will eventually reach saturation point and ‘solve hunger.’ I’m not convinced that we will ever get to that point with our current strategies.

In the past, we often built elaborate self-justifications about why we didn’t get involved in what happened to distributed food once it left our care. “We just provide the food, we don’t get involved in all that complicated stuff.” If the member agency wasn’t poisoning or purloining and  those  pounds were going out the door, then we were good.

Our ability to get away with taking this approach has steadily, almost imperceptibly been slipping away. It started, strangely enough with SNAP outreach. Remember when food bank involvement in this venture was considered a sinister plot to sap and impurify our precious bodily fluids?* That situation changed in a remarkably short time.

Of course, many food banks already have comprehensive plans linked to reaching poverty and health goals that are consistent with the real world need in their service area rather than traditional metrics or performance benchmarking. ( I can think of a couple of examples fromnortherly cousins in California such as San Francisco and Alameda). (Check out the links to these plans)

Just as it happened with SNAP, I think we’re going to see the same rapid uptake in other activities:

 

1. NUTRITION AND FOOD LITERACY EDUCATION at all levels and in all client ages and interactions;

 

2. INCREASED LOCAL COLLABORATION to allow food to leverage other longer-lasting improvements in people’s lives (building social and community capital, training and job creation, health and housing);

 

3. FOOD AS MEDICINE to keep health compromised clients living more productive lives, through the right type of food;

 

4. A NATIONAL ANTI-POVERTY COALITION. We will do the painful work to ensure that bottom up and top down efforts coordinate in powerful new social campaigns to address poverty and its root causes.

Are these my fantasies, or are they going to come to pass?

You only have to look at how Feeding America has pivoted to capitalize on this new situation.

The writing on the wall has been there from large national foundations for a couple of years now. They’re tired of supporting an endless war on hunger that had no end-game. The C4C (Collaborating for Clients) work and its offshoots is a direct result of this shift in funder priorities.

The food as medicine approach is gaining traction in the diabetes area and in other public  health-style interventions. The affordable care act has provided a slow but seismic shift in the preparedness of healthcare providers to consider us as partners, however patronizing or wary they may be! The initial BMS funded study with FA foodbanks is bearing fruit around the country. At last our network has generated health specific data and we have to leverage it to the hilt.

The Feeding America network’s ‘meal gap’ focus has resulted in the conclusion that only fresh produce as can fill that gap. Despite territorial squabbles about who’s turnip is who’s. (And as a ‘net exporting’ county, I’m more of a squabbler than most!) this emphasis has already improved the levels of ‘Foods 2 Encourage.’ We are at a transitional point now where the new stats are being used as a fig leaf to hide the nutrient poor quality of other foods passing through our system. This situation will eventually correct itself as food manufacturers increasingly target the lucrative ‘health’ market.

As we were talking  about gaps, there is still an ‘education gap.’ Given the increased emphasis on fresh produce, it demands a comensurate increase in the focus on the education that will allow people to want to cook more produce. Unless we do this, we might as well toss all this new produce away in the dumpster and save our clients the trouble. This represents an, as yet, unseized opportunity on the national level. To match the focus on produce with an equal focus on ensuring it makes it the ‘last mile’ into the mouth of growing child or shrinking adult.

The final of the four areas of the ‘shorten the line’ activities that I identified earlier in this article is the one that represents the biggest unturned key of all – the coordinated anti-poverty movement.

Feeding America has had a fitful relationship with frenemies like ‘Share our Strength’ and others. There was also the fear that by partnering in a deep way with non-food focused entities we would lose our USP (and the funding that comes with providing food – something that people riot in the streets about if they don’t get enough of . This has always focused the minds of politicians of all stripes.)

We have arrived at  a moment of opportunity with a new leader taking on the CEO function at Feeding America. Is it going to be more of the same or are we going to have a leap of the imagination as to what is possible for us to achieve?

Diana Aviv – New CEO of Feeding America

I encourage Diana Aviv to grasp this opportunity and run with it. CTHG has shown on the local level how food can be a way of leveraging other longer-lasting interventions in people’s lives. The same is true on the national level. Let us leverage the billions of pounds of food the network brings to the table, to forge a greater coalition of those who want to address the trap of poverty that so many are consigned to.

I’m sorry to give you indigestion, but this may involve issues such as minimum wage reform and campaign finance reform, so that people can provide for themselves and invest in their own communities, and also so we have political decisions that reflect the will of the many, not the road block of the few.

Sometimes the battles pick us.

I hope to see you at the next CTHG conference. Don’t just send your staff next time, come yourself. You will be inspired and stretched. There is a whole other world out there and it provides a key to improving the lives of those we serve and work with for the long-term.

Oh and don’t worry, the conference name is going to change.

 

* You win a free gluten-free Krispy Kreem donut if you picked up on the Doctor Strangelove reference.

 

 

 

Chan

GOODBYE YELLOW BRICK ROAD? IS IT TIME TO PIVOT YOUR NONPROFIT?

 

Your nonprofit organization steps out onto the yellow brick road, hearts full for your hopeful march to achieve your mission. So why is it that the Emerald City doesn’t seem any closer now than it was a year ago, or even five?

Maybe because there is a fork in the road that you are missing which could really get you there.

Maybe you need to pivot.

The Foodbank of Santa Barbara County has been engaged in a significant pivot over the last five years from simply providing emergency food to 300 local nonprofit agencies to operating like a preventative health organization, raising low-income people’s health in the cheapest way possible – through what they eat.

We were originally seen as an essential organization for the community, but one whose job was to apply a nutritional band aid to a problem that could never be fixed.

We knew the true hunger issue locally was a form of institutionalized malnutrition – lack of food access for healthy food and easy access to poor quality food. These factors led to poor nutrition and health. Even more significant was a lack of the skills and empowerment needed to make good use of fresh.

Our first stage was to outlaw candy and soda and put hundreds of thousands of dollars into sourcing more fresh produce and making it available free to agencies.

Our pivot has been a big success for us, so let’s consider what tactics might be applicable to you in your situation.

Why don’t you start by taking a helicopter view of what you are doing and how it fits in with who else is doing what in this area.

Take a hard look at your true impact against the total need both from the perspective of the individuals you serve and related to what the community really needs.

Consider extensive stakeholder and user interviews. You will probably find that your end users have a different perspective of your services than you do.

With the Foodbank, once we’d made this commitment to pivoting by focusing on nutritional health rather than pumping out empty hunger –inducing calories, we realized that ‘charity’ was not going to get us more than part of the way to our destination. So we moved from focusing on a simple one-way charitable exchange to messy, awkward exhausting – yet sustainable – community engagement.

This was exemplified in our programs like the national award winning HSP, where an old model of food distribution (poor kids go to a room and pick up your bag of food while everyone watches) was replaced by a mutually supportive healthcare model that engaged the whole family in the excitement of helping each other stay healthy with food.

 

So, try not to think only in terms of your existing ‘mission’ which may be too open ended or vague. Perhaps consider what is the ‘destination’ you need to arrive at? (A community where…)

 In our previous mission, everything was about the short term and today’s crisis. Our clients are needy, we are needy as an organization. Help! Help! That will get you sympathy money. That will get you ‘go away’ money. But it will not get you the money you need to try to really solve the problem.

Move out of your historical comfort zone and do more of what needs to be done (as opposed to what you’re ‘good’ at doing) and build the partnerships that will help you reach the destination in collaboration with others.

What chunk of the destination goal could your organization take on, either by yourself or in partnership? How can you build support and resources for this?

Your pivot will fail if societal and local circumstances are not in favor of it (for the Foodbank it was donor and client interest in healthy food available for all, and also granting foundation interest in moving from outputs to long term outcomes). Another reason to pivot may be to avoid a big bad twister of a change in the outside world that is coming toward you.

It may be easier to sell your pivot as an ‘evolution’ as opposed to a sudden turn. It will cause less unease for all parties. And with some people you just have to pretend nothing’s changed!

Use data to win the argument for pivot – this is a way of avoiding it being a battle of personalities. Who are the supporters who can help you compile and interpret this data?

Who are the key influencers that can help you make the case for a pivot? Look for individual champions on your board, volunteers and funding community to influence others. Balance when to ask permission and forgiveness.

You may have to operate like an internal start-up within your larger organization. This will be a core group of believers who can steer change.

Money greases the most painfully grinding of wheels. So find a source of outside funding which will enable you to research or take on some small initial facet of your pivot. Use this outside money to speed internal change. Use this ‘win’ to demonstrate to those who are on the fence that your pivot will draw new forms of support. We were able to secure partial funds to hire a dietician, and it enabled us to make a lot of changes.

Make peace with the fact that your pivot may require you to be a ‘two-faced’ organization for a period of time presenting either the old or evolved mission in different ways to different people.

It will take time, education and persuasion for donors supporting your original mission to come to understand and embrace your new mission. (What is that verse from the Bible…For what shall it nonprofit a man to gain the whole world and lose… his funding.) When I am talking to donors, I know within 30 seconds whether I should be having a hunger or nutrition conversation)

 

Finally, it’s not all about the outside world. Pivoting the mission is a lot easier than pivoting the culture. What is your plan for making this kind of shift internally? Identifying and empowering champions is one way. Firing or ‘freeing up the future’ of people who cannot move on in their thinking is another uncomfortable but vital tool. The culture is going to be the last thing to change and it will take years (Culture eats mission for breakfast).

As long as you remember Glinda’s words and you will get there just fine.

 

 

 

 

Goodbye Fundraising, Hello Resource Development

The Fundraising Tree of Many Hands

We are nearing the financial year end for many nonprofit organizations, and maybe things are going to work out fine and you will make budget.  Perhaps you will even produce one of those modest nonprofit surpluses that will make everyone feel good, with being so much that it would raise any eyebrows in the community. It is unlikely to be enough to enable you to truly reinvest in your mission at the level necessary.

Maybe, though, you are going to have a deficit this year. Is it a one-off freak event or do you sense a gradual softening of your fundraising?

In the world of food banking and emergency food provision we rode a wave of recession-based fundraising from 2008 to 2012 that was based on general recognition that doubling down on core services was a necessity that had to take priority over funding the opera or saving the snowy plovers.

Line Dancing Without The Stars

Those days are over. The problem is that the recovery is job-lite, and a growing number of the people who access our services are food insecure families with at least one breadwinner trying to piece together a living from a handful of part-time, low-pay, no-benefit jobs.

Nevertheless, many donors have become bored with the recession, and they want to move on. Now, they could be whistling opera arias while they feed the snowy plovers, rather than tapping their toe to a Woody Guthrie number and making sure that no American goes hungry. Many foundations have already moved on from a posture of feeling obligated to focus their resources on ‘urgent needs’ of a recession.

Snowy: Gimme all your money, honey.

I have touched on the challenges of the current fundraising environment in this column before, typically by encouraging you to ‘sell a new bill of goods’ to your donors (such as nutrition and food literacy; or food banks as preventive health institutions; or as community development engines). These newer ‘cure not band aid’ activities are designed to work symbiotically with the previous singular focus of hunger relief.

However, in this post, I want to encourage you to consider a more permanent shift in how you approach the entirety of your fundraising and development.

The Development Team (Self-Portrait)

Walk down the hall to look at your fundraising person or staff or department. However many, or how wonderful they are, they are NOT going to be able to succeed in providing the level of funding truly needed for you to succeed at your stated mission.

I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but they cannot do it alone.

It requires everyone on the payroll and also everyone with links to your organization to have a ‘resource acquisition’ mentality, which is something different from simple ‘fundraising,’ and I hope to make this distinction clear.

When nonprofit leaders swap notes about fundraising, we usually gravitate to chit-chat about direct mail vs. events vs. online vs. this or that. We get hung up on the tactical tools rather than focusing on the types of shift in strategic approach that will enable us to succeed.

The good news is this strategic approach requires you to focus heavily on only two things:

1. Building and maintaining diverse relationships in the community;

2. Having the technology and dynamic internal communications/culture to assemble and actively disseminate the latest information about those relationships to all staff.

That’s it, folks. Focus all your energies and staff on these two issues and your organization will be sustainable in the long term. (Assuming, of course, you are the right people doing the right thing at the right time for your community)

Today’s washout is tomorrow’s prospect.

So how do you do what I am suggesting? Let’s take a look at a group of people who are doing them already – people who are raising money for institutions of higher education. You’ve seen them at airport hubs in shorts and a suit jacket, modern day bounty hunters, tracking down their prey. These gift officers put incredible focus on steadily building relationships and joining the dots between a complex net of interconnected people. Of course, they start with an advantage, that they have a finite group of ‘prospects’ with a common interest related to a shared past experience of their glorious alma mater. (And even if that experience was plain bad, the fundraiser knows that they can give it a decade or two and rely on the golden glow-generator of memory to make that graduate positively inclined towards the institution. Or maybe just call it Stockholm Syndrome!)

A human services nonprofit needs to build a similar kind of shared experience with its large number of potential supporters in ways both large and small. Foodbank of Santa Barbara County’s Impact Group approach to focused service provision is already generating new communities of interest (and communities of resource development) for us, around shared interest areas like nutrition or diabetes care or poverty or through targeting specific geographical areas of highest need in our service area.

We seek to involve people beyond the ‘twanging heart strings’ level of financial support, because we want to directly connect people to an area of their on-going interest:

“The Foodbank are interested in optimum nutrition and exercise? So am I!

The Foodbank is working to provide special support to those with diabetes? I’ve got an aunt with diabetes!

The Foodbank is bringing special focus to build collaboratives to address poverty in a particular part of town? That’s the part of town my family pulled themselves out of, or that’s the part of town that I could make a lot of money long-term by investing in at the ground floor!

The list goes on and on and on. Everyone who supports us is interested in ameliorating hunger, but most are interested in so much more; in things that are ‘stickier’ than solely hunger, the perception of which will ebb and flow with (skewed or otherwise) perceptions of the local situation.

If we can engage people long term in a positive change area, then this is going to garner us far more sustainable resources to help us achieve our mission of building healthy communities through good nutrition.

 

If the CRM jigsaw only had four pieces, life would be so peaceful…

Technology can help us achieve this, because we can source new types of information on people and compare links between large amounts of data. We can utilize a cheap (or theoretically free to nonprofits) CRM (Constituent Relationship Manager) like Salesforce or spend lots of money on Raiser’s Edge or any of the other IT solutions out there. It doesn’t really matter what you use as long as you are aggregating and linking all that data, and taking all of those relationships seriously.

This demands that we bring a high level of sophistication and focus to fundraising efforts over a wider level of dollar donation, whereas before, this was only the purview of the major gift level. I am sensing the need for us to flatten out how we treat small scale and large-scale contributors to our organizations. People want more information, more access. We have to find ways of doing it that don’t suck us dry of time and money.

Clearly, it is not cost effective to spend hour upon hour of staff time to build a relationship with a very chatty $25 donor, which is why social media and utilizing groups of community supporters acting as a conduit, becomes vitally important. You might also be pleasantly surprised to discover that the contractor who gives you $25 at Christmas is one degree of separation away from the wealthy person who favors that contractor for the job of moving the west wing of their house to the east wing or whatever the current priority is.

The new Major Gifts Officer cracks a joke

Perhaps at this stage of the discussion, you might acknowledge the potential benefits of focusing on relationship building and mapping, but how do you make it happen with a staff that is already stretched tighter than Simon Cowell’s face?

It’s not only your patience I’m stretching

I have talked in previous posts of the potential upside of moving, however painfully, towards an employment model where everyone you hire is a leader or potential leader – whether they ride a desk or a forklift. Their job is to inspire, guide and when needed, manage the work of a shifting group of human resources that are paid ‘other than with money.’

This enables everyone in the organization to scale the impact they could achieve on their own. They work with volunteers, community leaders (super volunteers), knowledge philanthropists and interns.

For this to work, processes need to be simplified and automated, online training needs to be provided for tasks, and we need the ability to break down complex tasks into smaller discrete sub-tasks which can be taken on by those with only a modest amount of time to commit to the organization. The upside for employees of this kind of ‘outside-in’ organization is that they will be become better paid.

If this wasn’t confronting and challenging enough by itself, I am further suggesting that you need to up the ante by insisting that all staff be tasked with bringing resources into the organization as well. (And be rewarded for doing so).

However small your staff is, they have between them relationships with the people who have the relationships with the people that are waiting to be inspired and actively engaged in your mission, and which will bring it the sustainability of funding that it needs to succeed. You just need to give staff the confidence, permission and motivation to start to grow and link those relationships.

I’m afraid this involves more of that indigestion-provoking medicine called ‘culture change’ and the kind of cross-functional teams and situations that can get people talking and sharing what and who they know.

This now brings us to considering the distinction that I drew earlier, when I said it was more a question of getting staff, board and volunteers to understand that what we are asking of them is not ‘fundraising,’ but ‘resource acquisition’ which is different. The more introverted members of your team can be reassured that ‘resource acquisition is far less scary and embarrassing than fundraising.

It is not asking your friends for money. REPEAT. It is not asking your friends for money.

Rather it is building a matrix charting the varying resource needs of the organization alongside the different interest/involvement areas that your organization provides, and then to begin to join the dots themselves about who they know who might be interested in what area.

The whole organization pitched in to bring home the bacon (and the wooly mammoth, and the hippo and the python) Where’s Russell Crowe when you need him?

This kind of culture change also involves tasking staff who come to you with great idea for a new initiative with getting involved in generating the resources to put that initiative into action.

To which they reply: Wait, isn’t it the development department’s job to come up with the money to make my initiative a reality? I mean I can work up a budget or something, but the development director needs to schmooze some people and write some begging letters, because that’s their expertise, right?

Development Departmental Mascot

It is their job, however it is also the job of the employee with the lightbulb over their head. Again it is a question of breaking down the elements of this initiative into chunks of people, things and money. We can’t afford to pay for everything ourselves, because that would be hogging all the fun, right? So where are new resources for each of these chunks out there in the community, which are laying in the hands of people who are waiting for the opportunities that their social investment in you will bring them, their employers, families and groups.

I would argue that the required resources for many new initiatives are out there, they just need to be tapped, and who better to do it than the person who within your organization who is excited by what that new initiative can achieve? Of course they are working in tandem with the accepted development team, so that you minimize toe-stepping and mixed messaging, but they can play a key role in helping to drive the process. They can get involved in meeting with people who may be able to play and working their own set of relationships and forging new relationships built on common interest and shared vision.

I don’t know about you, but when I walk into an all-staff meeting, I don’t see a bunch of job titles sitting around, I see everyone as a walking ‘Kickstarter’ campaign ready to inspire the community to deliver on an amazing idea.

Get out there and bring back the resources

This doesn’t mean that the development department is getting off the hook, oh no. They have to utilize the same approach. If they come up with great new fundraising ideas, they also need to come up with the people (who are not paid staff) who want to execute the idea. They also need a logical framework for how this activity is going to get some oversight and accountability from within our organization. This requires us to work with trusted volunteers who can engage with other volunteers or community organizations. We also need to rely on a sharing technology and culture to enable us to mitigate the risk of a crazy or self-serving person doing damage to our good name/brand.

These days, we are all Sherlock Holmes, looking for the clues and connections that are going to close the case or close the campaign, and build an organization that is sustained by the community for generations to come. Your mission deserves nothing less, right?