How to rebuild. Or not.
Major changes within a development shop are par for the course for any organization. It might be that:
A prior leader made bad calls and was ousted, leaving the new leader to pick up the pieces.
Gift officers have cycled out, taking years of institutional knowledge and donor relationships with them.
A comprehensive campaign is over and your donors have disengaged.
If you’re facing the aftermath of major changes in your org and have concerns about how they might be affecting your outreach to donors, one of the most critical things for you to do is:
Complete a retrospective, 5-year audit of donor-facing communications, structures, and processes.
And then use this information to move forward or rebuild in an informed and strategic way.
To illustrate, let’s say you’re newly in charge of fundraising for a school within a larger university. Some early donor conversations reveal that your department used to put out an annual impact report, but that stopped a few years ago. You could simply decide to reinstitute the report at this point, but a better option is to understand why it went away in the first place.
The report may have disappeared for any number of reasons, including:
The central university advancement office now handles the reporting that was included in the School’s prior annual report, making it redundant
Your team decided to break up the content of the report into a quarterly impact newsletter and create more touch points
A short-staffed manager made short-sighted calls and the report simply fell by the wayside
Force majeure (COVID anyone?) made the report unfeasible one year and it wasn’t reinstated the following year
There’s no way to know any of this context without a comprehensive audit. And once you’ve done it, you’re in the position to answer the most important question:
What is the best way to restore a superior donor experience from the past or build an even better one today?
From there, you can choose to carry forward what is useful to you, leave behind what isn’t, and imagine a bold new future for your donor communications that is grounded in your department’s greatest strengths.
Stay tuned: our next blog post will go into more detail on areas of focus for a communications audit.
