New Year, New Thinking! Strengthening Your Internal Relationships

I love starting off a new year with goals, resolutions, and new ways of thinking. I love being inspired and pumped for the year ahead. In thinking about 2025, while there are things around me that I cannot control (and if I think about it too hard I could go down a depressing rabbit hole), I want to focus on the things that I can control.  

In thinking about you and the work you do every day, there are definitely things you can control and things you cannot. I’m starting a series on three things you can do that will make a major impact on your work in 2025 and beyond. Through this series of blogs, I hope to give you some inspiration and practical suggestions to help make you, your organization, and your donors all feel connected to your mission.

#1 Strengthening Your Internal Relationships

This fall I’ve been talking to a lot of new client prospects. One of the challenges that seems to be happening with all of these clients across the board is a real lack of cohesion amongst the different teams and departments of the non-profit. This is not uncommon, but for all the talk our sector has done about creating a culture of philanthropy, in practice it doesn’t seem to be happening.  

At Veritus, we know without a doubt that in order for mid and major gift programs to be successful, EVERYONE connected to the non-profit has to understand it and be bought into the objective of the programs. I’m talking about starting with the board, executive team, and each department; all the different facets of the development team have to appreciate, support, and care about these programs.

I realize this coming-together-as-one-team doesn’t happen overnight. It takes work. And, as a frontline fundraiser or a manager who oversees the mid and major gift teams, you can only control what you can control. But, you can make an impact on building a culture of philanthropy from your seat at the table.

Here are some suggestions that you can begin working on in 2025:

1. Get to know your colleagues—It’s surprising to me how we don’t take the time to get to know each other in our organizations. I listen to mid and major gift officers who really have no relationship with the membership or direct-response team members. No wonder they have no idea what each other is doing. And, getting out beyond the development team, it’s rare to find that mid and major gift officers have any kind of relationship with the finance or accounting folks, the program people, or the executive team. There is no way you can be truly successful without their involvement in your work. Knowing them goes a long way in helping each other understand each other’s work. Take your colleagues out to coffee, lunch, happy hour, whatever it takes to get to know the people in your organization. You will see how it makes a difference.
2. Set up learning opportunities for internal staff—If you have a monthly staff meeting, ask to be included in each one to relay stories and information about the work you are doing with donors. Share stories on how donors’ lives have been touched because they are investing in your organization. Give public praise to people outside of development that are making a difference in how you do your work. Bring the emotion of your work to your colleagues who are sitting in cubicles or in their home office isolated from your work and bring it to light. This will have a tremendous effect on how they will view their own work.
3. Report on the impact your organization is making on donors—Assuming your program people are reporting on the impact your organization is making in helping make the world a better place, you are responsible for reporting back on how your organization is making an impact on donors. Send out Slack or email messages on a consistent basis on things you hear from donors in your meeting with them to all of your staff. Can you imagine what a “pick-me-up” it is for someone in finance, who is working on budgets, invoices, and billing to not only hear that your organization is making a difference in the world, but that they’re helping change donors’ lives too? Wow. That is huge.
4. Conduct an organization-wide thank-a-thon—I just recently got this idea from one of our Client Experience Leaders who is working with a client that just did this. Everyone in that organization took a couple of hours out of their day just to call and thank donors on Giving Tuesday. Yep, they did a reverse “Giving Tuesday.”  Instead of asking for gifts, they thanked their donors instead. The report from our client is that it was effective in helping all staff understand how donors are truly part of their mission. The stories donors relayed to non-development staff fundamentally changed how those staff thought about development and fundraising in general. What a great idea.

You cannot do your work in a vacuum. This is why when we start working with a new client we ask that everyone in the organization sit in on our initial training sessions so that everyone understands what we’re all intending to do with mid and major gifts and why everyone around the table is so important to its success. I guarantee that if you build those internal relationships at the beginning of 2025, your mid and major gift programs will be extremely successful.  

Jeff

(A three-part series to start the New Year right)