The Next Big Thing

All hail the next big thing! Everyone is looking for it … or running from it … or a little of both.

“What’s next” is a huge topic of conversation anywhere you go in the fundraising sector. And because the lure of that magic fundraising bullet is so seductive, it’s way too easy to get caught up in its siren call — you know … that sublimely hypnotic melody that wraps itself around your overworked brain and soothes away the trauma of your last failed direct-mail package, those hugely expensive test mailings, the CAN-SPAM bugaboos, and links that take forever to load and then take visitors to some cyber-limbo/hell wasteland anyway.

I’m not a fundraiser, but I found myself having to admit on two occasions recently that even I jumped the gun, crowing here at the office about e-this and mobile that and declaring that FS needs to write about the hip, the hot, the cutting-edge and the right-this-minute strategies that will propel any organization to mega-fundraising success. Ha!

Meanwhile, readers ask me questions like, “How do I get first-time donors to give again?” and “How do we determine what a ‘major gift’ is?” Hmmmm … double ha! Earth to M.B.

I admitted my flight of fantasy first at a brown-bag lunch at the offices of Creative Direct Response, while Geoff Peters sat in the back of the room chortling in my direction. Then again during a podcast interview for Jeff Brooks’ Donor Power Blog.

“It’s humbling,” Jeff said to me, referring to the sting you feel when you realize that you, in fact, do not know it all. He’s right; it is.

So I rolled around in my humility for a while, and then I had a thought. I do, indeed, know what “the next big thing” is; I do, indeed, know what that magic fundraising bullet is.

Unfortunately, the knowledge won’t make me rich. That’s because you already know what it is. Everyone who works in nonprofit fundraising already knows what it is. Are you ready? I-n-t-e-g-r-a-t-i-o-n. Duh … cue the anemic, little, anticlimactic drumroll, please.

If you want to play the semantics game, integration is an evolutionary thing, not the revolution that everyone seems to be looking for. But as each new strategy creeps onto the radar, the challenge is to, first of all, be enough on the ball to be aware of it; then to study it; and then, if it’s appropriate, i-n-t-e-g-r-a-t-e it into your overall fundraising plan.

Groundbreaking, huh? Never let it be said that FS shies away from the controversial stuff.

Seriously, though, as unsexy and as “now tell me something I don’t know” as it seems, the sure-and-steady integration of new strategies with old — peppered with a healthy level of risk-taking, of course — is what propels the most successful fundraising. It will do it for yours, too. And that advice is No. 1 — with a (magic) bullet.

Margaret Battistelli
Editor-in-Chief
mbattistelli@napco.com