Generosity Ops: Structuring Your Organization to Accelerate Giving

Over the past 20 years, I’ve had the privilege of working side by side with thousands of nonprofit leaders. Most of my work has revolved around removing fundraising bottlenecks and using technology to accelerate philanthropic results. For better or worse, I’ve been able to consistently observe similar problems across the majority of nonprofits that I served.

In my work with nonprofits, I’ve found that the biggest challenge nonprofits face is a lack of centralized data insights. I know that statement may sound vague, but let me illustrate my point with a few common quotes that I hear from well-meaning, hard-working nonprofit professionals on a weekly basis: 

• “I had no idea that one of our largest major donors was volunteering with us.”
• “I know we collected a ton of contacts at that event… but I’m not sure if they donated.”
• “I couldn’t tell you if our direct mail donors retain better than our email donors.”
• “I know that first to second gift retention is important, but our marketing team doesn’t have access to that data.”
• “Our executive director wants us to focus on impact statistics in our communication, but I prefer video stories. I don’t have a way to show her who’s right.”

Do any of these quotes sound familiar to you? If so, you’re not alone. When nonprofit teams are siloed and cannot easily capture and share insights, it causes misalignment and confusion across the entire organization. Shared data that leads to action is critical to the success of any organization. Without visibility into real-time data insights, your organization is driving in the dark. Opportunities are lost, and decision-making is delegated to the loudest or most senior team members in the room based on their best guess or gut feeling.

In the words of former Netscape CEO James Barksdale, “If we have data, let’s look at data. If all we have are opinions, let’s go with mine?”

Solving this data problem requires more than just minor tweaks to organizational systems. It requires a new kind of team focused on aligning organizational decision-making around shared insights. 

Enter generosity operations.

Generosity ops is how leading nonprofits are able to unify data and foster team collaboration. At its full potential, generosity ops drives a deeper understanding of donors, saves your team time, and dramatically increases giving.

Generosity Ops Breakdown: Roles and Responsibilities

For the past two decades, high-growth tech companies have leveraged “revenue ops” teams to centralize insights about the customer journey and bubble up insights to help accelerate revenue growth. Similar to revenue ops in the for-profit world, the generosity ops team focuses on optimizing revenue generation by removing silos and exposing the hidden insights that are often missed or overlooked at many nonprofits.

To better understand the function of this team, let’s look at a quick breakdown of a few common tasks and outcomes within generosity ops. The value created by this team can vary based on the needs of each organization, but this list is a great starting point for understanding how generosity ops teams can accelerate results:

• Connecting volunteer data to donor data to understand how giving and volunteering amplify one another.
• Surfacing program stories and impact data to fundraising and marketing teams in order to quickly close the loop with donors.
• Identifying ambassadors and activists in the database who offer more value than just a donation.
• Reporting on how marketing, volunteer, fundraising, and major donor activities are interrelated.
• Creating alignment by providing KPI visibility to all teams (retention metrics, lifetime value by channel, donor upgrade metrics, etc).
• Identifying innovation opportunities within the organization.
• Creating enablement and cross-training materials for team members so that learnings aren’t lost between teams.
• Finding pockets of innovation within the organization and helping ensure the innovation scales.

Building a Generosity Ops Fits Based on Organization Size

If you’re a smaller nonprofit, you might wonder whether adding a generosity ops team within your organization is feasible. Creating an entirely new department might seem daunting, especially if you operate on a tight budget.

I have good news: Generosity ops can work for organizations of any size!

It’s up to you to experiment with what works for your organization. It might take some trial and error, but you’ll improve the process over time and create an optimized generosity ops strategy that maximizes your impact and supports your mission.

If you’re unsure of where even to start, here is some guidance based on organizational size.

What Generosity Ops Looks Like for Smaller Nonprofits

As a smaller nonprofit, implementing generosity ops doesn’t necessarily mean creating a brand-new team or hiring new staff. One popular option is to designate someone as the part-time internal owner of generosity ops.

This individual can then build the generosity ops team by selecting committee members from each functional area. This might include leaders from the fundraising, communication, and program departments for small organizations. Whenever possible, try to recruit at least one data, technology, or Excel guru for your team. Aggregating and making sense of data is at the heart of generosity ops, so you’ll need someone who can help dismantle data silos and experiment.

Once your fledgling team is up and running, set up monthly meetings focusing on one or two core initiatives that can drive results this quarter. Don’t try to boil the ocean or embark on a multi-year data project. Start small and try to deliver quick wins for your team.

As a starting point, here are four questions to ask:

1. Where is our data stored? Can I quickly bring datasets together for reporting?
2. What KPIs are most important to the organization, and does everyone have access to them?
3. What data points are we missing?
4. Can we convert our data into clear reports accessible to the whole organization and tie them back to our KPIs?

Doing this exercise can help identify opportunities for improvement that will likely generate the most impactful results. To keep your generosity ops team on track, establish a realistic timeline and link all of your tasks to a specific organizational goal or KPI.

What Generosity Ops Looks Like for Larger Nonprofits

At larger organizations, the generosity ops team commonly sits outside the fundraising or marketing teams. This helps the team maintain a holistic view of the organization while providing unbiased feedback and reporting. 

At a minimum, the independent generosity ops team would include a data scientist and a fundraising strategist who truly understands your organization's needs. While the data scientist focuses on centralizing data insights and leveraging business intelligence tools, the nonprofit strategist collaborates across departments to uncover opportunities for improved data visibility and shared insights.

As an extension of the generosity ops team, I recommend identifying an “innovation champion” within your organization. This person can sit within your generosity ops team or serve in an existing leadership role in fundraising or marketing. Your innovation champion has likely already shown proficiency in identifying and scaling innovation at your organization. Your innovation champion doesn’t need to have earth-shattering ideas themselves; instead, they should be able to recognize and implement innovative ideas from your staff or community. A perfect candidate for this role can influence other key stakeholders and champion change. Linking this person to your generosity ops team (directly or indirectly) will help your new team accelerate new ideas and clearly communicate value along the way.

Generosity Ops Pitfalls to Avoid

Remember that regardless of your organization's approach, like anything else, it takes time for a generosity ops team to become fully effective. With that said, there are three common pitfalls to look out for as you explore this new function:

• Analysis paralysis. The generosity ops team becomes stuck in large-scale projects that don’t deliver immediate value, such as overhauling the entire software ecosystem before consolidating data. Quick wins build team confidence and demonstrate results.
• Lack of executive buy-in. The team is doing good work, but the new insights are never used to drive action because key leaders aren’t bought in or simply override new ideas. Ensure you are clearly communicating the value to key leaders along the way.
• Innovation bureaucracy. Excitement for innovation is stifled by overly complicated processes and systems, leading to more time spent on procedures than achieving tangible results. 

I could share hundreds of specific examples of how Generosity Ops has the potential to accelerate results. My goal in this article is to provide you with a brief overview of the generosity ops concept and hopefully spark your curiosity to learn more.

The work you do is critically important. Don’t be discouraged. It’s time to step out and innovate! And, as you make progress in your journey, I’d love to hear from you. Let us know in the comments how you use generosity ops and other innovative concepts to drive increased generosity.

The preceding blog was provided by an individual unaffiliated with NonProfit PRO. The views expressed within do not directly reflect the thoughts or opinions of NonProfit PRO.