12% of all charitable giving takes place in the last three days of the year, which is why your donors need to be able to reach a live gift officer on the phone and why your online giving portal needs to be humming like a Maserati.
In the first two weeks of the year, successful gift officers are thanking donors with notes and calls and doing not much else.
And then? Where to start? What to do? You would surely be excused if feelings of bewilderment or helplessness arose. Omicron, Delta, the Great Resignation, a year-end giving shortfall. No one would blame you.
There is a path to the kind of 2022 you want to have and you deserve to have. Three keys. Three resolutions. Three “come hell or high water I’m hanging on to you!” mantras that can guide you, shape you and protect you better than a KN95 mask.
Each requires a little bit of work. But each will serve you for the rest of your life.
One: Work at being a person of peace. When we demand that of ourselves, to be at peace with the ups and downs of life, we attain that most precious trait a fundraiser can claim: Quiet Confidence.
Things don’t always go our way? No kidding! Knowing what we can change and what we cannot? Exactly! Embracing optimism not negativity? The key to a long life.
Peace does not knock at our front door. We have to find it. The peace that brings Quiet Confidence endears you to your donors, your organization and to your team.
Two: Work at being simple. All the latest trends, all the newest fads. Chase them if you must, but know the chase will never end. And that chase will never make you the professional you yearn to be.
Success – and happiness, really – lies in searching out and clinging to the simple truths that never fade away.
Just as the keys to a healthy life are right in front of our nose, so are the keys to fundraising achievement! The keys to a healthy life are simple yet challenging at the same time; diet, exercise, sleep. You know them.
And so too, you know the simple yet ever-challenging truths of fundraising. We’ve written about them and we’ll revisit them in the year ahead.
Your path is right there, my friends. Simple priorities we find so darn hard to master that we look beyond them to the latest thing.
Find those simple truths, embrace them, and your path to success will appear before your eyes.
The third mantra for 2022? Some will say it is the most important of all.
That’s for next time.