Special Offer from Spark Point Fundraising for Listeners!

Are you ready to make 2019 your best fundraising year yet? As a special gift for listeners of The Nova Communities Podcast, Spark Point Fundraising is offering 25% off Spark TIme – a comprehensive evaluation of your organizational challenges and fundraising strategy, which includes 90 minutes of consultation time with this week’s guest, Whitney Brimfield.

You’ll get insight into what’s working and where you can improve in the new year. Contact Spark Point Fundraising to learn more and don’t forget to mention The Nova Communities Podcast in your message!

Episode Highlights

• Welcome and Introduction (2:10)
• Aligning Fundraising and Mission (9:35)
• Step One: Strategic Planning (14:23)
• An Ideal Plan (15:11)
• Revenue by Source (19:06)
• The Implementation Plan (22:30)
• Celebrating Success (25:11)
• Potential Results (27:10)
• Three Focus Areas (28:32)

The interview transcript is below for reference.

Guest Biography

Whitney Brimfield
Founder and CEO of Spark Point Fundraising

Whitney Brimfield is the Founder and CEO of Spark Point Fundraising, a boutique consulting firm that specializes in helping nonprofits build and expand revenue lines from foundation, corporate, and government sources. Whitney has more than 20 years of experience in fundraising, business development, and social enterprise at the local, state, and national level.

She has worked on a variety of issues, including public health, human services, workforce development, college access, international development, and the arts, raising millions of dollars for numerous causes. Select clients include Bread for the City, the National Building Museum, Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, and the National Quality Forum.

She specializes in helping organizations find their funding spark, whether that means adding a new revenue stream, improving systems, developing a winning grant proposal, or creating a completely new fundraising strategy. She is skilled at designing highly successful development strategies, coaching Boards of Directors and executive leadership to overcome fundraising fears, writing winning grant proposals, engaging corporate donors, and building individual donor programs. She brings a marketing eye to resource development, always thinking about how an organization’s communications and messaging must dovetail with its investor outreach.

She is an active volunteer and sought-after board member. Her past board appointments include the Washington Improv Theater, the NARAL Pro-Choice Maryland Education Fund and the Women’s Information Network. She holds a Master of Health Science from Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and a Bachelors from Haverford College.

Contact

LinkedIn | Whitney Brimfield
Twitter | @Spark_Point
Facebook | @SparkPointFundraising
Instagram | @SparkPointFundraising

Interview Transcript

Emily
Welcome to the show, Whitney. I’m so glad you’re here.

Whitney
I’m thrilled to be here. Thanks for having me, Emily.

Emily
I’m excited to have you share more about yourself and your holistic approach to some of the strategy and fundraising activities that you do. So let’s start with that.

Whitney
My name is Whitney Brimfield and I’m the President and CEO of Spark Point Fundraising. We’re a boutique fundraising firm that specializes in strategy and grant writing. We help organizations deploy the strategies that will most effectively advance their mission and sustain their work. So as you can imagine, we’re pretty busy. My background is obviously in fundraising. I worked in all levels of organizations, local, state and national, and I’ve worked as a development director, as a grant writer, and everything in between. I’ve found that the way to have the best impact in the nonprofit sector is actually to work outside of an organization because you get to touch more missions and spend less time in meetings, quite frankly. It’s a fun journey being a fundraising consultant and I hope I can be helpful to your audience.

Emily
Absolutely. I think you will. One thing I really enjoyed from when we first spoke was your holistic approach to the work you do. It started as grant writing and fundraising, but you’ve really taken it a step further to be a strategic partner with the organizations you serve. Tell me more about that approach.

Whitney
So like I said, we focus on two things. Strategy and grant writing. For both our role is really about how can we be the most efficient and effective and helpful for organizations. So a lot of times a nonprofit will hire a consultant to help with a fundraising strategy and they get this gorgeous 20 page document that they read once and then maybe they talk about it with their board and the board members like skim it and then everybody forgets that it exists.

Emily
I’ve seen those documents!

Whitney
Those documents have so much helpful information in them, but it’s impossible, almost virtually impossible for them to be useful unless you really break it down into the actual things you need to be doing on a regular basis. So one of the ways that we approach fundraising strategy and planning is that yes, you get a strategic overview of where your organization should be focusing their energy because you need to know that, but the more important thing that we do is that we create a calendar that helps organizations implement that plan. So for every month of the year we tell you these are the things that you need to do this month in order to make that plan a reality. I think that gives us an opportunity to help, not just with the planning, but also with the implementation and then we partner that implementation calendar with coaching. We’re not necessarily going to be the ones on the ground doing the day to day fundraising work, but we will be right there next to you answering questions, helping you figure out challenges, and providing you with moral support because fundraising is hard.

Emily
Yeah, it’s hard. It can be messy.

Whitney
Yes, it can be. Then the same is true of our grant writing practice. So typically when organizations hire us, they hire us basically to manage their entire grant revenue program. That could be anything from just writing foundation proposals to managing your entire grants calendar and writing proposals and doing reports and prospecting. So we do all of those things.

The thing I think that sets us apart is taking a more holistic and strategic approach to the work of raising funds from grants and there’s this ceiling that you can reach generally in an organization of how far you can go with grant funding. Right? Like there’s only so much money you can raise from the pot of money and from grants it’s much smaller than the pot of money you can raise from individuals.

I think that oftentimes, especially in organizations where grant funding isn’t a huge percentage of the revenue of the organization, they tend to set it and forget it. It’s just kind of do the minimum needed to keep the funders that they have, but there’s always ways to grow your grant funding even if it’s just by small increments. I think we’ll probably talk a little bit more in detail about this later, but I think our practice is really around providing strategic guidance about how to break through that ceiling. We tend to get good results for our clients. I mean we can’t make any guarantees, but on average, our current grant clients earn about $100,000 in new money annually when they work with us. I think it pays off to pay attention.

Emily
I love that data point. Those are always so helpful. The interesting thing too about development and talking about fundraising is that sometimes you have one person in your organization who’s a little bit off to the side, right? They’re not really in operations. They’re not really in the program day to day, but they’re the one who’s constantly talking about money. And so to have this holistic approach is helpful to unify all areas of your organization. Now we’re thinking about how it affects the whole organization on a larger scale, not just when we receive the sales report or revenue update.

Whitney
For sure and I think what you’re describing in the world of fundraising is referred to as a culture of philanthropy, so everyone in the organization has some role to play in fundraising, even the person and perhaps most importantly the person who answers the phone. So having that understanding amongst everyone in the organization of how fundraising affects their work and how they can have an impact on the success of the organization in terms of fundraising is really critical. But it’s hard to get people on that train. So it’s part of what we do as consultants is to help people communicate with the staff, with the board, with their donors about how a culture of philanthropy will make a difference to their work is huge.

Emily
Yeah. It’s massive. And when you’re talking with those people, what are you sharing with them as the why this type of program or fundraising plan is important?

Whitney
Well, there’s an obvious answer to that question. Nothing will happen if you don’t have any money, but I think the challenge that a lot of organizations face is that they hold a lot of fear and stress around fundraising because dealing with money and talking about money in our culture is taboo and oftentimes as an executive director, you’re looking at the bottom line and you’re not just worried about whether or not the next grant proposals going to come in, you may be worried about cash flow and how is payroll coming in the next month and whatever other revenue challenges. So the way that we help organizations get past all of that is to really help them face their fears with fundraising and embrace the importance of money in their organization and build that culture of philanthropy. That makes all the difference I think in terms of how folks are able to succeed when they are working on fundraising.

Emily
That’s a great point. The scarcity mindset is something I’ve talked about on this podcast a number of times. There is a ceiling certainly, based on your organization, and perhaps your area of focus, but there are an abundance too of resources. It’s just making sure that they’re aligned with your mission and seeking out those opportunities that are part of your values.

Whitney
Right. Absolutely.

Emily
So Whitney, how should organizations focus their efforts to ensure their fundraising are aligned with their mission?

Whitney
I love this question. My short answer is don’t try to do everything. I think most folks think that or you may have an instinct that they have to try a little bit of everything so that they have their hand in every pot and the reality is that certain parts are going to be more fruitful than others depending on your mission. So for example, a community-based organization that provides direct services is well suited for corporate and foundation giving, but an organization that cares for animals or for children is very well suited to building a large individual donor program. Right? Babies and puppies are very compelling. Even if you don’t have either, you certainly are moved by them and so that makes it easier to engage individuals across all spectrums of society that care about those issues. Similarly, an advocacy organization is unlikely to be successful at getting government grants and may not even want them depending on their mission.

So it’s all about figuring out who cares about your work, who benefits from it, and who has an interest in your impact, and who will be willing to turn that interest into an investment. The answer to that question is different for every organization, but if government grants is not in the answer to that question, then there is no need for your organization to pursue them. I think that’s the challenge. Having that focus is hard, especially for organizations that don’t have a full time professional fundraiser on staff, which in my experience is many of them because you don’t know that you don’t have the experience of doing fundraising that will tell you those kinds of things and that you don’t have the trial and error to know what works and what doesn’t. And you don’t want to waste your time figuring it out because other people have done it before you. So I think that’s the biggest and most important thing that you have to do in order to align your fundraising with your mission.

Emily
I’m curious, in your experience, have you seen organizations who are looking for any kind of money or grant instead of focusing on their mission and messaging? Maybe they have adapted over time to be able to receive additional funding even though it isn’t aligned with their mission?

Whitney
I think it’s a little bit of everything, right? I mean a lot of organizations get stuck in mission creep, which is the words I use to describe what you are saying. That they really are chasing the money and not being always as true to their mission as they could be. And often the result of that is a lot of unrestricted funding for a program that doesn’t advance your mission. So in a sense it’s like creating more scarcity that those kinds of programs attempt to draw the energy towards them because that’s where the money is, right? But if you get into that cycle, then you’re losing sight of the goal, which is your mission. We can all agree that it’s not good to do that, but I think that the challenge that people face is that they don’t know and when you have an offer on the table, it’s very easy to say yes, right?

I think there’s a certain amount of discipline that’s required in fundraising in order to avoid that. If your mission truly is relevant and compelling and important, which of course everybody believes because why else would they be doing this? Then you need to find the people and the institutions that really care about those things that you’re working on and go to those people. I think the other challenge that organizations face in how they get easily into mission creep is they don’t start with a solid strategy around the organization’s focus on the mission, right? So if you don’t have a strong strategic plan or at least a strategic direction, I mean, I think a similar problem exists with strategic plans as exists with fundraising plans that they tend to be really nicely done and very compelling, but only looked at a couple of times.

If you have that vision and that path in mind, it’s much easier to say no to money that doesn’t align with it. But so many organizations aren’t starting from that place, so there’s no roadmap to tell them if they’re not on the road. Then you’re off the road. Anybody who’s ever gotten lost hiking knows what that’s like. So yeah, I think if you don’t have a solid strategic direction and some discipline around that, then it can be very challenging.

Emily
And is that where your strategic approach comes from? First starting out and looking at that strategic plan before diving into the fundraising?

Whitney
We, ourselves at Spark Point, aren’t a strategic planning firm, so we don’t do that work. We, of course, partner with other organizations that do it. But I’ve definitely advised organizations that want help with fundraising that you need a strategic plan first. There’s no way to be a really effective at fundraising if you don’t have that. Because then what are you talking about? I mean, yes, you have a mission and you may have a vision and values, but those are just guiding principles. That’s not like what’s informing your day to day work, I would hope, because there has to be more to it than that. So I think it’s just important to keep that in mind.

Emily
Yeah. So step one is defining your mission and vision, having that strategic plan and then moving towards the fundraising plan. What would you say is entailed in an ideal plan?

Whitney
So in my mind, the only real requirement for an ideal fundraising plan is that you look at it more than once a year.

Emily
How many times?

Whitney
Monthly, at least. Daily or weekly. I mean, I would say daily but whatever format is required in order for you to be able to use it in that way, makes it the ideal plan for your organization. And so that gets to another point which is you need to have a plan that works for you, not a templated thing that was created by somebody who knows nothing about your organization. Of course, you know, there’s some things that you would have to include in every plan, right? Like you need revenue goals and other benchmarks that will help you measure success – number of prospects, number of meetings, number of proposals, conversion rates, retention rates, all of those things. You need high level strategy. So what, where are the matches between your organization’s mission and the way that you’re going to raise money? So what we’ve talked about before, and then I think revenue goals by source are also important.

So most organizations aren’t raising money from only one source. If you are doing that, you should probably diversify a little bit. What percentage of your revenue is coming from foundations, from individuals, from corporations, and you’ve already figured out what mix of strategies you need based on your mission, but now you need to understand what the percentage of revenue is coming from each of those sources because each has different capacity for every organization. So I think thinking through that is really important.

Then I think also the thing that we often ignore is thinking through the staffing structure. You could have an amazing plan that’s super comprehensive and you’ve got tactics for every section and you know exactly what you’re going to do. Then you’re like, this is the work of three people and I have half a person to do this. Then it’s impossible, and then you’re setting yourself up for failure. Most organizations don’t have enough people dedicated to fundraising despite the fact that the fundraising staff are the only people who pay for themselves. So you actually can afford a fundraiser if you hire someone who’s good at their job. I think it gets back to your point about the scarcity of mindset, right? That organizations often thinks that they shouldn’t be investing in staff that isn’t mission focused, but if investing in staff that’s generating revenue, there is no money for the mission focus staff. I feel like it’s a misconception, a misunderstanding of how organizations function that exists in the nonprofit sector. If somehow we’re supposed to generate all of this impact in all of this revenue, but do it with half the number of people that a corporate entity would use to do the same thing.

Emily
Yeah, in associations and nonprofits we are very creative, but that’s true – the right people have to be in the right place. Otherwise there is no room for growth. If you’re constantly only mission focused, you’re not going to ever get to that next level or that next step as an organization.

Whitney
bsolutely. And you’re also going to have a huge challenge with staff retention and burnout. Everybody in the nonprofit sector is burnt out and it’s because of the fact that nonprofits aren’t investing in staffing appropriately and that’s because of the scarcity mindset. So it’s a vicious cycle that is causing, I mean I think we could be doing so much more if we were investing in more people.

Emily
And for the most part Boards want us to do more, but we’re doing –

Whitney
But not with any more resources.

Emily
Exactly. Exactly. Or we’ve been able to fake it for long enough, right? That they’re not investing.

I’d love to briefly skip back to one point you made about revenue goals by source. That is very smart. For folks who are looking at a diversified plan, say their typical revenue source is individual giving and sponsorships, but they’d like to start include grants and planned giving or legacy giving. If they have not done that in the past, how would you recommend that they set goals for those areas? Or is the first year to just feel it out and then you set goals in year 2 or 3?

Whitney
So the answer to your second question is the length of time it takes in order to generate revenue and be profitable in whatever revenue stream you’re looking at depends on what it is. Right? So Foundation revenue tends to have a longer lead time than individual donor revenue because there is a much more bureaucracy and process typically with foundations than there is with an individual who’s making a decision about how to spend their own money. So if you’re adding foundation revenue to your plan and it’s a new thing, I would make the goal very conservative at the beginning. It generally takes between, I mean on the very short end of the stick, it takes maybe six months and I think more realistically 12 or 18 months to get it to go from zero to a grant funded through one foundation because there’s a lot of relationship building that needs to happen along the way. So for that example, you want to be conservative. I think for individuals you really do, that is a case where you really have to spend money to make money, right? You have to spend money on people because an individual donor program requires a lot of care and feeding and attention and almost sometimes literally feeding because people will always show up for food.

And also there’s a lot of tracking and data management that needs to be done in order for those programs to be successful. So if you’re just starting out with an individual donor program, well if you’re just starting out with an individual donor program first, talk to your board and your closest volunteers and ask them for money and then see how that goes. But after that step, if you’re really getting into, reaching more broadly than your closest supporters, then you really need to be thoughtful and strategic about your infrastructure. You need a database that will help you track all of the information and keep notes about people and do your moves management. I wouldn’t spend too much time or money or effort on a database right away because they can be expensive and that can take you down a crazy path. But you do need a way to track all that information. And you do need a person who’s paying attention to it all the time and it’s going to take a little while for that to pay off. If you add direct marketing, the letters, the emails, all of that into that strategy, that’s the whole other ball of wax that you need to be focused on. There’s a whole science behind that and there’s countless consultants who can help you figure it out and I am not one of them.

Whitney
There’s a lead time required and no strategy is going to be profitable right away. I mean, any company that starts, any startup will tell you nobody’s expecting them to be profitable for at least two years. So the same is true in fundraising. This is the same processes and the same paths. It’s just for a different purpose.

Emily
Certainly. Excellent. Well said. We’ve talked about this holistic approach and at the beginning you mentioned giving clients a calendar and an actual implementation plan to help hold them accountable. Can you talk a little bit about the support that’s provided and how that’s helped the organizations you’ve served?

Whitney
Anyone who’s ever worked on a project knows that you come up against roadblocks and things that you don’t know what to do about, and that can sometimes completely derail you. I think that happens a lot with fundraising because there are a lot of roadblocks. It’s very personal. People have various levels of comfort with talking about money and they may have problematic or otherwise challenging relationships that need to be dealt with in order for forward movement to happen. Those are all things that make people uncomfortable. So it’s very easy to get on the path and then stop. The role that we play is really to unstick the path, right? To talk you through how to like breakdown these challenges into their smaller pieces and help you figure out what you can do first and then next and then next because every problem is really just a set of other problems that can be minimized.

Whitney
Right? I think that’s what we do really and that gives people confidence in the path that they’re on and the steps that they should be taking. And it takes away the uncertainty that I think a lot of people in fundraising roles face in how to do their jobs. Up until recently there was no way to learn about this stuff except on the job. When you learn something on the job, it tends to be very effective, but you also can learn bad habits, right? So that affects people a lot. I think that the other way that especially development directors can get stuck in fundraising is that it’s very easy to hide behind a robust grant funding program and not diversify, which puts your organization in jeopardy.

There’s two kinds of diversity when it comes to revenue. One is diversity within a certain type of fundraising, so you may get grants from 10 foundations. There’s also diversity among types of fundraising – so foundations, corporate government, and like I said before, we help you figure out which are the right matches for you. But then within that, there are also ways that you can, if you’re really anxious about doing individual donor work and you have a strong foundation program you may not push yourself to get to the individuals. That’s part of our job, to say, I know you don’t like doing this, but if you really want to achieve the goals that you have, you have to pick up the phone. Yes, making phone calls is the best way to raise money. I think the other thing that we do that’s really important is that we help organizations stop even if it’s just for a minute and celebrate success, right? Success isn’t always a million dollar check, although we would totally celebrate that in fact did recently with one of our clients, but even the small things like reconnecting with a lapsed donor or picking up the phone and calling a program officer, they are really important to because it is hard to do this. You need to really give yourself credit where credit is due. Even on the small things.

Emily
Right because it’s a longer term commitment, right? To be making these plans, you don’t always see the fruits of the labor until much later, so to have someone who’s cheering you on along the way, supporting you, who’s been there with other organizations and understands – that is a tremendous help too. Otherwise these roles can feel isolated as often times there is only one person focused on these types of activities. I like the coaching aspect.

Whitney
Yeah and I mean I think it’s important to do that with everyone who is fundraising, right? So especially your board and other volunteers who are helping the organization raise money. They need to feel that, first of all, appreciation, but second of all, gratitude (like to me they’re two different things) that they’ve done something that has real value to the organization and then they should be constantly reminded of that because it helps them to continue to stay interested.

Emily
Yeah. And do more.

Whitney
And do more. Right? So the more success a board has, the more you should celebrate it. And every single thing that they do for fundraising, you should give them a pat on the back for because every board member that’s doing fundraising, while it’s everyone’s every board member’s job, most don’t do it and most say they’re not going to do it. So the ones that do really need to get the extra credit, the gold stars.

Emily
Absolutely. And sometimes it doesn’t take much, just a couple touch points, to multiply the outcomes. One additional question I have about grant writing is what the organizations you’ve worked with – what types of results do they typically see?

Whitney
So I’ve noticed amongst my clients and with other organizations, it’s very easy to set it and forget it. When it comes to foundation funders, once you get in the door with them, especially those that give you money every year and are less competitive, you just kind of send your annual report and your annual proposal. You invite the program officer to events, but you’re not doing enough work to steward your foundation relationships if that’s all you’re doing. You’re leaving money on the table as a result. Also I think with foundation funding, less prospecting and cultivation happens, but that’s how you build your program. Even with foundations, you have to pick up the phone, build relationships and make formal asks. Otherwise you’re always going to get the same money from them even though they may have 10 times the giving capacity of what you’re getting. People just tend to accept that reality with foundations in a way that they don’t with individuals, but it’s the same animal in some ways. It’s still one person deciding whether or not to give you money. So you can ask that person for more money.

So when we work with clients, we focus on three things. The first is getting and staying organized with your deadlines, requirements and follow up. So the baseline, you must be doing that in order to be successful. Right? And then the second is crafting compelling proposals and reports that step, that talent organization story while still following the guiding guidelines and requirements of those documents, which can be numerous. The third thing we do is really being entrepreneurial in our approach to prospecting and cultivation and stewardship. I think it’s point three that really differentiates us from other grant writing firms as we all know that unsolicited proposals are a waste of time, especially in this day and age when grant funding is hyper competitive, so you have to have an actual relationship with an actual person at a foundation in order to be successful.

If you want to increase funding from a particular funder over time, then you must build those relationships. And I don’t know, there’s no other way for them to get deeper insights than those that come from one on one conversations and for you to pick up the phone and call them. So I think that’s the thing that most organizations are not doing that we help them to do. That really makes a difference. And that’s where I think our impact comes from – that it’s really not just about having a really good proposal and being organized, it’s also about relationships. Even though that shouldn’t be a surprise to any of us in the world of fundraising because it’s all about relationships. With foundations and other institutional funders, it’s very easy to ignore those relationships because they don’t seem as urgent, but they’re still critical and they need attention.

Emily
Yes, relationship building is a critical, critical aspect of nonprofits and associations as a whole anyways. It’s not surprising, but it is so important to be intentional out those opportunities because sometimes just knowing the person will multiply your money.

Whitney
Right? So here’s an example I have. I have a client who we do their grant writing work and recently they had a proposal due and I said, well, why don’t you call the program officer and just ask her. I can’t remember what I said they should ask her about, but there was something we wanted to know and I said, let’s go. Let’s just call her and ask. And she said, you know, as a result of that conversation, they told us to apply for five times the amount of money that we would have.

Emily
Five times?

Whitney
Yes. And so it was like a 15 minute phone call. So I mean that’s an anomaly. That’s not what happens always, but that’s the only way to get more money out of your foundations funders is to talk to them. It drives home the point too that it wasn’t even the intention of the call, the intention of the call was for something different, but it ended up knowing this person and getting clarity helped.

Emily
Wow. That is amazing! Well let’s shift gears a little bit. Whitney, I would love to hear more just about you and if there’s some advice you would give yourself from when you first started in the nonprofit industry?

Whitney
That’s an interesting question. I mean, I first started working at nonprofits when I first started in my career, so there’s a lot of things that I should have thought of them that were really more about learning how to be a professional that’s so much about the nonprofit sector, but I think that the most effective way to be a fundraiser in a nonprofit is to be a bridge builder and a change agent. You should be the most entrepreneurial person in your organization. I think owning that entrepreneurialism and pushing for the right to have it is something that I would have done more of in my role in nonprofits if I had felt more empowered to do it.

Emily
Yeah. A connector and an innovator.

Whitney
Right. And I mean, part of that comes from the fact that you need a solid strategy in order to be an effective fundraiser. So you want to push the organization that you work for to be as innovative as possible because it makes fundraising easier for you. But also you have the privilege of what very few people in the organization have of seeing everything. You see every part of an organization’s work, not just one siloed piece of it. You have kind of a more nitty gritty vision of it probably than the executive director does because you spend your time in different ways. Certainly the executive director is the strategic leader and the face of the organization and they know everything but they don’t know everything. They shouldn’t be that far into the weeds but fundraisers tend to have a little bit more of a holistic vision of the organization. That means you’re coming from a position of strength when you’re talking about change. I would say take that role on and use it to your advantage as much as possible. They see the needs in a different way than the executive director does because they’re in the nitty gritty a little bit more.

The other thing that might be helpful to executive directors is that your development director sees those needs in a way that you don’t and can probably justify decisions that you’re making in ways that you can’t. So for example, if, if an executive director decides, well, we need to cut this program for whatever reason, they have their reasons for doing it and that’s what they’re going to share with the staff. Right? But they might also want to talk with the fundraiser and say, well, why is it that this program isn’t bringing in as much money as it should? Or what are the challenges that we’re facing that are going to cause us to have to change this, you know, remove it, or whatever you do decide to do that. The fundraiser is going to say, well, the trend in our sector is towards this and then this program is, is not going in that direction despite the fact that that’s where they should be. And so we’re not going to get as much money from foundations if we’re going to pursue this project because is not what they care about. And so that gives you an external reason for, for your decision that you might not have had otherwise, and might be actually quite helpful to the people that you may be changing their job or laying them off. They want to know why. And this is a reason why that isn’t just based on your discretion.

Emily
Sure.

Whitney
Why Oregon executive directors aren’t just making those decisions based on their discretion. But I think that there’s often some external context that could be explained and that a fundraiser might have some of that information more helpful. Yeah.

Emily
Yeah. Good. So last question for you, Whitney. What is the smallest action someone could take today to have the biggest impact?

Whitney
Call your donors and thank them. All of them.

Emily
All of them. All the time.

Whitney
Not just the individuals, you should call everyone – even your government funders, even though they’re not really the ones giving the money. It doesn’t matter. Those individual relationships are the most important thing that you have in your organization. And when you call them and say thank you, you could also share something interesting or important that’s happened recently in the organization. I think that’s always something that your funders want to hear about.

Emily
Yeah, that’s great. So simple yet a big impact. Okay, so Whitney, where can people find you?

Whitney
Our website is sparked-point.com, just like the name of the company. On Twitter we’re @spark_point. And then on Linkedin we’re Spark Point Fundraising and on Instagram we’re @SparkPointFundraising. So we’re everywhere.

Emily
Excellent. I will link to all of Whitney’s contact information in our show notes and Whitney, you had mentioned that you have an offer for our listeners today, would you like to share more about that?

Whitney
Yes! So for everyone who listens to this podcast, we’re offering a 25% discount on our Spark Time assessment, which is an online assessment tool that helps you figure out what are the three to five things you should be focusing on now in order to move the needle on your fundraising immediately. It’s not your typical assessment and is not super lengthy or time-consuming, it doesn’t require interviews. It’s really getting a sense of where you are now and having an expert look at that data and tell you, okay, these are the things you need to be doing. It tends to be a great way to jumpstart your planning when it comes to fundraising and now is a great time to try it. If you contact us through the website, simply mention this podcast and we will give you a 25% discount.

Emily
Wonderful. That’s so generous. Thanks for offering that to us. I highly recommend seeing if the assessment works for you. Whitney and her team have been a great resource to me and I think this would be very beneficial for anyone listening who is interested in really increasing their impact in the fundraising. Well Whitney, thanks again so much for being part of the podcast and we look forward to talking to you again soon.

Whitney
Thank you so much. It was so much fun.