Teaming with Counsel

In this 4th of four related posts on the alternative of a staff-led campaign feasibility study, let’s take a minute to look at the role of counsel as partner in the process.

Making the decision to conduct a staff-led feasibility study does not demand that the organization’s staff go it completely alone. While the greatest organizational benefit comes from having development staff conduct interviews, there are three points in the entire study process at which experienced campaign counsel can add value. The stronger your familiarity and trust relationship with counsel, the better to leverage their targeted involvement.

Study design: Counsel can assist in developing the process and materials for the interview phase. This would include developing the participant selection criteria, the case/briefing document, the interview guide, and the scale of giving.

Training interviewers or interviewing: Your staff’s confidence may increase if the interview team has been trained by professional campaign counsel to conduct the interviews. You may desire to have counsel conduct some of the interviews so as to foster first-hand knowledge of the findings, especially if counsel is to be subsequently involved.

Analysis and strategy development: You may desire to have counsel assist with or completely handle all data transfer, content analysis, and development of study conclusions, including recommendations for implementation strategies.

By developing your objectives and plan for the study, you will be in a position to consider whether and when it is preferable to team with outside counsel in conducting the feasibility study.

Timing the Study

In this 3rd of four related posts, I’m offering some guidance on discerning when the time is right to conduct your campaign feasibility study.

The feasibility study should be completed before solicitation begins in support of the project(s) to be funded. The study serves many purposes, including testing the case for support, identifying issues that will shape campaign strategies, and positioning leaders and donors for subsequent involvement.

The study is most effective when the following criteria are met:

• Organizational plans and goals have been articulated in a preliminary case or briefing document.
• Awareness-building efforts and presentations have been made to key individual prospects and small groups of prospects, thereby assuring at least a baseline of knowledge among first-tier prospects and influencers.
• Development staff members have determined their readiness to implement the campaign and have at least begun efforts to fill voids.

Feasibility studies sometimes occur before all these criteria are met. Meeting criterion #1 means study participants will be reacting to a well-developed and well-articulated case for the organization’s desired impact. While still a draft document seeking refinement, this version of the case/briefing document should be as clear and compelling as available information allows. In dynamic environments, it is unlikely that development staff will have perfect and complete information from which to write the case to be used in the study. Despite that, a study conducted around a grossly premature case yields little return on the significant investment of time and energy.

Meeting criterion #2 means that study participants will have become at least somewhat familiar with organizational and campaign plans prior to study participation. In this way, reviewing the case/briefing document in preparation for the study interview is not the first encounter with the organization’s thinking. Rather, it serves to deepen and amplify earlier knowledge transfer.

By meeting criterion #3, campaign planners avoid unnecessary delays in moving from the planning stage (during which the feasibility study is conducted) to the implementation phase. Anticipating requirements of staff, budget, communication, and leadership should have allowed the organization to resolve those issues prior to commencement of the study.

Benefits of a Staff-Led Feasibility Study

In this 2nd of four related posts, I’d like to share my experience to help you explore whether an alternative to the traditional counsel-led feasibility study offers you the right kind of benefits.

There are numerous ways that conducting a staff-led feasibility study can benefit your organization.

1. It strengthens donor relationships with staff by using targeted conversations.
2. Donors feel better knowing the conversations are about them first, rather than simply about their money (a huge benefit for a principles-based fundraising philosophy).
3. Staff members gain experience asking sensitive questions about personal giving and interests.
4. Interviews conducted by staff allow the organization to obtain valuable donor/prospect information that can be imported directly into database management software without being filtered (or lost!) by the consultant. Some consultants prefer to treat the entire interview as confidential, in part to retain information that subsequently makes the consultant more valuable to the client in providing campaign counsel. Said another way, the consultants who conducted the study must be retained in order to find out what your donors think and feel about the project.
5. Consultants must often designate their availability so as to accommodate other clients, thereby reducing scheduling flexibility with donors. A staff-led interview process allows for greater scheduling flexibility for completing interviews.
6. Depending upon the size of staff and the interviewing team, this approach may field multiple interviewers to gain multiple perspectives.
7. Staff members feel a greater sense of ownership of the information, having harvested it in real time as opposed to simply receiving aggregate information in a report.
8. Conducting a study with one’s own staff is a sign of growing professional maturity and experience, thereby increasing staff credibility among internal constituents.
9. Given the competitive world of attracting and retaining professional development staff, such a staff-led effort builds valuable career experience, thereby helping to retain gifted staff.
10. Finally, this approach may save money in consulting fees, making this savings available for other budgetary needs, such as prospect research, cultivation costs, publications, etc.

Campaign Feasibility Studies: New take on an old idea

In this first of a four-part post, I’d like you to consider the merits of conducting campaign feasibility studies in a slightly different way—by using your own trained and experienced staff. Subsequent posts will add some detail to this introduction.

A feasibility study can play an important part in campaign preparations. In the past, organizations automatically turned to outside consultants to conduct such studies. In part, there was a sense of objectivity and confidentiality that came with the use of a third party between the institution and prospective campaign leaders and donors. However, it also resulted from limited major gifts experience and lack of professional development staff. As the profession grows and matures, both issues are less of a barrier than ever before.

Today, there are alternatives to the traditional approach. There are more development professionals employed now than in previous years, and many of these professionals have valuable experience that can be harnessed in campaign planning phases.

Feasibility study interviews are as much about cultivating the prospective donor as they are about ascertaining answers about the case and the individual’s giving interests. Therefore, in some cases, it is appropriate to maintain the relationship continuity of the major gifts field staff and their prospects/donors, rather than “inserting” an unknown third party (the consultant) for a single interview.

Conditions that warrant having outside counsel conduct the interviews include the following:

• Development staff has limited or no experience with major gifts.
• Known sensitivities exist around institutional leadership, making confidential interviews preferable.
• Demands of fundraising and other pressing work do not permit staff to invest the time to conduct interviews.
• Conditions that warrant having the development staff conduct feasibility interviews include the following:
• Mature development staff with prospect portfolio management responsibilities are available.
• There is strong relationship continuity between development staff and prospective campaign donors (also referred to as prospects or interviewees).
• Prospective campaign donors are weary of “one more feasibility study,” having participated in many, which eventually begin to resemble one another.
• Prospective campaign donors signal some objection to “experts” from “outside” coming in for a short period and then leaving.

Overcoming Deeply Entrenched Training and Mindsets

One emerging and growing influence that I see in my health care philanthropy work requires a pervasive mindset shift from what has traditionally been a need-based fundraising case (aka, sales approach) to one of a value-proven/community asset/investment-worthy mindset and message. While your plan may be sound and solid, if you’re not careful (and very attentive), you could unconsciously become focused on tactical steps that are built on a fundraising business model that is becoming increasingly misaligned with an environment of national reform and accountable care and the pervasive public perception of hospitals as big, profitable businesses. The “need” message, however artfully crafted, won’t gain much traction in the future. The tactics built around that message will likewise falter.

So here’s the more troubling part….there’s NOTHING new in this message. It’s hard to change what’s deeply ingrained. One must put one’s attention in alignment with one’s intention; namely, shifting the way we think about the work and the exchange relationship. What are you reading now that’s different from before? Who should you be in conversation with that disrupts your thought patterns and comfort zones enough to see things through a new prism? Are you assertively carving time into your schedule to take deep dives into thoughtful exploration of these questions?

The change begins at home. Here’s hoping you’ll have the courage to step off the treadmill long enough to reward yourself with the pursuit of your own shift.

Remembering My Being

So my morning habit of reading led me this a.m. to reread Chapter 6 (Being Mastery) of Kevin Cashman’s Leadership from the Inside: Becoming a Leader for Life. Some nuggets within led me to lift them up as something worth thinking about. For me, writing them out tends to reinforce them in my mind, which may also bring value to you. Here’s a couple to chew on:

“With no silence, there is no reflection. With no reflection, there is no vision. With no vision, there is no leadership. As counterintuitive as it may seem, silence and reflection are actually performance pathways to more expanded vision and more effective, innovative leadership.”

“Thinking is the effect; Being is the cause. Being is consciousness in its pure form, the source of thought. It is not a thought; it is the source of thought.”

“We have become a world of human doers having lost connection to our heritage as human beings.”

“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seing new landscapes, but in having new eyes” (quoting Marcel Proust).

And then there was this one that really made me pause…..”Being is infinity contained in the eternally present moment.”

SO MANY applications to these reflections in our work and lives today. Worth pondering for even a moment, don’t you think?

Leaning Into the Future

Unlike chemical reactions caused by the introduction of a catalyst, leaders who work to bring about change are themselves changed in the process of creating the reaction. Sensing the future is now—not only some distant and ethereal moment in time forward—we characterize the leader position as “leaning into the future,” to live and to keep becoming what we will become. This concept of continuous and purposeful adaptation replaces the soft notion of “the future” requiring some sharp, 90 degree turn onto some clearly delineated road at some precise moment. Instead, our “way” forward is intentional, resolved, and hopeful as we look for how the pieces of this future come into a clear(er) whole.

Clarity around why you are here is essential, as is the courage to listen and lead from one’s passion and source of energy. The ideals of integrity, respect, dignity and freedom have inherent value and importance in gaining the clarity each of us needs. This clarity feeds our passion and energy and fuels our creativity and courage to act beyond the safety of our traditional sphere. If we are truly on our way to a global village, where and how do we produce right action to lift up collective impact in our world?

The last lines of Wendell Berry’s poem, The Wild Geese, closes this summary, just as it did our time together at Conversation 2011:

And we pray, not
for new earth or heaven, but to be
quiet in heart, and in eye
clear. What we need is here.

Deepening Our Own Learning Resilience

As in every previous gathering, Conversation 2011 participants recognize our adaptability our focus on what we must learn and what we must do. Learning takes times and takes many forms. Sometimes it is intentional and purposeful; other times it is situational and sporadic. Learning resilience is a byproduct of an open mind, an open heart, and open will.

We see the power of asking ourselves, “What do I need to learn (and/or do) now to shape the future at each of the four levels we outlined?” There is a shared sense among us that we see our own responsibility in all of this. Being authentic—not just trying to be—authentic is an important distinction. Increasingly, our work may be in: a) modeling the language and behavior we want others to emulate; b) asking bigger questions more often…What’s the opportunity to impact the bigger global context (vision)?; and c) working to evoke healing in people – symbolized by what one participant shared he’d learned recently from a Masai person working with his organization. This person translated a traditional Masai greeting into English, where it means “nourish me with your words.” Can you imagine if each of us spoke only that which nourished others with our words?

Authentic Cross-Boundary Collaboration and Creating Flexible Networks

We view boundaries not as barriers but the places where neighbors meet and where discovery begins. We believe the future will increasingly reward those who find “openings” along the boundaries of organizations, communities, and sectors in order to pursue societal change and to focus the leverage that philanthropy provides. Being authentic throughout means letting go of the myth of control. It means navigating through change, risk, uncertainty and loss as you look for the opportunities and the sought after impact.

In the future we envision, individuals and organizations will converge to achieve bigger results (than they could if only acting alone), then ultimately disperse to converge again with different individuals and organizations. Movement in this direction will pull leaders to think and act organizationally and individually as one member of a constantly evolving network.

Cross-boundary/cross-sector collaboration (for-profit, not-for-profit, public) will become commonplace in this future.  We will move further away from the common (Western?) sense of competition in everything to flexible networks among those interested in sparking some big “shift” toward human and planet well-being; where private, not-for-profit, and public entities push for purpose and profit, to make us better people on a sacred and saved planet. Individual leaders who move in this direction will operate from a deep sense of trust and presence, courage, creativity, and reciprocity—all while honoring the legacy of their own history and evolution. Doing so becomes a constant reminder of the power of relationships—interrelationships—as the currency of commerce and change.

Images of Possibility vs. Predictions

At Conversation 2011, we began to articulate new images of possibility—more of the future we believe is trying to emerge. The visual image of people working at round tables became a metaphor for thinking and acting in new ways. With no “head” of any table, all voices were important and the stories each brings are powerful and must be held gently.

These images are born of some fundamentally valuable compass points (ideals) of integrity, respect, dignity and freedom – ideals that few would intellectually argue against, yet all too often recognize are buried by metrics, science, and technique because “we don’t have time for that” now.

We must be willing to walk into the disruptions we see on the horizon. So much personal and organizational energy and resources are consumed—often unconsciously—trying to prevent these disturbances to our status quo. We envision that there are strong forces pushing at us (as if in some downward representation in the graphic below) while concurrently there are many other forces pulling us. Where and how these forces intersect creates a punch, a breakthrough, an opening for change. Unless we are willing to be disturbed, we will miss moments of opportunity for even greater impact.