Goals are great, except when they're not
The note to my team, in which I probably incorrectly quote a sportsball coach
Since we’re entering that… erm… exciting (?!) goal-setting time of the year, where we decide what our fiscal year goals will be, I wanted to take a moment to put goals into perspective. Goals in fundraising are funny because they hardly ever REALLY describe what matters, or whether you’re successful as a fundraiser or fundraising team. Dollars raised, although of course the most important lag measure, is the most notoriously misleading about the success of your fundraising efforts, with total visits coming in a close second. They are important aspects of evaluating success, don’t get me wrong. But, in and of themselves, they are too nondescript to really be taken at face value.
For example, you can have stellar visit numbers, but not raise a dime. Also, you can raise a million dollars in one visit, but not add any value to the organization, the mission, or the donor’s life (or you could even HARM your organization’s reputation – re: Sackler). So, although these numbers are indicators of how we’re doing our jobs, each individual metric by itself cannot tell us how WELL we’re doing our jobs. A classic “quantitative analysis needing qualitative narrative to be meaningful” situation.
It is easy to make the mistake of equating achieving the quantity goal of interactions, with achieving it while adding value to the donor’s life and relationship with the organization. Although not every visit, call, email, text message can or has to be earth-shatteringly meaningful (“tears were shed, you HAD to be there”), but each of the actions we take with the donor must have some meaning in and of itself. Only this makes it in service of something greater than itself (guiding the donor on the way to the point of Philanthropic Inevitability) not the other way around.
My friend and colleague Peter Moes, the Chief Development Officer at United Way of Salt Lake, described this dynamic really well on a call this week. He referenced Nick Saban, legendary former head Football coach of the University of Alabama. I’m butchering his analogy here, be he said something like football being not so much about winning the game as it was about winning each PLAY (because if you win each play, you ultimately win the game, yadda yadda). Although I want to be careful not to put a too competitive spin on things, I do think there is some deep truth to this for us as fundraisers.
It is not enough to show up, say hi, bye, and then all of a sudden dollars appear at the end of the year.
The real risk here is that having goals might distract you from what is important. It is the quality and intent of the interaction that matters, regardless of whether you make an ask. Each visit, call, email, text message, etc. with the donor serves a larger purpose, yes, but that larger purpose is served only when these interactions have meaning themselves. Focusing on how you can add value to the donor’s life in that particular moment, how you being there, or the message you send, adds to the relationship is the right focus of your energy.
I’m not saying goals are bad, what gets measured gets done, after all. Rather, I think that the goals we set only have meaning when we focus on the right quality of whatever the goal measures (visits, dollars, you catch my drift).
So, don’t get distracted by what the ticker, the dashboard, or the dial that displays our goals tell you. Focus on what makes these interactions worthwhile to the donor and the organization; what the purpose of your engagement with them really is.
Focus on winning each play, rather than winning the game. I think you’ll find that achieving your goals will follow.