"Part of a goal’s purpose is to give the team something they can surpasss."

By: Greg Bowden

Last week I had the opportunity to lead a roundtable discussion at a training seminar for staff and volunteer leaders of a YMCA association. As is so often the case at such events, everyone received a few “freebies” to help keep them informed and motivated. One of the items was a wooden, twelve-inch ruler. Inscribed on the ruler was the YMCA logo and the phrase “What Gets Measured Gets Done.” It hit me like a hammer. I had been having a number of conversations during recent days over that very issue: setting measurable goals for staff and volunteers in the hopes of motivating them to get it done. Here I was receiving the same message back, and in the form of a clear, concise sentence. It immediately went into my lexicon of “the rules of fundraising.”

There are several different ways we can apply this maxim to our professional lives. As fundraisers, setting goals is what we do. The most obvious application is an overall campaign goal. I have seen too many campaigns where I was told the goal was to raise “as much as we possibly can.” No kidding. However, that is not a goal; it’s an objective (and, I might add, one that every campaign should have for itself.) Campaigns need goals, else how do the staff and volunteers know they have succeeded? Furthermore, goals should be milestones that can be met. Part of a goal’s purpose is to give the team something they can surpass.

There must also be milestones to be met along the way to the overall goal. It is not enough to simply set a goal of $5 million to be raised over eighteen months and not set any intermediary points. That would be like giving you directions from your house to my house by telling you to turn out of your driveway and pull into mine. There is too much slack in that plan for anyone to stay on target.

There are a couple of strategies here, and both rely on our central maxim. One is to set phase goals for different areas of activity in a campaign, and define the time allotted for each particular phase. For example, the Major Gifts Phase may occur during the early months of the campaign and extend for a defined period of time. That phase would then have its own sub-goal; a portion of the overall objective. It is not a bad idea to inflate those phase goals somewhat, so that their sum is greater than the total campaign goal. The analogy I use to explain this is my days of running high school track, when the coach told us to run through the finish line, rather than just to the finish line. Everyone should be pushing to exceed his or her goal, rather than merely meet it.

In addition to phase goals, landmarks can be set on the calendar for the campaign’s overall progress. This process benefits from a sound campaign structure. One of the principal tasks in a campaign is to build a Campaign Executive Committee, a group of committed volunteers who have made a leadership-level financial commitment. This group should meet regularly throughout the campaign, perhaps every three weeks. There should be a quantifiable objective for the amount of desired activity between each meeting. For example, the committee may be responsible for conducting a total of $1 million worth of requests between each meeting. The necessary prospects are divided among the volunteers, and each person knows that they will have to report their results at the next meeting. Again, the sum of the different intermediary goals is an astronomical total, but that pushes everyone to look beyond the campaign goal and toward the campaign’s ultimate potential.

The objective in these strategies is that each volunteer has a clear expectation placed upon them. If you want your volunteers to put forward their best effort, let them know that their work is being measured against a standard. The last thing they will want to do is come back to the next committee meeting—in a room full of their peers—and declare that they did not quite hit their mark. They will push themselves to exceed the expectations placed upon them.

The counter-intuitive truth about these measurable goals is that your volunteers will thank you for it. True leaders want to be challenged, and not in fluffy, equivocal terms. Your volunteers will welcome the opportunity to prove to you, and to themselves, that they are worthy of the task. One of the best examples of this fact comes from outside the fundraising industry. What is the only branch of the US military that meets or exceeds its recruiting goals year in and year out? If you said the Marine Corps, then you are right. Do people seek to join the Corps because they know it will be a languid vacation? No. I would suggest to you they do so because they know it will be hard; as hard as anything they have done. We all have a deep-seated need to apply ourselves to some monumental challenge and demonstrate that we can “measure up” with the best.

If a campaign struggles, is it because the organization does not have the appropriate leaders, or because it is not drawing out their leadership abilities in the appropriate way? I would suggest the latter reason is more often the truth. If you want to bake a cake, it is not enough to simply have the ingredients in your kitchen. You must mix them together, whip them into shape, and apply some heat. The ingredients—the leaders—cannot do it on their own. It is up to us to show them what is necessary if we are to reach our objective.

Greg Bowden was formerly a campaign director at Custom Development Solutions, Inc. (CDS). CDS is one of North America's most sought after fundraising consulting firms specializing in the strategic planning and tactical execution of capital campaigns for non-profits throughout the United States and Canada. More information on CDS can be found on the web at www.cdsfunds.com. If you have a fundraising question, please call 800-761-3833 or send an email to lcs@cdsfunds.com.