Community-centric fundraising is new to us, but it is going to be here for the long haul. It is timely, much needed, and most importantly, it is challenging – to our beliefs and the way we know Philanthropy. And if we want to do a good job at it, we have to raise critical questions, be willing to become vulnerable, and make all necessary changes in our work – whether it’s in the research or to frontline fundraising. In this article, I am translating the community-centric fundraising principles into three broad pillars we can incorporate into our work:  Internal, External, and Environment.

Before moving on to a closer look at each pillar, here is a pictorial representation of how they are positioned around your organization.

Here are strategies you can try for each of the three pillars.

1. Internal

This includes everyone who is “inside” your organization or is working towards your mission. Examples include board members, staff, volunteers, etc.

  • Set up a bi-annual survey, with questions beyond their individual roles. Whether it is about workplace practices, hiring and onboarding practices, or the training they feel is needed in areas of social justice, offer space for your people to share perceptions about Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility.
  • Share the results of this survey with appropriate transparency and update your policies and practices.
  • Hold small, monthly, focus-group like conversations that offer a safe space to discuss social justice topics – anti-racism, systemic oppression, equity, wealth disparity, intersectionality, etc.
  • Set up an annual “brainstorming session” with all donors and your internal entities to test the mission and evaluate if it is still relevant to the community needs. Be ready for both hard questions and hard answers!
  • Evaluate if you can create a “collaborative lab”, where you invite young POC fundraisers to shadow your staff and collect experience that they can showcase for their full-time roles.
  • Hold a weekly “virtual celebration” team check-in to encourage and celebrate different fundraisers, every week, for their contribution beyond the direct securing of gifts. Reasons could include anything like celebrating someone’s contribution when another team member was away from the office or attending a racial justice seminar that made them feel empowered to contribute meaningfully to the workplace.
  • Invest in a database or seek external consultant support to set up a data collection tool for you to collect volunteer data. Far too often, volunteering data is not consistently recorded or reliable. The better your data, the more responsive your engagement strategies can be.
  • Encourage the use of social media. With most of the world spending the majority of their time online, teach your internal entities to make the best use of virtual tools, including professional sites like LinkedIn. Offer free training and encourage your entire staff to leverage LinkedIn to build better collaborative professional relationships with fundraisers beyond your organization and local chapter.
  • If you are a chapter-based organization, see if you can conduct an “all-hands” session at various group levels appropriate to your organization. Example – all west coast chapter or all country-wide chapters or all North America chapters etc.

2. External

This includes everyone who is “outside” your organization and connected to you directly. For example, your donors (both individuals and organizations). Note that sometimes there is an overlap between internal and external entities; for example, you can have alumni volunteers and donors. In all such cases, go through both the checklists below (i.e., internal and external).

  • Broaden your research techniques to be more DEIA oriented in general. Click here to read how you can get started.
  • Set up an annual “DEIA enabling” donor survey. You can collect information on social identifiers and feedback on mission relevance for the community, offer space to rate how your organization is doing on DEIA efforts with the donor community, and ask if they want to contribute in any way in forwarding your commitment toward this effort.
  • Re-assess all forms and questionnaires that collect information from new donors to create a simple and concise form to use on all platforms. This form ensures all data collected is consistent and complete. Having various donor forms on different social media platforms, with too many questions, only demotivates a new donor.
  • Create thoughtful segmentations that promote collaboration instead of tokenizing any particular community. These collaborations could include speaking opportunities in your events or mentor-mentee opportunities.
  • Set up an additional tab on your website called “Donor Defined Impact”. This tab will have a form, where donors can share, all year round, how they feel the impact of your organization’s mission and work. Combine this information and other social metrics available in your database to create KPIs that go beyond financial numbers.
  • Create thoughtful segmentations of affinity and engagement that looks beyond mere capacity. Use these segmented donor pools to re-evaluate the portfolios of your frontline fundraisers. The portfolios should not manage donors who only come from the wealthiest sections of the society but include a more holistic approach in creating these portfolios

3. Environment

This includes all entities outside of your “day-to-day” entities and not connected to you directly, i.e., other organizations with a similar mission, other chapters of your organization, different schools of your university, etc.

  • Coordinate with your local AFP/ APRA Chapter to identify a few local organizations that have a similar mission as yours.
  • Pick any one to two organizations from the identified list to collaborate on an upcoming thought leadership/donor engagement strategy session, where you truly leverage each other’s expertise and knowledge. Keep these collaborative projects short. Refresh your list to find new partners every few months. This way, you learn about many organizations rather than working in silos.
  • If you are a chapter-based location, spread over different areas, encourage the global office/the chapter head office to conduct an all-chapter staff and board survey. This survey can include questions around accomplishments, challenges, and ways to collaborate among the chapters. Share the results transparently all across the organization.
  • As you collaborate with peer organizations, share your impact KPIs with your local AFP Chapter. This shared knowledge enables a path towards a unified and consistent way of looking at social impact.

This list is just the start. Let us work together to solidify these ways and ensure our work is relevant in a community with all social justice elements enabled.

Meena Das is a Fundraising Analytics Consultant with a U.S.-based consulting firm. She specializes in designing and analyzing survey-based research tools. Meena appreciates spending her time outside work as a mentor to immigrants and pro bono research advisor to Nonprofits. Her two recent favorite projects are working on making data-based research tools more DEIA (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility) compliant and designing the second season of her podcast “Being and Unbeing parents of an Immigrant”, where she wants to bring together the families of immigrants left behind in the home country. Connect with Meena on LinkedIn.