Brock Warner - From the Ground Up: Digital Fundraising For Nonprofits

Acclaim for

From the Ground Up:

Digital Fundraising for Nonprofits

"B ROCK HAS TAKEN SOLID fundraising strategy and brought it to life through a real-world guide to digital fundraising. In plain language, Brock is providing tactical and practical advice, rooted in insights that will drive results. This is a must-read for fundraisers." MAEVE STRATHY

"...A WELCOME ADDITION to nonprofit literature." JASON SHIM

B ROCK PROVIDES AN EASY -to-digest essential overview of the digital tools that can complement age-old best practice in fundraising and help you raise more! SARAH WILLEY, CFRE, MA, SMS

B ROCK SHARES THE WISDOM he's acquired through years of research and gives you the practical knowledge he's gained by creating highly successful digital campaigns. You'll avoid beginners mistakes and be launching your own winning campaigns in no time. DENNY YOUNG, MA

From the Ground Up:

Digital Fundraising For Nonprofits

Fundamentals That Will Serve You Well For Years To Come.

Brock Warner, CFRE (He/Him)

First Edition, September 2020

2020 by Brock Warner, CFRE

ISBN: 978-0-9809836-1-6

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests as well as speaking inquiries, write to the author at the address below.

www.brockwarner.ca

A CKNOWLEDGEMENTS :

This book would not be possible without the support of my incredible wife Mary and my children Emmylou and Stella. To the many friends, family, peers, coworkers and mentors past and present, thank you all for your patience, compassion, belief and encouragement.

As my co-professor at Humber College, Tara Irwin, CFRE has helped tremendously to inform and improve on the best practices throughout this book with her many years of experience. Thank you Tara!

Special thanks to Holly H. Paulin for her keen eye and tireless efforts as my editor, and to Mikael Hansson, Jason Shim, Stephanie Highfield, Michelle Lee-Garbe, Kelsey Watson, Nicole Kallmeyer, Jay Onrait and Mimi Maxwell for your invaluable advice and input as this book took shape.

The biology of purpose

keeps my nose above the surface.

Brian Eno

Introduction

S OME THINGS NEVER CHANGE , right? Well, close. It only seems like it. In our digital age, there are more trends by the day, and each fad comes and goes so quickly that it feels like the world has moved on by the time you catch up. Chasing fads is exhausting, unproductive, and, perhaps most damaging of all, its a distraction from the fundamentals that attract far less attention but wield far more power and influence.

We live and work in a world composed of layers. There are visible outer layers that get all the attention. Those outer layers are the fashionable trends, flashy ideas, and headline news. Peel back those layers though, and the deeper we go, the slower the rate of change. As this rate of change declines, something else increases: importance. Its a concept Stewart Brand, Brian Eno and Danny Hillis have evangelized for decades through their work with the Long Now Foundation: what changes quickly gets all the attention, while what moves slowly has all the power.

Pause for a moment and think about the fast-moving layers in your life, the stuff that disappears as quickly as it arrives. Fashion. Latte flavours. Viral videos. Pop music. Apps. Fad diets. Flossing (the dance, not the other kind!). Besides a bit of fun and water cooler conversation, did any of these make a meaningful change in your life? If we were building a home, its the latest coat of paint, or the pictures weve hung on the walls.

Now, consider the slow-moving layers in your life. The things that change at a painfully slow, possibly imperceptible pace. Your retirement savings. Public policy. Transit infrastructure. Wars. Medical research. These deeply entrenched systems that we interact with every day dictate our quality of life, the lives of our children, grandchildren and so on. These deep layers wield a shocking amount of power in our lives. In our house building analogy, the slowest moving layers would be the ground we build on and the initial foundation.

This way of looking at the world as being made up of slow-moving layers beneath fast-moving layers is easily applied to the ways in which you might effectively design, manage and oversee digital fundraising in your nonprofityou need to build from the ground up. You need to get comfortable with those slow-moving layers that hold all of the power, but get none of the attention. Ive written this book to share what more than a decade of front-line digital fundraising has taught me and what has lasted the test of time.

Each chapter of this book is meant to interlock with the previous chapter or section. Well start with basic, fundamental concepts and definitions in Section I: Understand It . In Section II: Design It , well begin to put them to use as we design and plan the more tangible, visible pieces of your digital fundraising program. In Section III: Build It , well pick up speed by diving deeper into strategy, and developing a critical eye that will serve you well as you venture into Section IV: Burn it Down . There, well look at how, where, when and why you might want to set fire to your current under-performing program and build a new one from the ground up.