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May
18
Written by:
admin
5/18/2008
We sometimes forget to reflect on how much our environment has changed in the last 5-10 years:
- Much more scrutiny from external organizations such as Revenue Agencies. We have to be more accurate and adhere to more rules and regulations. The rules and regulations are increasingly complex to learn and to administer.
- Donors have taken much more direct control of their philanthropy. We need to be much more careful in how we record gifts and then how we manage them once they have been received.
- More complicated giving vehicles and more complex recognition and maintenance activities such as family foundations are becoming commonplace. This makes data entry, crediting and reporting more difficult.
- We are all collecting and maintaining many more data elements. Just consider the management of email addresses alone. We’re also collecting cell phones, more information on interests, public information such as securities and have implemented new communication techniques such as email marketing.
- We have all added new web enabled systems such as online communities, online giving, online event registration and others while still needing to maintain our back end database. Many of these projects have created incremental workloads without the addition of staff to manage the technology.
- As we have all moved into larger and continuous campaigns, our data entry and maintenance volumes have increased. Incentive vehicles such as challenge gifts are harder to record and manage especially as these transactions flow through to the general ledger.
- Privacy laws and individuals’ awareness of privacy and data exposure has made conventional tracing and finding of lost constituents more difficult. Once lost, they are harder to find. These laws have also added complications to our opt-in and opt-out management.
- We are competing more directly with other non-profits who sometimes have more resources than we do and whose fundraising models can be simpler. Consider online giving where we often have many designations as opposed to a few or even just one on a political site’s profit’s online giving page.
- Fundraising is a core business. We need to operate at the highest level of efficiency in the use of every resource we have.
Staffing is always the most difficult budget resource to acquire. Reorganization and streamlining of work and improvements in technology is also critical.
How much more can we assume? Only time will tell.
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