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Want to Fundraise More Effectively? Strengthen Your Organizational Culture
For the last several years we’ve been doing a lot of research and development work regarding the impact of organizational culture on various aspects of organizational and individual performance. We’ve examined the impact of culture on overall management, revenue performance, governance, brand-building, customer service, and program development.
It will come as no surprise to savvy executives that organizational culture can severely limit an organization’s ability to create and sustain outcomes. A robustly healthy culture, on the other hand, can act as a substitute for pure capital (money) and can turbo-charge an organization’s ability to achieve. Frances Fukiyama’s book, Trust, lays a compelling set of cases out addressing how a culture of trust has saved more than a few organizations from oblivion.
My partner, Wendy, has finished developing a short, targeted session - designed for staff retreats - that reveal how adjusting particular behavioral and attitudinal dimensions across an organization can make a big difference in improving fundraising performance. She has been having great success with this session, and I believe that it is because she maps out a very practical and measurable way to operationalize effective changes. People understand what they need to do and why they need to do it.
Many staff members within arts organizations have little or no experience with philanthropy. Surprisingly, we find that this is true in Development Departments within organizations, too. Experienced development officers find themselves frustrated by how the overall organizational behaviors actually work against achieving the very philanthropic support that the organization says that it wants to develop. It’s the old story of sending mixed messages - at high cost.
Surprising? Not to us. Many people are committed, in principle, to ideas and objectives that, in practice, they either don’t understand or have mixed feelings about doing. Amazingly, sometimes the people who are most in the way of achieving the organization’s objectives are the executives themselves - not from intention, but from not really grasping how apparent and visible organizational culture is to people on the outside, e.g. people that you might want to cultivate for contributed support to the organization.
Posted on March 29, 2007 09:29 AM | Permalink
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