Episode #446
446: Build Fundraising That Compounds with Bill Crouch
Reflections from host Sarah Olivieri ... Is Your Budget Killing Your Major Gifts Program? Many nonprofit leaders I talk to about major gifts describe some version of the same wall. They know the money is out there. They have heard the statistics about wealth transfer and donor-advised funds. They have sat through the trainings. And still, nothing moves. So they go looking for the missing skill. Better scripts. A new CRM. A workshop on how to ask. Here's what I often find when I see an organization trying to do major gifts but struggling. They're actually operating with systems and processes that work against major gifts. Systems like: annual fundraising strategies a schedule of campaigns an annual budget that rewards short-term gifting, which often comes at the expense of building the proper long-term relationship that leads to true, significant, sustainable funding from major donors Relationships operate on systems as well, but these are not the systems that relationships run on. When the wrong systems are in place, people rarely call out the system. They compensate with effort instead. In fundraising, that effort goes into activity that can be measured this quarter. Events. Appeals. Data entry. All of it visible, all of it defensible, and very little of it building the thing that tends to produce seven-figure gifts. A version of this came up on almost every strategy call I had this spring, which is why I was glad to sit down with Bill Crouch and talk it through. Bill has spent more than forty years inside this work, first as a college president raising private money in the shadow of a state flagship, now advising nonprofits nationally. He has lived this work and he has taught it, which is a rarer combination than it sounds. What the conversation gave me was not a new idea. It was a sharper explanation of why the patient approach holds up and why so few organizations are structured to survive the wait. The Annual Budget Is the Clock Everything Else Runs On Start with the operating budget, because everything downstream inherits its timeline. A relationship with a high capacity donor takes eighteen months. Sometimes three years. Bill spent eighteen months getting the first million dollar commitment for a giving group at his own college. Six weeks after that, he had five more, because the first person made calls to friends. Eighteen months of nothing, then five gifts in six weeks. Now put that curve inside an organization that closes its books every twelve months and asks the development office what it brought in. The gap is rarely a matter of discipline. The organization has committed to a reporting cycle that cannot see the work until it is already finished. So the work does not get funded, does not get protected on anyone's calendar, and does not survive the first cash flow scare in month seven. I write and talk a lot about how the layout of your budget shapes the decisions you make , and this is the most expensive version of that. A twelve-month frame makes long horizon relationship work look like underperformance. Then leaders respond to the number in front of them, which is the only responsible thing to do with the information the system gives them. The Desk Always Wins Bill described development work as needing two different capabilities. The technical side, sitting in the office getting things done. And the relational side, out in the world with people. Two skill sets, often two different humans. In a small shop, one person holds both. Ask that person what they did last week and you will hear about the database, the appeal, the grant report, the reconciliation. Not the coffee that took ninety minutes and produced no measurable outcome. The desk wins because the desk has deadlines. The relationship has none. This is a design flaw with a simple mechanism. Every task in the office has a due date attached to it and a visible consequence for missing it. Relationship building has neither. Give one person both jobs and the work with a deadline tends to consume the work without one, week after week, however much that person believes in the relational side. Which means the fix is structural. Protect the time in a way the person cannot trade away, or separate the roles. Telling someone to prioritize relationships more is asking them to out-discipline their own job description. The Mechanism, Named One line from that conversation has stayed with me: "That forces nonprofits to make short-term decisions that hurt long-term strategies." What I appreciate about this framing is that it locates the problem in the design rather than in the people executing it. The short-term decision is the rational one given the reporting cycle. Change the cycle, or build a revenue floor that takes the pressure off it, and the same team will often behave differently. Not much had to change in anyone's character. The structure stopped charging them for patience. Turnover Is What the Design Produces Forty years ago, the number one problem in nonprofit fundraising was development staff turnover. It is still the number one problem. Bill named four causes, and the timeline inside them is the part worth sitting with. It takes about sixteen months for the wrong hire to realize they do not want this job. It takes the supervisor about sixteen months to accept the same thing. So roughly a year and a half of relationship equity walks out the door, and the next person starts from zero with donors who have now been handed off twice. Run that loop three times and you have a decade of fundraising with no compounding whatsoever. The organization has been paying for major gifts capacity the entire time and never accumulating any. And the third cause Bill listed is the one nonprofits could fix tomorrow. The only way to get a meaningful raise in this field is to leave. We hand out cost of living adjustments and call it compensation strategy. Then we act surprised when the person holding four years of donor history takes a call from a recruiter. The turnover looks to me like an output. The design tends to produce it, and hiring better rarely changes what the design produces. If you want to see the same mechanism from another angle, emotional intelligence functions as retention infrastructure inside these teams, not as a soft add-on. Relationship Building Is a Practice You Can Teach Here is the part that gets skipped. The long horizon only pays off if something real happens inside it, and most organizations treat what happens in the room as a matter of charm. Some people have it. Some people do not. Hire for it and hope. Bill asks every high capacity person he meets about their favorite childhood toy. That is the whole thing. A simple question about a toy, and within a couple of minutes he is hearing what someone actually cares about, in their own words, before any case statement enters the conversation. I have been collecting strategic questions for years, and I recently started a separate collection just for get to know you questions. His goes at the top of that list. I asked my next podcast guest the same thing, and it changed the shape of the whole interview. Which tells you something about the mechanism. A good question is repeatable. It can be written down, taught, practiced, and handed to a nervous program director who has never asked anyone for money. Charm cannot. So when an organization decides that relationship building is a talent rather than a practice, it has quietly made that work impossible to train, impossible to delegate, and impossible to sustain past the tenure of whoever happened to be good at it. Bill also brings brain science into how he approaches this, and that tracks. Relationship building, brain science, and psychology go hand in hand. People give when they feel seen, heard, and valued, and there is a physiological story underneath that, not just a sentimental one. Which means the patient work is doing something specific in those eighteen months. Those months are where the ask becomes possible. Skip them and you are asking a stranger. Titles Are Structure Bill told a story about interviewing a researcher at a large university. She had put the institution in her will. She had been there sixteen years. She had identified and researched a donor who eventually gave a million dollars. No major gift officer had ever walked into her office to thank her. Nobody, in sixteen years. She stayed because her children had a tuition waiver. His response to this pattern is to give every person in the development operation the same title: "Every person in the development shop should have the same title. Director of Major Gifts." This makes sense given the setup. A title describes what the organization believes a role is for. When the researcher's title says researcher and the gift officer's title says major gifts, the org chart has already suggested who is doing the real fundraising and who is doing support work. Most people read that correctly and behave accordingly. I coach clients on titles constantly, usually while helping them build a first development department, and my rule is that people should have whatever title helps them do their job best. Bill's version goes further, and I think he is right about it. It does two things at once. Inside the organization, it tells the researcher and the data entry person that they matter, which is the same thing every donor is trying to find out about themselves. Outside the organization, it gives every one of those people a title they can carry into a room and use to build a real relationship. Give everyone the title that names the actual goal, and you have used structure to say something that a values statement on the wall never manages to say. The Board Question That Is Easy to Sequence Wrong Then there is the board, where two incompatible jobs get stuffed into one body. Bill's framing came from a retired chamber of commerce CEO. Most nonprofit boards are made up of sparrows. Sparrows come to the quarterly meeting, sit through staff reports, argue about whether to spend two hundred dollars on a computer, write a thousand dollar check, and buy a seat at the gala. Most nonprofits could not operate without them. Plenty of boards also want an eagle. Someone who can write a seven-figure check. Eagles tend to hate meetings, do not care about the computer, and rarely sit through reports. Put one on your board and within a year they will often either turn into a sparrow or quit. So Bill builds his clients a separate group. Five or six people, all high capacity, meeting twice a year in each other's homes rather than at your facility, with a single agenda item. Which of our friends can we ask. I give the same advice and I get there differently. I do not want money, power, and decision-making consolidated into the same group of people. Your governing board should be the people who want to do the careful, unglamorous work of oversight, checking that nothing is going off the rails. Not the people with the biggest checkbooks, who are usually the furthest from the weeds and the least accountable for the outcome. So give the givers their own structure where giving is the actual job. Two groups, two purposes, no competition between them. This is also why the board chair and executive director relationship works better when the governance lane is clearly drawn. What a Built System Looks Like Build the plumbing first. Here that means a small number of specific things in place before anyone worries about scripts. The CEO carries a real portfolio, ten people or fewer, and treats it as a standing commitment rather than a fourth quarter push. The relational time is protected structurally, not aspirationally. Compensation is designed so that staying is financially rational. There is a revenue floor that does not depend on this year's major gift closing, which is what makes waiting affordable. And there is a group whose entire purpose is giving and opening doors, separate from the group that governs. Fully built or partially built matters enormously here. A partially built major gifts function has all the cost and none of the compounding. You are paying for the staff, the software, and the events, and you are still starting over every eighteen months. Diversifying and de-risking your revenue base is part of the same picture, which is why revenue design deserves attention before the ask does. What This Makes Possible When leaders see this clearly, the fear around major gifts usually drops several notches. The conversation stops being about whether anyone on the team is brave enough to ask a person for a million dollars and starts being about whether the organization can hold a relationship for three years without flinching. That is a design question, and design questions have answers. What can stop being so heavy is the self-blame. Chances are nobody failed at fundraising here. The organization was built with a twelve-month clock and then asked to do multi-year work, and it did roughly what that setup tends to produce. You are where you are, it is what it is. Once the structure changes, the same people, the same mission, and the same donor list start producing something entirely different, because the effort finally accumulates instead of resetting. Doing Work That Compounds This is not about asking bigger. It is about building an organization that can hold a relationship long enough for the ask to make sense. Nonprofits can raise transformational money.They can pay their fundraisers well enough to keep them.They can stop rebuilding donor relationships from scratch every eighteen months. Not by pushing harder, by building systems that hold. About the Guest Bill Crouch is the CEO of BrightDot Fundraising Advisors and has spent more than 40 years helping nonprofits transform fundraising into meaningful, lasting relationships with donors. A former college president, fundraising expert, author, and Honorary Fellow at Oxford University, Bill is the author of Mattership™: Making Donors Feel They Matter, where he shares practical strategies for building trust and inspiring generosity. Connect with Bill: Website: http://thebrightdot.com/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/brightdot LinkedIn personal: Bill Crouch LinkedIn Be sure to subscribe to Inspired Nonprofit Leadership so that you don't miss a single episode, and while you're at it, won't you take a moment to write a short review and rate our show? It would be greatly appreciated! Let us know the topics or questions you would like to hear about in a future episode. You can do that and follow us on LinkedIn .
