Five Conditions for Resilient Fundraising

Background

As someone who is charged with stewarding the fundraising health of Working Families Party (WFP), I’ve noticed a concerning wave of news about financial challenges at progressive movement organizations. These challenges are mirrored in fundraising trends I’m seeing in my own work, and anecdotal information I’m hearing from colleagues at other organizations. It’s clear that larger political and economic trends are making the already-challenging work of fundraising even moreso. And while WFP has managed to remain financially stable and avoid press scrutiny, I don’t take our current position for granted. 

I began writing this post as an exercise to evaluate our fundraising efforts at WFP. My intention was to inform my own understanding and fundraising leadership, and to share this knowledge with WFP staff in an effort to deepen our shared understanding of how we do our fundraising and why. With all that in mind, my intent is to share some of my thinking and experience with an audience that includes WFP member organizations and movement allies in the spirit of collaboration and shared purpose.  

First, a brief background on my own experience. I joined WFP as Development Director halfway through 2019. I’ve worked as an institutional funder, as a staff person at donor networks, and in fundraising capacities at large and small organizations. I brought extensive experience in various fundraising contexts, familiarity with building teams, and a working knowledge of progressive organizing, building independent political power, and WFP’s model. I started 6 months after WFP hired a new National Director who was succeeding the founder. The organization had roughly 70 staff, and was on track to raise ~$13 million that year across a family of 501(c)(4) and PAC organizations. 

The job description included the following disclaimer: It is important to note that we do not have a staffed Development Department, and while we want to get to that point in the first several months or year, the Development Director will need to hold a variety of responsibilities that might normally fall on Development Managers and Associates and/or rely on support from staff that do not have full-time development roles. 

I’m grateful the organization set my expectations appropriately for what I’d be walking into, and the upside of building from scratch meant I could significantly shape the way we did fundraising. I’ve had to simultaneously build the fundraising strategy and the team to implement it. Our fundraising capacity has grown steadily since I arrived.

I’ve seen surges in progressive and civic engagement funding since I’ve started including: the effort to deny Trump a second term in 2020 alongside a resurgence in the movement to defend Black life; the opportunity to flip the senate in 2021 through Georgia; and making the “red wave” a myth in 2022 alongside the opportunity to win the Inflation Reduction Act. We ended up raising approximately $24 million in 2020, $27 million in 2021, and $40 million in 2022. These cultural and political conditions brought new donors off the sidelines and inspired giving at higher levels. We tried our best to prepare for what I anticipated was a national funding contraction around the corner 2023. Throughout this period we have scaled activities and grown steadily, but have tried our best to only hire permanent staff when new funding is likely renewable. Although we were not always successful, we knew that we’d need to establish real relationships with funders we were meeting for the first time. In 2023 we expect we’ll raise $26 million, and we are on stable footing for an ambitious year in 2024.

Five Conditions

Below I summarize five conditions that have shaped WFP’s fundraising over the last four years. These conditions have been shaped by the development team, enabled by our senior leadership, and moved forward by the many hands that do the fundraising work of the party. These conditions should not be confused with a fundraising strategy - which is how a development team manages a set of tactics to identify, cultivate, pitch, and steward funders. The five conditions of resilient fundraising are more like qualities in the soil in the field of the organization in which our fundraising grows. I hope they may provide some insight you can apply at your own organizations about how our organization as a whole approaches the challenge of raising money including everything from financial planning to program implementation. Although WFP’s fundraising leans political, I think these observations are applicable across 501(c)(3), 501(c)(4), and PAC fundraising efforts.

Program Model: Funding follows clarity.

WFP seeks governing power. Our form is a party, our primary intervention is elections, our strategy is to block harmful republicans and build growing numbers of Working Families champions who govern for and with our constituency: the multiracial working class. We put significant staff and leadership time into consolidating this model, and invest ongoing effort into onboarding and realigning stakeholders to the model. When the work the organization does (and does not do!) is clear and coherent, fundraisers can focus on finding and engaging supporters that agree with the vision. Our work of fundraising at WFP becomes inviting funders into the story of the organization and its model, and the unique role they can play in it, rather than making up and remaking stories to pitch the organization. 

Spending time and money to clarify your model can be expensive and having model clarity doesn’t need to be a prerequisite to good fundraising. If the model is a work in progress (as it was for WFP for my first three years here) you can choose to let funders in on that stage of your development and your plan to clarify the model at some point, without stalling good work in the process. Eventually lack of clarity about your model will catch up with you and make it difficult to deliver on your work, sustain funders and even more difficult to scale, so having that plan in place, and evaluating the timeline with discipline is important. 

Aligned Funders: Rowing in the same direction.

We have grown our budget only as quickly as we are able to identify aligned funders. WFP has been careful to take money that is aligned with our priorities in the direction we are already heading, and to deprioritize potential partnerships that are too contradictory. This approach may have resulted in slower growth than we otherwise might be able to accomplish, being clear about our model has allowed us to build trust with funders because the organization is committed to doing the work it says it wants to do for the long haul, rather than fashioning itself to different donors’ interests in the short term. Our intention is that the outcomes our organization wants to accomplish and that of our funders are in alignment: we offer them the capacity to implement the change we would both like to see in the world, and they offer money to sustain, strengthen and grow the capacity over time. 

Having a clear model allows you to communicate directly your intentions over the long term. Funders can clearly understand where we are going together and the need for long term, general support dollars to get there. Alignment is not a fixed reality: we work with our funders to test for alignment throughout our relationship, work to build more alignment over time, and part ways if the contradictions in our goals become too great. Likewise, it helps for our staff implementing work to understand the expectations we have set with our funders, and how the decision to partner with a funder supports the organization advancing the work we had already planned to do. Alignment is more like bumpers in a bowling lane rather than a checkbox. We regularly evaluate alignment based on what we learn and external conditions, realigning staff, funders and stakeholders in response to current external conditions, and orienting new people to the alignment, etc. 

Authentic Relationships: Mutual care and trust, for funders too.

Our fundraising strategy includes revenue from individual and institutional members, small dollar donors through a digital program, and wealthy individuals, and funding institutions. While the majority of our time as an organization is spent on engaging the working class, we also believe that people with access to wealth are an important constituency to organize into our coalition. Just as in organizing with working class people, I invest in relationships with wealthy individuals and institutional representatives because it helps me to understand how aligned a funder is with WFP, how we can work to deepen that alignment over time, and in some cases to decide against working with them. I invest in relationships because it helps me understand their giving capacity and plans, to inform our projections and appropriate requests. I invest in relationships because I actually care about funders as a constituency–they exist within an unjust system and are choosing to side with the working class–and it’s my role to organize them.

It’s unjust that wealth inequality exists, and philanthropy and organizations’ need to focus on high dollar fundraising is a byproduct of inequality. Classism makes fundraising uncomfortable, including for people with wealth. If you believe in your organization’s theory of change and ability to make an impact, these are tensions worth managing. I believe the site of struggle over inequality is systemic change, well beyond the individual decisions that wealthy people make. I am privileged to know wealthy people who feel the same. I hope to build an organization where funders aligned with our vision can find a sense of belonging, expand their sense of what’s possible, and sharpen their political analysis to be part of the path to get there alongside the multiracial working class.

Financial Discipline: Spending at the rate of raising.

It has been essential for WFP to have the ability to make grounded assessments about revenue projections. Making revenue projections is a critical part of our fundraising work, as it must substantially inform both our fundraising goals and our spending decisions. We use a rule of thumb of 90% certainty on revenue we’ll put in our budget. 90% certainty means we have a strong relationship with a funder and a mutual understanding of highly likely renewal, whether it is written in a multiyear commitment or not. Investing in relationships helps us have the information we need to make strong projections. 

WFP only budgets against our revenue projections for core costs like staffing that are difficult to cut and don’t overstretch our essential expenses. We set higher fundraising goals than our budget and it’s common for us to raise more than we budget. However, we know we can’t count on goals so we don’t count on expenses related to it until new, unbudgeted revenue has been raised. Our budget stays the same, our raising and spending above the budget for new short term program expenses is what changes. 

Having a clear model makes it easier to have conversations with funders and donors about multi year commitments. One of my primary focuses has been to grow our base of multi-year funders and increase our core budget baseline, while maintaining flexibility to take advantage of political and cultural surge opportunities.

Team Approach: Fundraising is an organizational commitment.

At WFP fundraising is a team sport, within the development team and across the organization. I rely on a talented team of development professionals–some have extensive prior fundraising experience and some do not–and we have all learned on the job about the unique fundraising challenges at WFP. Our development team writes formal and informal communications, manages complex projects, sets and evaluates strategy, plans events, coordinates data, researches, designs, engages staff in understanding our fundraising, checks for alignment between programs and funding, and manages relationships. It is unlikely that any organization can maintain all of these capacities with excellence at any one time, and as our team has evolved we have had to tap in staff from other teams and consultants to bridge the gap. As the leader of the development team, my ability to be self critical about how I spend my time, listen and understand the limits of our team’s capacity, and communicate how our capacity and boundaries are related to anticipated fundraising outcomes has been essential to fulfilling our highest purpose while mitigating burnout. 

Beyond the development team, I have benefited from an engaged principal and senior leadership team who have worked with me to foster the conditions outlined in this post and leans into fundraising strategy and tactics. We have also worked to build a culture that prioritizes fundraising as an essential responsibility of many of our staff roles. Some teams cover their own costs, some do not. We work through managers and team leaders to set reasonable goals based on a team’s overall plan and priorities. Without the participation of staff and senior leaders across the party, there’s no way we’d be able to handle the volume of what we do. Fundraising is an organizational priority, and the development team is more of a hub than the full fundraising team. Committing to an expansive team approach has been essential to our success.

Conclusion

So in sum, what’s the secret to WFP’s current fundraising success? A clear model, a commitment to only grow as fast as we’re able to organize aligned funders, genuine care for our funder constituency, feedback between our fundraising projections and our financial planning, and an organization-wide commitment to fundraising. The conditions I outline are not a job description for a Development Director or a charge for a development department. Organizations will need to bring different approaches to a fundraising team unique to their form, work, moment in time, and talent. I hope these insights might inform others to reflect on whether or not these conditions are present, and if working on them might help make your fundraising more powerful and durable.

My intention with consolidating these concepts is not only out of concern for the financial health of the Working Families Party, but for the health of our field. WFP is building a multiracial working class alignment of organizations and individuals seeking governing power. We are only as strong as the coalition of organizations doing their politics with WFP. My intent is that this post may be of use to other fundraisers at our state and national member organizations and other allies in our movement. The more we share what we learn with each other, the more we will become more clear, powerful, and strategic as a movement.