Key Takeaways

The Report He Had Been Putting Off for Months

A development director said something on a call recently that I have been thinking about since.

He had a set of board-approved goals for the fundraising program from the start of the fiscal year:

• Five thousand new email addresses
• A percentage of social growth
• Several new donor leads
• A campaign dollar figure

Reasonable goals, approved by reasonable people, in a room where everyone felt good.

They had about fifty email addresses.

“I’ve been putting them off for several months,”

He said,

“and I can’t do that any longer. I need to know what these numbers are.” Then, a minute later, the part that mattered: “It’s going to paint a pretty bleak picture. And if I’m on the development committee or on the board, the question I’m going to ask is, well, why are we still doing this?”

He was not avoiding the board because he was afraid of them. He was avoiding the board because he could already hear the meeting, and he did not have a second sentence.

Why Does a Bad Number End a Fundraising Program That Might Have Worked?

Because a number reported alone is a verdict, and a verdict only has one response.

Sit in the board’s seat for a second. You approved a goal of five thousand. You are shown fifty. You have no other information. What are you supposed to say? Congratulations is absurd. Keep going is unaccountable. The only responsible-sounding thing you can do is ask whether this was a mistake.

That is not a hostile board. That is a board doing its job with the only input it was given.

The failure here is upstream. Somebody built a reporting relationship in which the organization reports outcomes and the board evaluates them, with no third thing in the room. No account of what was actually done, no account of what was learned, no account of what changed. Just a scoreboard, checked quarterly, by people who were not there.

The Delay Reflex

I want to name the delay itself, because I think it is the most common quiet failure in nonprofit development.

The report gets pushed a month, then another, and not because anyone is hiding anything, but because every month you wait, there is a chance the number improves and you get to walk in with a better story. Hope is a legitimate reason to procrastinate, and it is a terrible reason to stop reporting.

Here is the arithmetic of the delay. Three months of silence does not make fifty look like five thousand. It makes fifty look like fifty plus a communication problem. You have now given the board two things to be unhappy about instead of one, and the second one is about you rather than about the fundraising program.

The single most protective thing a development leader can do with a failing fundraising program is report it early, in detail, while there is still time to change it. Bad news does not age well. It ages into a governance issue.

Lag Metrics Have No Second Act

Five thousand email addresses is a lag metric. So are dollars raised, donors retained, and gifts closed. Lag metrics are the results. They are the right things to want and the wrong things to manage by, for one simple reason: by the time they are visible, the period in which you could have influenced them is over.

They also have no diagnostic content. “Fifty” does not tell you whether the offer was wrong, the audience was wrong, the traffic was too small, the landing page was broken, or the whole channel is uncompetitive for an organization your size. It is a single number carrying five possible stories, and a board asked to interpret it will pick whichever story it already believes.

What Are Lead Indicators, and Why Do They Change the Conversation?

Lead indicators are the activities you can control this week that produce the outcomes you want next quarter.

They are boring on purpose. Qualifying conversations held. Discovery visits completed. Proposals submitted. Emails sent and the deliverability on them. Landing pages live. Ad spend deployed and cost per acquisition. Donors moved from one pipeline stage to the next.

Here is the shift they create. When a board sees only outcomes, the implicit question is was this worth doing. When a board sees activities alongside outcomes, the question becomes is the activity producing the result, and if not, which part is broken. The first question is a referendum. The second is a working session. You want the working session.

We keep a simple monthly tracker with our clients: four tabs, one each for major gifts and foundations, mid-level, annual fund, and marketing. It is filled in at the end of every month and reviewed at the start of the next one. It is not sophisticated. Its entire function is to guarantee that no one ever walks into a board meeting with only a lag metric in hand.

One warning about lead indicators. They only work if the activity is genuinely someone’s job. If the person you are counting on to hold twelve qualifying conversations a month is also running your events calendar and your database cleanup, the indicator will be red every month, and the tracker will start feeling like a monthly indictment. That is a structural problem, not a performance one, and our post on the development role mismatch that is killing your gift pipeline is the place to start on it.

You may not have the five thousand email addresses yet. But you have the number of campaigns you ran, the audiences you tested, the cost per address on each one, and the date you decided to change approach. That is a report. The other thing was a confession.

How Do You Actually Build the Report?

Five parts, in this order. It takes about a page.

1. Say the Number First

Do not build to it. Do not open with context. The first line of the report is the number and the goal side by side.

“We set a goal of five thousand new email addresses this year. We are at approximately fifty.”

Say it plainly and do not soften it. Every hedge you add before the number costs you credibility you will need in part four. Boards forgive bad results far more readily than they forgive the sense that they are being managed.

2. Show What You Actually Did

This is the part that is almost always missing, and it is the part that changes the temperature in the room.

List the work. Which channels, which offers, which audiences, what it cost, over what period. If you ran a paid search fundraising program and two lead magnets and a series of social campaigns, say so, with the numbers under each.

Include cost per result wherever you can compute it, even roughly. A board looking at fifty email addresses will draw one conclusion. A board looking at fifty email addresses at a stated cost per address, next to what your other channels cost, is having a portfolio conversation instead of a judgment. Our piece on the cost to raise a dollar covers the three numbers worth computing before you walk in.

The board is not able to tell the difference between

“we tried, and it did not work”

And

“we never really ran it”

Unless you show them, and those two situations call for opposite decisions. One says the channel is wrong, the other says the execution is…

Do not let a board guess which one they are looking at.

3. Show What You Learned

A failed fundraising program that produced knowledge is not a failed investment. It is tuition, and the board is entitled to see what they bought.

In the case above, the learning was specific and useful. The offers converted at a reasonable rate. The problem was that the top of the funnel was tiny, because the organization was competing on search terms against national organizations that have been publishing content against those terms for fifteen years. Small fish, big pond. That is not a marketing failure. That is a competitive position, and knowing it is worth real money because it rules out an entire category of spending going forward.

Also worth reporting: one donor who came in through that fundraising program, knew nothing about the organization beforehand, and gave $500. One story is not a trend. But it does tell you the mechanism works when the volume is there, which is a different problem than the mechanism being broken.

4. Show the Pivot, and the Date You Made It

This is the part that converts a bad report into a credible one.

“On this date, based on this data, we decided to stop investing new effort here and to shift to this instead. Here is why we think it will work better. Here is what it will cost. Here is when we will know.”

A board that sees a documented decision is looking at a functioning management team. A board that sees a bad number and no decision is looking at drift, and drift is the thing that actually gets a fundraising program cancelled.

Notice that this is only possible if you report while there is still time to pivot. A report delivered after the fiscal year closes can contain parts one through three. It cannot contain part four, because the decision window has already shut. That is the practical cost of the delay reflex.

5. Name the Kill Criteria for Whatever Comes Next

Before you launch the replacement, tell the board what failure will look like and when you will call it.

“We are giving this ten weeks. If we are not at this number by then, we stop and report back.”

This is the single most underused move in nonprofit governance, and it does two things at once. It makes the new initiative dramatically easier to approve, because the board is not being asked for an open-ended commitment. And it takes the emotional weight off you personally, because you have pre-registered the standard rather than being judged against one invented after the fact.

A fundraising program that can end is easier to start. That is true of experiments in every field, and it is true here.

What If the Data Itself Is a Mess?

Then that is your report, and you should put it on the agenda by name.

This happens constantly at organizations in the $1M to $20M range, and it usually looks like this: a database migration in flight, one vendor’s dashboard that nobody trusts, a second vendor reporting a different number for the same thing, and a staff member quietly embarrassed that they cannot answer a simple question about their own fundraising program.

I have watched capable people apologize their way through an entire board meeting for a measurement problem that was structural and not theirs.

Do not do that; write the sentence down and read it out loud:

“We currently cannot produce a reliable number for this, for the following three reasons, and here is what it will take to fix it.”

Put a cost and a date on the fix. A board can act on that. A board cannot act on vague discomfort.

One caution worth naming. If you use outside consultants, be clear about who owns the data. Most good fundraising consultants will not work inside your CRM, and the reason is not laziness. It is that every additional set of credentials increases your breach exposure, and you are the one who has to notify your constituents if something goes wrong. The right model is that you own the system and the data, and your consultant helps you interpret it and build accountability around it. That way, when the engagement ends, you keep the muscle. Expectations about this should be settled in writing at the start, and when they have not been, somebody eventually gets frustrated. Usually with cause on both sides.

Frequently Asked Questions

Should we tell the board before the scheduled meeting or wait for the agenda?

Before, in almost every case. A board chair or development committee chair who learns about a significant miss in the room, in front of the full board, will react to the surprise as much as to the news. A short call a week ahead costs you twenty minutes and converts a potential ambush into a partner who helps you frame it. This is not about managing anyone. It is about giving the people responsible for governance the same amount of time to think that you have had.

How much detail is too much for a board report?

One page of narrative and one page of numbers is usually right. Boards do not need your full campaign log. They need the goal, the actual, what you did, what you learned, what you decided, and what it will cost. If a board member wants more, they will ask, and the fact that you have it ready is itself reassuring. The failure mode is not too little detail. It is detail that conceals rather than clarifies.

What if the fundraising program is not failing, it is just early?

Then say that, and say what “early” means in numbers and dates. “This is a twelve-month build, and we are four months in. At month four we expected this, and we have that.” Early is a legitimate answer exactly once. If you use it two reporting periods in a row without a supporting benchmark, you have stopped reporting and started reassuring, and boards can tell the difference.

Our board approved goals that were never realistic. Do we relitigate them?

Not in the same conversation where you report the miss. Report against the goals that exist, then bring a separate, forward-looking proposal to reset them with your reasoning attached. Trying to do both at once reads as excuse-making even when the point is valid. It is also worth asking how the unrealistic number got approved in the first place, because that is usually a symptom of a planning process that skipped the activity math. Our post on why your fundraising strategy isn’t raising money gets into that gap between the plan and the machinery.

Who should deliver the bad news, the development director or the chief executive?

The development director should deliver the report and the chief executive should visibly own the decision. That combination signals that the fundraising program is an organizational commitment rather than one person’s project, which protects both the fundraising program and the person. When the chief executive delivers a development report alone, boards read it as the development function being under management. When the development director delivers it alone, boards sometimes read it as the chief executive keeping distance from a problem.

Wrapping Up

Boards do not cancel a fundraising program because the numbers are bad. They cancel a fundraising program because the numbers are bad and nothing else is in the room.

1. Bring the activity.
2. Bring the learning.
3. Bring the decision and the date you made it.
4. Bring the kill criteria for the next thing before anyone asks you for them.

Then let the number be what the number is, because a board that trusts your reporting will let you keep working, and a board that does not will not, regardless of what the number says.

Stop waiting for the number to improve, and report this month.