How to make time for relationships
It’s hard to have any conversation these days without touching on the topic of time, our most precious possession that feels harder and harder to grab hold of.
Time management is essential for everyone, but it is indispensable in fundraising. In many ways, effective fundraising is effective time management. It is choosing to put donors first in our busy days and weeks. It is choosing which relationships to prioritize. It is choosing how to spend the time we have with donors. It is choosing to allow donors as much time as possible to tell us their story, what inspires them, and what impact they want to make.
Relationship-based fundraising, or philanthropy, requires special attention to time management. Effective fundraisers have three things in common:
They feel a sense of urgency about building relationships. They understand the value of every minute of their day.
They deliberately invest their time. They make a plan and execute it, asking peers and managers to help hold them accountable.
They educate colleagues and leadership about the impact of their time investment. They help decision-makers understand the value of each minute spent on relationships—and the cost of distractions.
I often hear “relationships take time” in defense of giving philanthropy programs a few years to mature. That is certainly true.
But I think it’s more true that relationships take time—as in, a significant number of hours. Those hours can be spread out or they can be condensed. Fundraisers can invest 80-100% of each day cultivating them—propelling your program to dynamic growth. Or, they can be distracted by back office work, assisting with events, managing volunteer programs, and covering tasks that don’t fall into anyone else’s job descriptions—in which case, to be sure, it will take years to realize the fruits of their relationship-building efforts.
To have more time for relationships, we need to make more time for relationships. In this article, we explore how to get started.
Step 1: Understand philanthropy’s time challenge
There are three reasons why relationship-based fundraising—such as major gifts, foundation relations, or corporate partnerships—gets the squeeze, especially in organizations with large events programs.
It’s rarely on fire. There’s no looming event day attracting our energy and attention, pushing us to pick up the pace and focus on what’s important. We have to create the deadlines learning about each donor’s personal timeline and by setting time-based goals for ourselves—and help each other to stay accountable to those goals.
The steps to our goals are not automatically defined. There’s no clean event checklist that resets each year and shapes our days. We have to create our own, ever-changing to-do list by continually mapping out next steps in each relationship—and then following through on those steps.
The time-sensitivity of our work is little understood. It’s clear why three days before an event a team should be all-hands on deck. It’s commonly perceived that “philanthropy is the long game” or “philanthropy can wait.” We have to create the case for viewing philanthropy as urgent and worth time daily based on mission growth goals—and support each other in making that case as competing priorities arise.
Step 2: Assess what’s important
If the tasks that arise in a fundraising program are plotted based on urgency and importance, most of relationship-based fundraising falls into the “important but not urgent” category. This is the category of work that has exceptionally high return on investment for both our mission and for our donors—but is also the easiest to neglect as fire-fighting, distractions, and time-wasting eat into our days.
Think about your own typical work week:
What is your definition of important? “Important,” in this sense, doesn’t mean generally important. It means important to achieving the goals you have set out for yourself this year.
What is are common types of work you do (or should do) that are quality time, according to your definition of important above? This is work to make more time for.
What are common types of work you do that are distractions—meaning urgent but not important according to the definition you set out above? This is work that to find ways to minimize, either through changing your own behaviors or working with your manager to problem-solve.
Step 3: Visualize the goal
First, create a visual of how you spend your time today.
Draw a circle to represent the “pie” of a typical week.
Create a list of key work areas. Categorize your tasks into 5-7 categories, such as: developing donor strategies, interacting with donors, donor meetings, writing proposals, other admin work, etc.
Divide your pie by these categories according to the approximate percent of a typical week each category consumes.
Next, create a visual of your goal.
Draw another circle.
Review your categories: are these categories in line with your definition of important? Add or remove categories, as needed.
Divide your pie by your new categories according to the approximate percent of a typical week each category should consume, ideally.
For full-time relationship-based fundraisers, the goal should be a pie that is 80% dedicated to a shortlist (no more than 150) prospective donors. That time should encompass developing plans/strategies for those relationships—including time with leadership and the team to brainstorm and learn—and executing them. Everything else should be reduced to no more than 20% (or one day) of a typical week.
Compare your drawings. What are the big differences? What do they tell you about your chances of achieving your goals for the year?
Step 4: Make a plan
We don’t automatically spend our time wisely. We have to deliberately choose to invest it.
If your day-to-day is very different from your goal, don’t despair! There are steps you can take—including involving your manager and/or colleagues to help you make changes.
First, take the time to map out your game plan:
Remind yourself of your definition of “important.” Build your case: Why is your important work also important to your team and organization’s goals?
What are your top three priorities, according to the definition of “important” you’ve defined for yourself?
What are the biggest changes needed so that you can spend 80% of your time on those top three priorities?
What are the changes you, yourself, can make?
What are the changes you need your manager to help you address?
Second, share your drawings and plan with your manager and colleagues. Get their reactions and listen to their feedback. Update the plan as needed. Discuss what help you would like from them in making changes, especially if your time is hampered by bigger picture issues, such as team dynamics or assigned duties that don’t align with the roles of your goal.
Step 5: Live out your plan
For most of us, our time management challenges arise from a combination of sources, some related to our own practices and many related to external dynamics.
In setting out to make time allocation changes, it’s easy to focus on the latter: fires beyond our control, distractions put on our plate by colleagues, leaders who don’t understand our line of work, etc. These pressures make us feel like our time is not our own. It’s frustrating to lose control and feel mired in a stream of tasks that aren’t important to what we are trying to achieve.
If we are fortunate, we have managers and colleagues who listen to our challenges and support us in redirecting our time. External pressures can ease. But it is important to remember, they are unlikely to go away entirely in a resource-scarce, talent-scarce nonprofit environment.
The more vital—and more fulfilling—focus area is: which of our own practices can we change? Every change we make to better invest the time we have, within the constraints we have, puts us back in the driver’s seat of our work. It’s empowering to:
Schedule an hour for donor calls—and protect that hour like a non-negotiable meeting
Use a CRM/database as a tool: log the details of donor interactions in real time to save on digging for notes and immediately enter the next step in the relationship so that you have a ready, rolling to-do list
Carve out an hour every Friday afternoon to make a list of the 10 donors you will focus on in the coming week; check back with yourself the next Friday to make sure you followed through on your plan
Recognize time-wasters and distractions and intentionally say no or spend minimal time on them
Getting started with the pieces you can control will pay off in success stories and ideas that have ripple effects. And success breeds success that can help resolve the time pressures beyond your control.