Fundraising question for those who have worked in national nonprofits

Lindsay Thorson

Hi! I work in a national organization that has regional offices around the country. For soliciations, every region likes to "do their own thing" and sometimes they believe regionalizing their appeals and solicitations is beneficial, though for some it hasn't proven to be. I work in the national office, and I just wanted to see the different ways other large national organizations with regional offices handle it. Does anyone have success having solicitations be unified or did every office manage their fundraising efforts independently? 


Further, is gift management and processing done regionally at your organizations or is it centralized?


Just wanting to get a better idea of how others do it in order to improve!


Thank you!!


Lindsay 

Jen Claudy

I used to work (10 years ago now) for an affiliate of a national organization.  Each of the 16 affiliates and the national office itself shared one RE database, but you could only access your affiliates records (Security based on Constituent Codes).  Everything was done at the affiliate level (probably differently) although the national office had a database manager who offered support if you needed it...I think she would help with questions, like BB Support, or actually do some of the work for some of the smaller affiliates (or those with new staff).  And she had other responsibilities as well.  From my perspective, it was fine.  If I entered a record and forgot to put my affiliate's Const Code, I'd have to email her and have her either add the code so I could access the record again or delete the record.  That was the biggest annoyance.  From her perspective, I don't know how she handled it...that database must have been such a mess!


To your specific question about soliciations, to the best of my recollection, we always did our own thing, and the national office may have sent out their own appeals, but not to "our" constituents.  We did all of our own gift entry as well, including the Finance side, although we had to submit monthly financials to the national office.  (We also had our own audit done.)


For that specific organization, the services provided were completely localized, so an appeal on a national level wouldn't have worked well.  However, I would think that centralizing data entry and mailings could help in many situations, because you don't have each location reinventing the wheel.  Or perhaps you could have each location do year-end appeals, and one appeal on the national level in the spring.  Or, send the mailing on a national level, but segmented and customized by location.


I think it also depends on what the end goal is.  Are you looking to cut costs by consolidating similar work/projects?  Are you looking to see a better return by using a national message?  Do enough of your locations struggle with resources/staff time in doing appeals on their own (or gift entry)?  Are you needing a more consistent & cohesive message that isn't accomplished currently?  There are probably other possibilities as well, but I think you should consider what you hope to gain, and then look at how to implement without stepping on toes (because if you step on toes and don't have buy-in from the various locations, it will be much harder to accomplish your goals, no matter what they are).


For gift entry, keep in mind that there are often pieces of data that one location may need for a particular report or metric they look at where the other locations have no need for that.  So if you centralize, you'll need to be able to accommodate all of those sorts of things.  I think, particularly for gift entry, the setup should somewhat mirror the overall organization structure.  If your national CEO makes decisions for the entire organization, then centralizing makes some sense.  If each location more-or-less runs itself, just under the umbrella of the national organization, then it may not make much sense to centralize work.  The organization I worked for would fall into the second...we were mostly on our own.  We had our own board (on which our national CEO had a seat) and our own advisory committees, ran our own events and appeals, etc.  We just had guidance from the national office, occasionally directives, and once a year all of the affiliate EDs would gather to network and plan.  The national office was more of a resource.