Family campaigns: help build successful donor giving.

The key to getting both your staff and board members to give to your organization is to treat them like donors. It sounds simple, yet many nonprofits fail to ask either to donate money. And if members of your organization aren't contributing to your mission, why should outsiders?

For Gerry Backs, M.A., CFRE, a senior consultant for DVA Navion, international fundraising consultants based in Calgary, Alberta, the old adage is true: Charity does indeed begin at home.

"When we're asking our own families (for donations), we often don't treat them like donors. We treat them like staff," Backs told the audience at a recent international fundraising conference. "One of the things that I believe strongly in is demonstrating one's values, and to demonstrate one's leadership and one's integrity, you have to walk the talk. If you have a strong giving and volunteering base in your organization, that really comes through. People can see that, and that helps you make a better workforce and accomplish your mission faster and better."

In a seminar entitled, Charity Begins at Home: Making Your Family Campaign an Annual Success, Backs said that the most important component of an effective family campaign is staff leadership, and strong leaders possess four qualities:

* They have a vision and the ability to communicate that vision;

* They have integrity and the ability to demonstrate that integrity;

* They set high, achievable standards and have the ability to help others achieve those standards; and,

* They have a commitment to those who will help them achieve their mission. If your executive director or leader is not "on-side," you have two choices: either get the person onside or move to an organization with a leader who is on-side.

"That sounds drastic, but you're not going to get anywhere if you have a leader who doesn't want to lead; who doesn't believe in a strong philanthropic culture; who doesn't understand that philanthropy is at the core of what they do; who thinks that fundraising is a necessary evil," Backs said.

"Being a leader is not just being a supporter of that organization. If you are not demonstrating leadership, then you have to build it. One way you can build it is through the family campaign, because we often don't ask, we just expect," he said.

Treating your staff and board members like donors can mean creating a strategic plan for your family campaign or doing an internal mini-feasibility study, just like you would for any fundraising campaign. One of the benefits of conducting a feasibility study is knowing how much you should ask for, as well as knowing that everyone in the study is already on the road to being committed to giving. As the leader, you're just asking them how to go about it. And if your staff, for example, helps you plan the campaign, it is already tying itself into the organization. When you get people involved in the planning of the campaign, they are more likely to give.

Backs offered six tips for running an effective family campaign:

1. Don't expect anything. Treat your staff and board as if they don't know anything about your organization, because chances are they don't know everything.

2. Create a separate recognition program. "These are your core people," Backs said. "We should be treating them better than our donors, and we often don't treat them anywhere near as good as our donors."

3. Create a method to communicate what you're doing with your staff and board in an ongoing manner, i.e. a newsletter.

4. Solicit peer to peer. Break down asking into teams. According to Backs, most people can probably ask five to 10 other people at the most for money.

5. Evaluate yourself. Because your family giving campaign is going to be an ongoing process, you must monitor it somehow to measure your successes and failures.

6. Build the family campaign into your organization. Make it part of your annual calendar and your orientation materials. "Communicate your expectations," Backs said. "If you don't communicate, if you don't ask, they're not going to give."

Backs also said that he believes that the culture of an organization is important when building a strong family campaign. Culture is created by anyone who has contact with your organization--the people who use your services, as well as your staff and board members. Creating a culture of giving means change, and culture can be very slow to change, both in a positive and negative way. According to Backs, change can

happen in three ways: chance, crisis or choice. If you leave culture to chance, you may end up in trouble--or you might already be in trouble.

"Even though you're making choices, sometimes you're going to fail," Backs said. "That doesn't mean that you're doing a bad thing necessarily; you just have to make another choice again the next time. If you work and make those choices to build a healthy culture, that gives you the ability to withstand all the pressures that we are living with in our organizations everyday. Everything changes around us. If you have a strong, healthy, committed board and staff, you'll be able to do your mission, survive, create more and grow."