Siloed behavior seems to happen without regard to the size of the organization. It is true that large fundraising teams who are decentralized can have more occurrences of this poor behavior because of their nature and structure, but I often see this even in small shops of less than 30 people.
What does siloed behavior look like in fundraising? Let me give you some examples:
- Alumni offices declaring that they "don't fund raise" and not integrating with annual giving
- Annual giving and major gifts not collaborating together to share donors
- Thinking about communicating to donors and saying "we need to add an email to this effort"
- Bringing in donor relations and stewardship after a major gift is closed, sigh
- Not involving research professionals in discussions about our constituents
- Changing a giving reply device without coordinating the impact of the change with gift processing staff
- Holding onto donor contact information and not recording it in the database or keeping a separate list outside of the database
- Anytime a staff member says "those are my donors, I would rather you not contact them"
- Thinking that social media is an afterthought to a communications plan
This is all well and valid, but how do we break down silos so that our donors and our fundraising don't suffer?
- Realize and identify that they actually exist in your organization
- Once identified examine how these affect your donors
- Seek out leadership that encourage people to collaborate
- Identify opportunities for collaboration
- Form cross silo task forces to tackle problems from a variety of viewpoints
- Reward and incentivize collaborative behavior
- Take deep breaths and understand that the only one who suffers in silos are the donors, we owe them better
Cheers,
Lynne
Love this column! So true. We need to partner with our Advancement colleagues in everything we do.
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