International Journal of Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Marketing

Int. J. Nonprofit Volunt. Sect. Mark. 21: pp 4356 (2016)

Published online 19 January 2016 in Wiley Online Library
(wileyonlinelibrary.com) DOI: 10.1002/nvsm.1546

Outstanding fundraising practice: how do

nonprofits substantively increase their
income?
Adrian Sargeant* and Jen Shang
Centre for Sustainable Philanthropy, Plymouth University, United Kingdom

In this paper, we examine the characteristics of charities that have generated substantive increases
in their fundraising income. We interviewed 25 fundraising directors and team members, from organizations experiencing rapid growth, adopting a decoding the discipline approach to identify
how each organization had overcome key barriers to its success. We identify that fundraising leaders
in these exceptional nonprofits focus particularly on matters connected to their team, organizational structures that support that team, and the development of an organization-wide learning culture. We also find that these teams were successful because of the systems way in which they
understood and coped with the complexities of decision making. They were exceptional in isolating
the right problems and exceptional too in the processes they adopted to solve them.
Copyright 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Introduction
Fundraisers in the UK raise an estimated 10.6bn
from the public each year with 70% of British society estimated to support the work of one or more
charities (Charities Aid Foundation, 2015). Some
20 000 of the almost 200 000 registered charities
(in the UK as a whole) are believed to be actively involved in fundraising, and the sector punches above
its weight in terms of the absolute volume of communications generated, accounting, for example,
*Correspondence to: Adrian Sargeant, Centre for Sustainable
Philanthropy, University of Plymouth, 16 Portland Villas, Plymouth, UK, PL4 6DX.
E-mail: Adrian.Sargeant@plymouth.ac.uk

Copyright 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

for over 10% of consumer direct mail and email

(Sargeant & Jay, 2014). Looking only at the 1200
strong membership of the Fund Raising Standards
Board, who report their figures, an estimated 20
billion solicitations for funding were made to the
UK public in 2013 (Fund Raising Standards Board,
2014). These solicitations are highly effective,
returning on average around 4.20 for every 1
invested (Centre for Inter-Firm Comparisons, 2014).
Despite the scale and success of fundraising activity, there has been relatively little attention paid to
the topic of fundraising management and thus the
drivers of this fundraising success. This is in stark
contrast to the domain of consumer marketing
where scholars have focused considerable effort

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44

on the variety of factors that drive success in forprofit marketing.

Notable here is the extensive literature on market
orientation and its impact on a number of performance variables (Kohli & Jaworski, 1990; Narver &
Slater, 1990). When first mooted by Benson Shapiro
and others, the relationship between the degree of
market orientation attained and organizational performance was largely an article of faith, but successive studies have now supported the positive
impact on variables such as sales, market share, and
profitability (see Van Raaij & Stoelhorst, 2008, for a
review). Market orientation has also been shown to
drive customer satisfaction and loyalty (Kirca,
Jayachandran, & Bearden, 2005) and also to impact
internally on employee job satisfaction, trust, and organizational commitment (Ruekert, 1992). A handful
of studies have also demonstrated its utility in the
nonprofit sector, linking the degree of marketing
orientation achieved with performance variables
that include fundraising success as measured by total
voluntary income (e.g., Bennett, 1998).
A related strand of literature has explored the relationships between facets of strategic planning
and market performance. In particular, the adoption
of a more formal planning approach has been linked
in a number of empirical studies to enhanced performance (Huan, Brooksbank, Taylor, & Babbis, 2008;
Pulendran, Speed, & Widing, 2003). Key here appears to be the development of a detailed marketing
audit (Brooksbank & Taylor, 2002; Siu & Liu, 2005)
and conducting the requisite primary and secondary
research necessary to fill key gaps in knowledge
(Baker, Black, & Hart, 1988; Joseph, Joseph, Poon,
& Brookbank, 2001).
There has also been a high degree of focus on
marketing leadership. Notable here is the work in
the domain of transformational leadership based
originally on work by Bass (1985). Bass saw transformational leaders as operating on a deeply held set of
personal values. By expressing these personal
values, leaders are facilitated in uniting their
followers and changing long-held beliefs about
what is achievable and how it might be achieved

Copyright 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Adrian Sargeant and Jen Shang

(Bass, 1991; Deluga, 1988). This in turn heightens

motivation and leads to superior firm performance
(e.g., MacKenzie, Podsakoff, & Rich, 2001).
Successful firms are also regarded as those with
unique competencies that distinguish them from competitors (Day, 1994). A resource-based perspective on
competencies holds that these may be tangible, intangible, tacit, or socially embedded resources that confer
an advantage and deliver superior and sustainable performance (Hunt & Morgan, 1995; Srivastava, Fahey, &
Christensen, 2001). Thus, transformational leadership
can itself be regarded as a competency that converts
managerial inputs to critical outputs such as organizational culture, innovativeness, entrepreneurship, and
organizational learning (Hurley & Hult, 1998; Lado,
Boyd, & Wright, 1992).

Methodology
While much has been written on the optimization of
commercial marketing, there is a paucity of work on
the related topic of fundraising management
(Sargeant & Shang, 2010). With the exception of
the papers cited earlier on market orientation, no literature exists on how to optimize success with the
fundraising function as a whole. Given this gap, we
opted for a research design based on the principles
of grounded theory. We adopted a purist approach
in the application of grounded theories (Dunne,
2011) in the sense that we did not then conduct
an extensive search of the related literature on creating marketing success prior to data collection.
Both authors are however aware of the existence
of this literature, making it impossible, phenomenologically or hermeneutically, to not bring any a
priori knowledge on fundraising or management
into the project (Locke, 1996, p. 242). In that sense,
we adopted recursive analytic operations (Locke,
1996) in our application of grounded theory. That
is our data collection, analysis, and interpretations
occurred in a recursive cycle where data collection
and data analysis occurred simultaneously (i.e., constant comparison) and where decisions about which
data should be collected next were determined by

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Outstanding fundraising practice

the theory that was being constructed (i.e., theoretical sampling) (Glaser & Strauss, 1967; Glaser, 1992;
Strauss, 1991; Dunne, 2011). The nature of this epistemological approach is important. It means we
then permit data to dictate the development of our
substantive theory (i.e., on managing fundraising
success), while at the same time we allow existing
theoretical concepts (i.e., from marketing and management) to earn their way into our narrative
(Dunne, 2011). In this sense, existing theory is analyzed as an additional informant, and we treat it as
such later by presenting extant thinking alongside
our data (Glaser, 1978).
Rather than define great fundraising ourselves,
we approached 20 sector leaders (directors of
fundraising and senior fundraising consultants) for
their definitions of what constituted greatness.
Collectively, they defined this in terms of substantive increases in voluntary income and typically
doubling, trebling, or even quadrupling what
an organization was able to garner within their
medium-term planning horizon. We also asked them
to specify organizational leadership that they felt
had truly excelled and tabulated the votes
received for specific nonprofits. The analysis revealed five frequently cited organizations that in
their view had conducted (or were conducting)
great fundraising. These were Cancer Research
UK, British Red Cross, NSPCC, Save the Children,
and the Royal British Legion.
We then approached the fundraising leadership of
these organizations to interview them and senior
members of their management team so that we
could analyze how these organizations had attained
their success and the characteristics of their leaders.
In total, a series of 25 interviews were conducted of
up to 2 h in duration. Each interview was digitally recorded, transcribed, and subject to a review based
on grounded analysis. Interviews were semistructured following a decoding the discipline
methodology designed to focus on the factors
influencing success in the scenarios identified personally by the interviewee (Pace & Middendorf,
2004). We focused on the tools, techniques, and

Copyright 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

45

processes that each individual had adopted to overcome their selected barriers. It should be noted that
in keeping with the adoption of a grounded
approach, the specific content of each interview developed as the research process unfolded (Glaser &
Strauss, 1967; Miles & Huberman, 1994).

What does it mean to be great?

None of our fundraising leaders defined greatness in
terms of the absolute () amounts raised; they defined greatness in terms of delivering growth and
substantive growth at that. They, too, felt that to be
great in fundraising meant doubling, trebling, or quadrupling fundraising income. Growth though was
not seen as a goal in and of itself. None of our interviewees defined fundraising greatness without mentioning the impact that the enhanced income would
have on the mission of the organization. A passion
for the work and daring to believe in what might
be achieved were considered paramount. On occasion, the success had taken the focal organization
by surprise, with some interviewees reporting that
so much additional income had been generated that
the organization was compelled to reinvent their
programs to ensure that the monies were properly
spent. Fundraising greatness thus delivers the kind
of growth that is transformational for the organization and its programs either in scale or in content
so that the organization can multiply its societal
impact.

Fundraising leadership
For none of our leaders was fundraising merely a
means of paying their bills. In every case, they were
personally passionate about the profession of
fundraising, the cause they were working for, and
how they might personally contribute to improving
the lives of their beneficiaries. Crucially, to achieve
this, they saw the need not only to embed their
fundraising expertise in their chosen organization,
but rather to embed themselves as a whole
individual.

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Adrian Sargeant and Jen Shang

I didnt wake up this morning and just think: I

want be a fundraiser. I joined a specific cause that
I feel really passionately about and my way to
make a contribution to it is to raise money and
support. So fundraising is the expertise that Ive
been able to bring, but I think I can bring other
contributions into the organization as well
Im absolutely in love and besotted with the
cause I do love fundraising, I love the chase, I
love the accumulation of wealth in that sense, I
like the process.
It was told to prepare myself personally for it
(a fundraising campaign), family wise, energy
wise, fitness wise, clear my distractions, take
away everything that I am not going to need,
because its just going to be difficult, and it
was. Long, long hours work.
These individuals embedded their whole person
into the service of the cause, making a commitment
well beyond the confines of their contract of employment. In the language of system thinking, they
embedded their intellectual, emotional, and social
system of activity to serve the system of the organizational whole for its organizational purpose
(Checkland, 1994).
As they embedded themselves in their organization, they needed to understand themselves and
the benefits that their intellectual, emotional, and
social system of activity could deliver for their organization. In essence, they had designed the interface
between their individual system and the system of
their organization, looking for the optimal mix of
contributions that could be made to further the purpose of the charity. They then developed a similar
approach to the management of their fundraising
team, designing the interface their team would have
with other organizational systems, for example, service provision, marketing, and campaigning. They
also understood them in such a way that each of these
systems could be perceived as a whole in its own right,
but also simultaneously as part of a greater

Copyright 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

organizational whole (Koestler, 1967, 1978). All our interviewees were then able to pose the question how
might all these existing systems be transformed
systematically such that great fundraising may be created? We found considerable convergence in respect
of the process our fundraising leadership adopted in
answering that question.
While they did not employ the terminology, we
found evidence that they approached problem solving by adopting a systems thinking perspective, as
outlined by Jackson and Keys (1984). They began,
for example, by taking the broadest possible look at
their problem situation (Jackson, 2001). Our
fundraising leaders were able to identify the bigger
picture and thus all aspects of the environment that
might be relevant for securing improvement in
fundraising, rather than allowing organizational constraints (budgets, established patterns of behavior,
etc.) to dictate their problem definition. They were
also able to think about this bigger picture at a sufficient level of complexity (Ulrich & Reynolds, 2010).
In other words, they knew both what to think about
fundraising and how to think about fundraising.
The following example is illustrative:
(In the charity sector), theres very little investment in peoples personal or management development, particularly in comparison with
the private sector where I was very lucky to
receive a great deal of it. So I guess I had a
broader perspective of where it may help.
So a charity will say, yes, go on that direct marketing course, but very often theyre unlikely to say,
go on that coaching and conflict course or I want
you to learn about influencing skills or
So it just felt like something was missing that was
actually affecting our ability to work collectively.
And it also affected peoples confidence in their
ability to work with colleagues in the organisation.
In an NGO you have lots of very smart people,
certainly in fundraising, but most definitely in

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Outstanding fundraising practice

policy, advocacy and communications; and as a

fundraiser you need quite a lot of confidence to
argue your corner on how you might want to
portray a child, how you might want to portray
an issue and so in a weird way this was also
about building peoples confidence to do that.
The broadening of perspective articulated earlier
is important, because this realization allowed her
to tap into broader intellectual or social capital she
could access in order to create great fundraising
(Weick, 1988). This included drawing on her past
colleagues, past and current marketing agencies,
mentees, mentors, and any other connections from
different domains that might potentially have
proved fruitful. Through this level of thinking, she
was also able to transfer skills or knowledge accumulated in previous roles and engage them to design programs to improve performance in her
current organization.
As the preceding example also illustrates, after
setting up the broad context, the next step was
to gradually focus on the dimensions deemed
most crucial to the purpose at hand (Senge &
Sterman, 1992). Our leaders described a regular
process of iteration and active reflection (Ulrich,
2012, p. 5). This active reflection took place on
the nature of the problem, defining and
redefining it, on how the broad context was defined, and also on the foci that were selected from
that broad context. Our fundraising leaders were
able to continually iterate between these various
stages, searching out new ideas and solutions, as
they sought to isolate critical problems to address
and identify creative solutions. As they went
through multiple iterations of this active reflection
process, they refined their problem definition to
reflect any additional learning that helped them
to adopt a different perspective. They also begin
to think of potential solutions, not in terms of the
specific actions that must be taken, but in terms of
systems of actions that must be influenced, recognizing how each individual system might interact
with others.

Copyright 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

47

We knew that to meet our longer term goals we

had to bring other marketing teams in the organization on board. Historically they were viewed as
competition for resources and so we would celebrate our wins. But, as we reflected as a team
(with the campaigns team) we had to recognize
that our fortunes were interconnected. Instead
(we had to) work in partnership, occasionally taking a hit when it would help them achieve a significant goal. I realized early on that to achieve this I
needed to work hard on relationships with my
peers at director level. They needed to trust me.
Our leaders also identified that it is not enough to
merely focus on goals and the relationships between
goals (Checkland, 1994). Each point in time was
conceptualized as a system, a system of processes,
relationships, and structures (Figure 1). For them,
actions taken in the here could have much wider
ramifications than the mere achievement or otherwise of a specific goal (Senge & Sterman, 1992).
Our fundraising leaders were acutely aware of this
complexity (Stainton, 1984).
So, my functional responsibility is fundraising,
and that is really about raising as much money
and support as possible for children, and I tend
to view my role as: absolutely I need to know
how we are going to fundraise over the next
twelve to eighteen months, but I try to look out
to the three and five year horizon so that anything that were doing is leading to that, or is going to be contributing to that. And that helps me

Figure 1. (a) A linear progression of goals. (b) A systems

approach.

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Adrian Sargeant and Jen Shang

hugely in terms of where I spend my time, but also

in terms of prioritization of what were doing.

time managing the organization so that my

team can maximize their impact.

Here, the focal leader is viewing her role in two

time horizons, one short term and one medium
term, and she prioritized them differently. In systems
thinking language, what this means is that she views
these two timescales as being separate wholes, and
she therefore takes special care to attend to each.
At the same time, she views them as an integral part
of the design of the other. Thus, while she focuses on
the short term as a route to the medium term, she
also recognizes that the medium term needs to be
considered in designing short-term operations. The
difference between this and a more linear
perspective is illustrated in Figure 1.
What distinguishes the type of thinking depicted
in Figure 1b is an understanding that the short-term
system does not exist in a vacuum and that if the
medium-term and longer-term systems are to be created, actions must be taken now to put the building
blocks in place (Weick, 1988). The manager is considering not only the optimal system for today, but
how they can deliver this while locating it within
the system that will be necessary tomorrow. Systems
thinking is typically evidenced by the extent of the
integration and the sophistication of the system being created at each stage. Our leaders were actively
considering these issues.
Further complexity is added by the nature of the
fundraising directors role. They typically described
their functional responsibility as accounting for only
50% (or less) of their time. The balance was spent as
a director managing upwards and sideways (to other
functions) to allow the teams fundraising to
flourish.

Our fundraising leaders simultaneously considered

the short-term, medium-term, and long-term systems
that together comprised their functional role and their
role as a director of the organization and were thus
continually reflecting on the consequences of the actions taken in the context of one system for others they
were a party to too (Jackson, 2001). This fluidity is
what enabled them to become the kind of managers
who could think globally yet act locally (Senge &
Sterman, 1992) when required.

Fifty percent of your job is about your functional responsibilities and fifty percent of your
job is about your responsibility as a director of
the organization.
You would think I maintained tight oversight
of my team, but in reality, I send most of my

Copyright 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

The building blocks of success

Every one of the directors of fundraising we
interviewed had had a successful track record as a
manager before their current position, either within
the fundraising profession or in another sector. They
therefore had a strong sense of the basic issues that
had to be managed to produce success (Osland &
Turner, 2011). As they embedded themselves in their
role, they focused on issues relating to team, structures, and culture. We elaborate on these issues and
how they relate to fundraising in the following.
Constructing the right team

All our leaders stressed the importance of

appointing the right team to assist them in their
task, both team leaders and team members. Neither
could succeed without the other (Yukl, 2010). Our
interviewees also reported receiving the early trust
of their CEO and/or Board to make changes to the
teams that were appropriate and to provide the requisite resources to make this a reality (Roberts &
OReilly, 1974). Typically, our interviewees sought
individuals who thought in the same way as they
did and were thus also systems thinkers. They also
sought individuals who were able, ambitious, and
determined to succeed (Smith, Boyatzis, & Van
Oosten, 2012). They needed to have good technical
skills, but it was also necessary that they be a good

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Outstanding fundraising practice

team player willing to help others to succeed as

necessary.
These individuals did not need to have the same
appetite for risk as their director, so long as they
were open to experience and willing to discuss
the potential offered by various solutions (Barrick,
Stewart, Neubert, & Mount, 1998). They also did
not need to embed their lives in their roles to quite
the same degree as the fundraising director or have
the same readiness to take on challenges at quite the
same scale (Collins, 2011). However, they did need
a passionate commitment to the cause and a belief
in (and enthusiasm for) new fundraising approaches. In order to maximize the efficiency of
building such a team, many fundraising directors
therefore appointed people they had worked with
previously or knew of through their professional
networks that they believed they could work well
with. In doing so, they built a team that they knew
would converge in how they think but diverge in
what they think about.
In most of our cases, the teams were substantively
overhauled. Our interviewees reflected that the
people who left or were asked to leave were usually
either not up to the task or, critically, did not demonstrate the level of passion and commitment necessary for the new fundraising approach. Both have
been shown in the literature to harm trust and
group effectiveness (Chou et al., 2008).
A further critical factor to consider was the leadership and development of the assembled teams. In
this respect, all our fundraising directors demonstrated the characteristics of level 5 leaders. That
is, they build enduring greatness through a paradoxical blend of personal humility and professional
will (Collins, 2011). Our focal leaders had a high
level of confidence, derived from their successful
experience and personal reflections on how they
became successful. This confidence was motivational for their team members, not only because
of the exercise of personal charisma but also
through the setting of inspiring goals and standards
(Collins, 2006). The leader ensured that both individual team members and the team as a whole

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49

were accountable for both personal and team goals

(DeMatteo, Eby, & Sundstrom, 1998; Johnson et al.,
2006).
We also found evidence that in goal setting, our
outstanding leaders aligned their organizational metrics with the longer-term drivers of donor value.
There was less concern with metrics such as response rates and immediate return on investment.
They focused instead on the standards and behaviors they knew would add value for supporters and
thus build donor lifetime value. Their appraisal and
reward systems were similarly aligned, to focus
team member ambitions on the things that mattered
most to longer-term growth.
one of the first things I needed to do was to shift
the thinking of the Board. Although many were
from business backgrounds it wasnt immediately obvious to them that the same principles
of lifetime value and customer investment
might apply.
In addition, these leaders excelled at creating
shared mental modelsthat is, organized mental
representations of the key elements within a teams
environment that are shared across its membership.
These mental representations included the attitudes
and behaviors that were most valued and professional standards for how the team would interact
with others in the organization and key external
stakeholder groups, notably donors. In the latter
case, mental models included a shared definition of
what it means to be donor centric and the philosophy and kinds of relationships that needed to be
adopted to make this a reality.
We started to talk instead about acquaintances, friends and close friends and think
through how we should really talk to these very
different kinds of people.
Extant research indicates that teams with shared
mental models engage in more frequent interactions
with one another, are more motivated, have more

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Adrian Sargeant and Jen Shang

positive attitudes toward their work, and have

higher levels of objectively rated performance
(DeChurch & Mesmer-Magnus, 2010).
Although shared mental models are widely
regarded as a positive for team performance, they
can provide a heightened risk of groupthink occurring, where the team shares so much in common that there is little debate or reality testing
and irrational or sub-optimal decisions are taken
as a consequence. Our leaders dealt with this issue by deliberately encouraging a degree of task
conflict.
I encourage members of my team to adopt a
critical stance and ask questions when they
need to. I expect this of my team. No-one is
above making an error in their assessment of
a situation and we dont need a strategy
designed on a false premise. We dont need
applause for failure.
Task conflict is a constructive form of conflict
that improves decision making because many different views are deliberately aired (Farh, Lee, & Farh,
2010). The mental models developed by our leaders
thus emphasized the value of original thinking and
provided an environment where it was expected
that ideas would be routinely and critically debated
with no reflection on the originator, per se. Such
supportive environments were felt to be particularly
important at the initiation stage of a campaign, the
launching of new fundraising products, or the creation of new fundraising initiatives.
Finally, it is worth noting that each team we examined had been working together for extended
periods of time. This is significant because
experienced teams learn to trust each other more,
communicate more effectively, and learn to blend
each others diverse skills, strengths, and weaknesses (Dirks, 2000; Williams, 2001). None of the
organizations we interviewed, after the right team
had been built, suffered from the high turnover
rates that otherwise pervade the fundraising sector
(Sullivan, 2013).

Copyright 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Creating successful organizational structures

Organizational structure defines how job tasks are

formally divided, grouped and coordinated (Robbins
& Judge, 2013, p. 514). Most organizations we studied
adopted a structure based on function, including for
example, fundraising, finance, marketing, public
relations, campaigning, and program management.
The advantage of such a structure is that it pools all
specialists together to create economies of scale,
minimizes the duplication of personnel/equipment,
and enables employees to speak the same language
as their peers (Ulrich & Reynolds, 2010). This
structure also reinforces a clear line in command
and control (Burns & Wholey, 1993). The
disadvantage of this structure is that functional
departments can become competitors who as we
noted earlier can engage in a power struggle for
organizational power and resources (Sy, Beach, &
DAnnunzio, 2005).
All our interviewees found it necessary to make
structural changes in order to engage in both interteam and intra-team coordination and cooperation.
Upon their arrival at the organization or at the very
early stage of their fundraising transformation, they
first recruited most of the new members of their
team and then ensured that this new teams delivered early wins within the existing structure. They
then shaped the structure to secure additional resources they need to produce bigger and longerterm wins and to meet the development needs of
these new recruits (Pfeffer & Sutton, 2011).
At an inter-team level, our interviewees united different functional departments (such as campaigning,
communication, and fundraising) formally under
their own leadership or redesigned the reward
systems of all functional departments to encourage
cooperative efforts rather than competition.
These structural changes then accelerated the distribution of knowledge on fundraising principles
and practice from their newly recruited functional experts to teams in other functional areas. This shared
knowledge helped to bridge the gap between how
different functional teams think about their own

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Outstanding fundraising practice

functional systems and generate a more accurate

shared mental model of their organizational system
(Murase, Carter, DeChurch, & Marks, 2014; Ulrich,
2012). As a consequence of this purposefully structured knowledge sharing, more opportunities for cooperation and collaboration arose, and they arose
more easily (Mohamed, Stankosky, & Murray, 2004).

Inculcating a learning culture

Schein (1992) perceived organizational culture as a

pattern of basic assumptionsinvented, discovered, or developed by a given group as it learns to
cope with its problems of external adaptation and
internal integration. Such a pattern has worked well
enough to be considered valuable and, therefore, to
be taught to new members as the correct way to
perceive, think, and feel in relation to those problems. Without exception, all our fundraising leaders
had embedded learning at the core of the accepted
pattern or approach. The development of an organizational learning culture was deemed critical to the
development of exceptional fundraising.
Senge (1990) defined organizational learning as a
continuous testing of experience and its transformation into knowledge available to the whole organization (p. 6). Jones (2000) emphasizes the
importance of organizational learning for organizational performance. He defines it as a process
through which managers try to increase organizational members capabilities in order to better understand and manage the organization and its
environment (Jones, 2000, p. 472). We define it
as a process of information acquisition, information
interpretation, and resulting behavioral and cognitive changes, which should, in turn, have an impact on innovativeness.
In all cases, the leaders we interviewed made it
clear that the organizational culture when they took
up their appointment was far removed from the
ideal we articulate earlier. In most cases, a fundamental cultural shift needed to occur at the level of
the organization (not just at the level of the

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51

fundraising team). Even basic assumptions and

norms about how the organization operated frequently had to be challenged and changed, either
by the CEO or the fundraising director and their
peers (Gharajedaghi, 2007). In a number of cases,
for example, the organization had been failing to
meet its fundraising targets for several years and it
was now assumed that the target would not be
met and that it was acceptable not to meet it.
Our leaders diffused a new approach by
supplementing or replacing existing team members
with new personnel as necessary. As we noted earlier, these new individuals were selected for their
particular skill set; they were people who could
think quickly (and well) when they worked alone
on problems, but who also knew the limits of their
knowledge, asked for help when they needed it,
and were tenacious about guiding and helping colleagues (Bommer, Miles, & Grover, 2003). This latter
quality is probably more important for the success of
an organizations fundraising practice because it
helps inculcate a supportive culture that encourages
individual team members to learn from each other
and to be genuinely open to challenges derived from
the perspectives of others.
The directors we interviewed also encouraged a
greater degree of flexibility and risk taking on the part
of their teams (Edmondson, 1999). Failure was
redefined as the failure to learn from experience if
something did not work out as anticipated, rather than
the failure of a particular strategy or individual per se.
As long as the team learned from the experience to
inform future activity, all experiences, both good and
bad, could contribute to organizational learning.
We also noted the strong efforts made by those
we interviewed to broaden the perspective of the
members of their team (Panagiotidis & Edwards,
2001). Some of them provided their team members
(at all levels) the opportunity to experience firsthand the impact of the organization on the beneficiary group (Maurer, Pierce, & Shore, 2002). They
did so by sending their team members to the field,
letting them work side by side with program officers
and then assigning them the task of retelling the

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52

story of their personal experience in their

fundraising materials.
Others provided opportunities for junior members of their team to sit in on senior director or
board-level meetings. These junior members could
then become advocates for any top-down initiatives that the fundraising director would like to implement with the team, because they could then
better understand the rationale and design of these
initiatives and communicate this to their peers
(Edmondson, 1999). Both types of opportunities
enabled these team members to take alternative
perspectives and to translate these perspectives
into better fundraising practice within their
assigned responsibilities. Our fundraising directors
and their team members both described the impact
of these perspective-taking exercises as being
transformative and vitally instrumental in creating
great fundraising and in their personal career development. They enrich their careers and their
lives while creating great fundraising (Allen et al.,
2009).
Arrangements for personal support and
mentoring were also offered and extended beyond
the organization to draw on significant talent elsewhere. In addition, team members were encouraged to take on wider roles within the profession
(serving on committees, participating in working
groups, etc.) so that they could learn from the experiences of others and draw on best practices and
ideas from across the sector. Procedures were also
put in place for that experience and knowledge to
be shared internally and to be drawn on to inform
future planning and new fundraising innovation.
All this activity is consistent with best practice in
the development of an organizational learning culture (Senge, 1990).
What characterized all the campaigns we examined was a high level of systems thinking, not only
by the fundraising director, but also by the team of
minds they surrounded themselves with. This pattern of thinking was argued to facilitate the emergence of an organizational learning culture (Minati,
2007), certainly within the fundraising function.

Copyright 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Adrian Sargeant and Jen Shang

The directors we interviewed were personally focused on creating a learning culture and actively
hired or promoted individuals who could play their
own part in making that a reality.
it is a culture of change, its about describing
the existing culture and its building a narrative
towards what it might look like. So, whether
thats a hill to climb an enemy to beat, you
know, youve got to have a vision if you like,
for how things can be different, so that people
will come with you on that journey. You need
to do that with the people below you, so that
they feel enthusiastic and get behind you; but
you also need to do that with the people in front
of you and above you, in order to get their buy
in, to give you the tools, the investment, and
not to put barriers in the way that would prevent you from doing that.
The recruitment of talented team members, the restructure of organizational functions and reward systems, and the adoption of a relationship
management database system are at the core of this
process of building a learning culture. The resultant
collective behavior and shared mental model of all relevant stakeholders then allowed innovation to occur.

Conclusions
In our initial analysis, we focused on the leaders
themselves, noting that all the Directors we
interviewed demonstrated the characteristics of
transformational leaders. But in addition they appeared to embed their whole being into the creation
of fundraising for a cause they cared deeply about.
At a base level, we found that these individuals focused on managing the building blocks of success,
which they saw as team, structure, and culture. That
is not to say that they did not regard other aspects of
their management duties as important, merely that
these were the topics mentioned most frequently
as causes for concern, in our conversations. The creation of an exceptional team, in particular, had been

Int. J. Nonprofit Volunt. Sect. Mark., 2016

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Outstanding fundraising practice

an immediate priority following their appointment.

They looked for technically talented individuals but
also individuals capable of systems thinking so that
they might assist in breaking down organizational
silos by empathizing with the needs of other teams
and players.
What seemed key to us in elevating fundraising
performance was the quality of the thinking in
solving critical problems each leader was able to
generate. In our view, neither the ideas nor the considerable experience of our leaders alone could
have given rise to the fundraising success that they
created. The real difference these leaders were able
to make occurred as a consequence of the way in
which they understood and coped with the complexities of everyday decision making. They were
exceptional in isolating the right problems to tackle,
exceptional in how they then defined (or redefined)
those problems, and exceptional in the process they
adopted to solve them.
What was also striking was the degree to which
our fundraising leaders had focused on embedding
the same level of skill in their management (and
other) teams. As our individuals continuously internalized and improved on their own ability to conceptualize and think through solutions to problems, the
people around them formed a collective mind that
demonstrated similar characteristics. We found that
when the process of inquiry is undertaken by a collective mind of individuals working with a common
purpose, these teams then coalesced into a learning
system, and an organizational learning culture
emerged. The achievement of this organizational
learning culture seemed to us to be absolutely critical in delivering outstanding fundraising.
In this paper, we have therefore isolated aspects of
the marketing, management, and nonprofit management literatures that on the basis of our interviews
seem to hold the greatest promise for fundraising
leaders looking to optimize their performance. We
have added to knowledge in the sense that we have
suggested how extant theory might be meaningfully
applied or extended, taking account of the nuances
of the fundraising sector. We have also highlighted

Copyright 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

53

that while much of the extant marketing literature focuses on what marketing leaders do, there is perhaps
equal utility in exploring how they think and encourage others to do so too.

Limitations and opportunities for further

research
The weaknesses of a grounded approach are well
documented (see, e.g., Dunne, 2011). In particular,
we focus on a small number of campaigns and focus
only on the attitudes and behaviors of those teams.
Further research might usefully conduct comparisons between high-performing and low-performing
teams so that a degree of comparison and a comparison on specific dimensions might be conducted. It
would also be instructive to examine the role played
by other key organizational actors in the creation of
outstanding fundraising, notably the Chief Executive
and their nonprofit board. We noted briefly that the
support of both was necessary to achieve significant
change, but the mechanics of how this buy-in was
achieved or the nature of the environment that gave
rise to it would merit further study.

Biographical notes
Adrian Sargeant is a Director of the Centre for Sustainable Philanthropy and a Professor of Fundraising
at Plymouth University in the UK. He was formerly
the first Hartsook Chair in Fundraising at Indiana
University.
Jen Shang is a Research Director at the Centre for
Sustainable Philanthropy at Plymouth University and a
Professor of Philanthropic Psychology. Her research interests are focused on maximizing the value that
donors derive from their giving and thus the sustainability of individual and family philanthropy.

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