446: Build Fundraising That Compounds with Bill Crouch

Reflections from host Sarah Olivieri ...

Is Your Budget Killing Your Major Gifts Program? Many nonprofit leaders I talk to about major gifts describe some version of the same wall.

They know the money is out there. They have heard the statistics about wealth transfer and donor-advised funds. They have sat through the trainings. And still, nothing moves.

So they go looking for the missing skill. Better scripts. A new CRM. A workshop on how to ask.

Here's what I often find when I see an organization trying to do major gifts but struggling. They're actually operating with systems and processes that work against major gifts.

Systems like:

annual fundraising strategies

a schedule of campaigns

an annual budget that rewards short-term gifting, which often comes at the expense of building the proper long-term relationship that leads to true, significant, sustainable funding from major donors

Relationships operate on systems as well, but these are not the systems that relationships run on.

When the wrong systems are in place, people rarely call out the system. They compensate with effort instead. In fundraising, that effort goes into activity that can be measured this quarter. Events. Appeals. Data entry. All of it visible, all of it defensible, and very little of it building the thing that tends to produce seven-figure gifts.

A version of this came up on almost every strategy call I had this spring, which is why I was glad to sit down with Bill Crouch and talk it through. Bill has spent more than forty years inside this work, first as a college president raising private money in the shadow of a state flagship, now advising nonprofits nationally. He has lived this work and he has taught it, which is a rarer combination than it sounds. What the conversation gave me was not a new idea. It was a sharper explanation of why the patient approach holds up and why so few organizations are structured to survive the wait.