Fundraising Team Communication: 5 Insights for Collaboration

Whether you are trying to improve day-to-day operations or embarking on a capital campaign, internal communications are crucial for ensuring that your organization meets its goals. The internal processes and standards you maintain not only help improve productivity within your organization but also help your team stay focused on achieving your goals. When your fundraising team functions as a well-oiled machine, the results will be evident. To promote a high level of trust and collaboration among your team, it’s crucial that your internal communication is thoughtful, effective, and efficient. 

You can focus on improving communication among your team members in five essential ways: 

1. Determine team priorities 
2. Clearly define roles and responsibilities
3. Standardize communication expectations 
4. Create central, comprehensive resources 
5. Coordinate solicitations 

Improving collaboration through effective communication is important for any fundraising team. It will help you to not only more easily meet your fundraising goals but will also give your donors the best experience possible. Follow these five tips to reduce your team stress and increase your supporters’ confidence.

1. Determine team priorities 

When beginning a new campaign, it can be difficult to clearly communicate the mission and overarching strategic plan to the whole team. This is especially true if you’re adding new team members who are not yet as familiar with the work you do. 

To help your team stay on track, you should begin by outlining your priorities. Doing so will allow them to effectively prioritize their to-do lists in alignment with your campaign guidelines and enables your team to be more proactive in decision-making. Instead of waiting on someone else to approve every small decision, they can confidently measure whether this potential decision aligns with the mission and priorities set at the start of your campaign. 

2. Clearly identify roles and responsibilities

When it comes to fundraising, the work can often take an “all hands on deck” approach. While you want your team members to be ready to jump in and help each other at any point during your campaign, not having clear responsibilities can cause unnecessary confusion and inefficiency. Set a standard at the beginning of your campaign with assigned roles and responsibilities. 

Remember to define all the responsibilities of the campaign, both those that occur internally and those that are donor-facing. For example, you may have a team member who is internally responsible for managing your budget while another person is generally responsible for scheduling and coordinating all of your marketing efforts. For gift officers, it’s critical to assign donors to prospect portfolios to ensure that donors know who their point of contact is and aren’t receiving multiple solicitations. 

Additionally, it may be appropriate to identify how involved your board will be in fundraising. If you anticipate involving them in any meetings or giving regular updates on progress, that should be accounted for in your communication expectations. 

3. Define communication norms

When communication expectations are set, it will be easier for your team to keep projects moving and ensure that all key players are in the loop. This will also help streamline key tasks by limiting internal blockers and miscommunications. To create these communication norms and make sure your team’s time is being used effectively, you should determine the standards for each of the following: 

• Method of communication, such as email, instant messaging, or phone calls
• Expected response time
• Meeting frequency
• Who is expected to attend which meetings
• How long meetings should last 
• Which team members need to be kept up to date on certain projects

Setting out the expectations for all team members from the beginning ensures that there are fewer miscommunications and that there are no bottlenecks due to one unresponsive team member. 

4. Create central, comprehensive resources

Once you’ve created communication norms, your staff should be able to get what they need from other team members in a timely manner. But what happens if a team member is out sick, or simply hasn’t responded to an urgent request in a timely manner? To further decrease the chance of internal slowdowns, you should make sure that all team members can access the needed data, resources, and documents for their roles at all times. 

Having one central location for information about priorities, who is responsible for what, and information about initiatives, donors, campaigns, and more ensures that there are no unnecessary barriers to taking action. 

While internal responsibilities are always crucial to outline to avoid confusion, external responsibilities are especially important to identify in certain types of fundraising. For example, when contacting major donors, long-time supporters, or fundraising in more sensitive environments, such as in grateful patient programs, ensuring that your donors are receiving the appropriate level of communication and outreach from a consistent point of contact should be a top priority. 

While you want it to be accessible, you may also need to provide additional training on data security, particularly for donor data. It may not be best to give all team members access to donor information for security purposes, but you should ensure that anyone who needs access to that information knows where and how to find it and manage it securely. Grateful patient programs are an excellent example of when information needs to be safeguarded and not widely shared with all staff.  Even when taking a more narrow approach to data and resources, you should ensure that the necessary team members can access what they need to help your organization reach its goals. 

5. Coordinate communications

Lastly, to ensure that the smooth process used for internal communications translates to benefits in donor interactions, you should prioritize coordinating communications so that donors are not being flooded with messages and repeatedly asked for donations. While you should already be identifying which donors individual team members are responsible for, particularly for major donors, it can be beneficial to put even more intention behind communication about donor solicitations. 

Tracking your team-wide donor interactions, ideally through an integrated CRM, can help your team ensure that there is no unintentional overlap between outreach efforts and solicitations. From event invitations, organization or segment-wide newsletters, and more personal solicitations and communications, you want to have a clear picture of all the ways in which your team is contacting your donors.  It can be helpful to monitor:

• Who reached out
• When the donor was contacted
• The method of contact (by phone call, email, or direct mail, for example)
• How many times this donor has been contacted
• Frequency of contact
• Donation/Involvement history for context on the donor relationship 
• Donor response 

While some of this information can be entered automatically into a system, some of it will require manual data entry that takes more time. To ensure that your database paints a clear and accurate picture of donor relationships, it’s important to set the expectation and standards for that from the start of your campaign. 

Instituting processes and standards to improve internal communication will not only make it easier for your team to work efficiently, but will also help you stay focused on reaching your goals. These five communication tips can help you streamline and improve actions taken by your fundraising team for the best results possible. 

Chelsey Newmyer

Chelsey is a Senior Consultant at Graham-Pelton. An analytical problem solver, Chelsey uses a data-driven approach fostered by her engineering background to conduct multipronged annual giving campaigns, manage leadership-level prospects and volunteers, and enhance cross-departmental relationships.