Lisa Avra’s presentation was fantastic. She presented at our Nonprofit Career Club and told us what it was like being a Chief Development Officer at the University of Texas at Austin, what she learned before coming on in that role, and how we could get there.

We had 15 fabulous people attend our presentation, everyone from people who were looking for a place to volunteer to people who had a career in fundraising to former nonprofit executives to people who wanted to start nonprofits, to people who wanted to get INTO nonprofit work but didn’t know how.

At first Ms. Avra talked about her background, how she got from a BA in Radio and TV and English Literature to the CDO of the Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin. She was really good at relating what she talked about back to the people she was talking with. She said that she got a BA in English Lit and a minor in Art History, so she decided to become a teacher.

Job #1: She got an Master’s in Education, and began to teach art at an inner city school. After a year of that, she realized that elementary school politics were NOT going to work for her, so she moved into museum education,

Job #2: As the Director of Education for the Dallas Historical Society. Unfortunately her position was only for 9 months, as a contract, so then

Job #3: She found another temporary position at the Dallas Museum of Art. But she realized then if she wanted to move up in the world of museum education she needed an advanced degree in Art history. So as she thought about that, her husband got promoted into a position in Mississippi.

Job #4: Since there weren’t a lot of people with advanced degrees in Mississippi back then, she ended up being the Director of Education at the Mississippi Museum of Art. And this is where she first got a taste of development. She said, you’ve got to do grantwriting if you want your programs to succeed. At the same time, she was volunteering with a nonprofit that helped mentally challenged adults. She created a program for them to sell their ceramics and they took them to market and made lots of money.

Job #5: They offered her the position of Executive Director, and she took it.

Job #6: Then another nonprofit for developmentally disabled people asked her to come on as Executive Director, and she did this for two years, and then it was time to come home to Texas.

Job #7: She realized that when they moved back, although she’d been the head of two nonprofits, what she liked best about her jobs there was development.

She said, “Money makes the world go around. If you can raise the money, you can do the good works.”

And she wanted to go somewhere where she could do it well, in a big development office. She looked at the University of Texas when she got back to Austin, and applied cold for a Development Director position, and got the position.

Job #8: After a few years, the Children’s Museum in Austin needed a development director. She knew someone who said, “You’d be perfect for this job!” They wanted to start a major donor program, and her children were the age that she thought, This could be fun for them. So she went to visit the management there, and they wanted her, so she worked there for a few years.

Job #9: Then she was talking with a friend who was getting promoted from the Chief Development Officer and Assistant Development Director position at the Ransom Center at University of Texas, and he said, “You should really have this job” and she realized it was a perfect position for her, and she’s been there ever since.

So how she got her executive position was at first through just volunteering, and she said, “You would not believe how many people become executives through volunteering first” and it’s definitely true in my experience as well. And she got her first full time development position at UT through a cold application, but all of her subsequent positions were through personal recommendations by people that she knows.

For people who want to move up in their careers, here’s what she said.

#1. Join AFP if you’re wise. They have monthly luncheons, workshops and a jobline in Austin. For $250, they will hook you up. This is the place to network and find a fundraising job.

#2. Check out Greenlights.org for Texas based people.

#3. Check out TANO.org, ditto, and the RGK Center for Philanthropy Certificate program if you want to get certified. There may be a nonprofit certification program in your city. Google this.

Ms. Avra’s presentation was particularly useful to me because she broke down the definitions between fundraising and development very succinctly. She said,

Fundraising is creating a product or activity you can sell and have the proceeds go to your organization.

Development is building relationships with people who have the same intent and capacity to give. You give them the opportunity to give. Someone who has the capacity will give it to you or give it to another nonprofit or the government, and they already give the government enough money, so you might as well ask! And provide an opportunity for them to feel good about giving.

Do you have any other suggestions for how people can get started in nonprofit careers or move up in development? Please leave a comment!

Follow Wild Woman Fundraising on Twitter! Because you’ll get sweet tips on fundraising and development!

Are you new here? Welcome! Sign up for my newsletter and get fresh nonprofit fundraising, management and career ideas monthly!

First Name:

Last Name:

Email:

Join us today at 5:30pm at 2500 Exposition Blvd, Howson Library, in Austin, TX, when we’ll be talking with Lisa Avra, CDO of the Ransom Center!

She’s going to be talking about her Development career thus far, about what she does all day, and advice for people who want to reach the C-level of nonprofit fundraising.

I want to ask her,

Are your duties mainly major gifts?

Do you incorporate lean manufacturing principles into your fundraising strategies?

What are some questions you’d like to ask her?

Come out today at 5:30pm at 2500 Exposition Blvd, Howson Branch Library, Austin, TX and get your questions answered!

Free presentation, free parking, free advice! You can’t lose!

Are you new here? Welcome! Sign up for my newsletter and get fresh nonprofit fundraising, management and career ideas monthly!

First Name:

Last Name:

Email:

This July 27th, at 5:30pm at 2500 Exposition, Howson library in Austin, Texas, we’ll be listening to Lisa Avra, Chief Development Officer, Harry Ransom Center at University of Texas at Austin.

Ms. Avra graduated from Baylor University with a BA in Mass Communication and English. She then went on to get her teaching certification at University of Texas at Tyler in K-12 Art and 7-12 English, Journalism.

In her current role, she leads a department of three development professionals. Develops strategies for securing major gifts from individuals, corporations and foundations. Manage a portfolio of 189 donors. Oversees an additional portfolio of 75 corporate and foundation donors. Directs activities in development communications, membership, and stewardship programs. Works closely with public affairs, marketing, curatorial, and administrative staff across the Center. Manages a $15 million dollar capital campaign. The Center’s capital campaign is currently leading all other UT college, schools and units with 172.4% of its goal three months prior to the halfway mark.

So how did she get from point A to Point B? Well, she’s going to tell us!

We’re so grateful to have her here to speak to us. Join us at Howson Library, 2500 Exposition, Austin, Texas, from 5:30-6:30pm.

Twitter If you’re looking for people to follow, may I suggest:
@wildwomanfund/funders (This is a list: I followed all of the top 100 foundations on Foundation Center, now you can too!)
@advancingwomen
@rosettathurman
@womanistmusings
@cheritatweets
@safeworld4women
@thefriendraiser
@ClinicEscort
@socialchngediva
@ShellyKramer
@Feministe
@socimages
@blogging4jobs
@unmarketing
@seattledrury
@socioinnovation
@kivilm
@PamelaGrow

LinkedIn Groups
Consultants Network
Fundraising Friends
Fundraising Professionals Group
On Fundraising, by AFP
Philanthropy Network
Professional Speakers in Philanthropy
Fundraising Worldwide
Nonprofit marketing
Social Media for Nonprofit Organizations
Nonprofit Message, Communications and Marketing
The Job Board: Find a job, post a job
Corporate Social Responsibility
Job & Career Network: Nonprofit, Philanthropy, & Government

Books
The Wild Woman’s Guide to Fundraising by Mazarine Treyz
Uncharitable by Dan Pallotta
Fundraising for Social Change by Kim Klein
Tools for Radical Democracy Edited by Kim Klein
Raise More Money: The Best of the Grassroots Fundraising Journal by Kim Klein

Articles
Grassroots Fundraising Journal, published by Kim Klein

CDs
The Soul of Money by Lynne Twist

Games
Adventures in Fundraising By Mazarine Treyz (Coming soon!)

Major Donor Sources
Look at the Business Journal’s Book of Lists
Look at annual reports of nonprofits similar to yours
Mailing Lists-Blackbaud has a mailing list of major donors

Blogs
Amy Sample Ward’s Blog
Beth Kanter’s Blog
Craig’s Fundraising Detective Blog
Pamela Grow’s Grantwriting Blog
Seth Godin’s Blog

Add your essential resources below!

Thank you!

We all have our little tricks for making do, for getting by with less. Here are mine. What are some of yours? Leave a comment!

1. Marketing: Go to the same printer every time, negotiate a lower price based on your loyalty and the urgency of your cause.

2. Ask a major corporation if they’d like to sponsor the publication of your annual report, and put their logo in it. Great exposure for their brand tied with yours.

3. Use the downturn to negotiate a lower price for t-shirts, pens, buttons, etc.

4. Get interns to do graphic design for you.

5. Free Publicity: Try getting an interview on your local community radio station, KOOP in Austin Texas, or Kaos in Olympia, Washington. If you’re in England, try University Radio York, and if you’re in Vancouver, Canada, try CO-OP Radio.

6. Go to your local tv station and get a free interview with your nonprofit leader. Portland Community Media is one place I’d recommend for Portland Oregon.

6. Appeals: Batch your fundraising appeal letters. Send out 150 at a time. Test out different messages, graphs, charts, quotes, pictures, see what works with who. This way you can avoid an appeal letter that bombs.

7. Get volunteers to stuff envelopes for you. If you’re in Canada, post an opportunity at Volunteer.ca. If you’re in England, post what you need at this site. Try Workforce Solutions in Austin, Texas, and Steps to Success is a good one for Portland, Oregon.

8. Get a pitney bowes machine to put the correct postage on your letters and packages. This will save you money in that trip to the post office.

9. Events: Get space and food donated for events. Use your board member connections.

10. Getting things done: Get free advice from wise people at SCORE, the Service Corps Of Retired Executives, everything from starting a nonprofit to running a marketing plan. You can take a class or get free counseling. I’ve used their services and I recommend them!

11. Grants: Need to research grants? You can view the Foundation Center Database for free. Go to your local cooperating collection to view grants for your charity.

12. Major Donors: Get free annual reports from similar nonprofits and find out which corporations care about your cause.

13. Also, get the Business Journal’s Book of Lists to find out which new companies to approach for supporting your cause.

14. Data entry: Do you need a database? How do you choose which one to use? Check out NTEN’s unbiased free survey of donor management databases to see which ones have the features you need.

15. In-Kind: Get a local coffeeshop to donate meeting space or coffee to your next meeting and promise to put their logo in your newsletter.

16. Get free yoga for your nonprofit by asking a local yoga studio to give a demo at your next staff meeting.

17. Negotiate with a new bakery or office supply store to tell people about their businesses, and give discounts to your employees or donors, and get free baked goods or office supplies.

18. Get donated auction items.

19. Post volunteer opportunities everywhere you can (local high schools, colleges, universities, volunteermatch.org, idealist.org, etc). Each volunteer hour is worth $18!

20. Use a new avenue for messages: If your nonprofit is almost at its goal, text message your most loyal supporters, asking for help in this last push.

21. Bonus: Get reduced price software from TechSoup!

Thanks for reading!

What are some of YOUR money saving tips?

Why should we?

Why should we fundraise?
Why should we gather stories?
Why should we enter donations?
Why should we write grants?
Why should we hang banners?
Why should we throw events?
Why should we ask for major gifts?
Why should we manage volunteers?
Why should we make social media groups?
Why should we create direct mail?
Why should we knock on doors?
Why should we nurture others?
Why should we ask for money?

Because,
if we want clean air
if we want clean water
if we want peace
if we want to help animals
if we want to help children
if we want money,
if we want money to solve problems,
we need to ask for it.

This is why we fundraise.

Join us.

You may have seen Nicholas Kristof and Cheryl WuDunn’s new book, Half the Sky, or the NY times article about Saving the World’s Women.

Why should we focus on women and women’s issues?
Why would donors give to causes that support women?

This audio interview with founder of Women Moving Millions, Chris Grumm, a Texas native, talks about why funding women is just good for our world.

Why make an entire nonprofit about getting women to give million dollar gifts? You can read the New York Times article, or listen to Chris Grumm reveals the answers to this and more in her interview. Download it as an mp3 or listen here.

Kristof and WuDunn write, “Traditionally, the status of women was seen as a “soft” issue — worthy but marginal. We initially reflected that view ourselves in our work as journalists. We preferred to focus instead on the “serious” international issues, like trade disputes or arms proliferation.

“…We came across an obscure but meticulous demographic study…(that) found that 39,000 baby girls died annually in China because parents didn’t give them the same medical care and attention that boys received — and that was just in the first year of life. A result is that as many infant girls died unnecessarily every week in China as protesters died at Tiananmen Square. Those Chinese girls never received a column inch of news coverage, and we began to wonder if our journalistic priorities were skewed.

A similar pattern emerged in other countries. In India, a “bride burning” takes place approximately once every two hours, to punish a woman for an inadequate dowry or to eliminate her so a man can remarry — but these rarely constitute news. When a prominent dissident was arrested in China, we would write a front-page article; when 100,000 girls were kidnapped and trafficked into brothels, we didn’t even consider it news.

Amartya Sen, the ebullient Nobel Prize-winning economist, developed a gauge of gender inequality that is a striking reminder of the stakes involved. “More than 100 million women are missing,” Sen wrote in a classic essay in 1990 in The New York Review of Books, spurring a new field of research. Sen noted that in normal circumstances, women live longer than men, and so there are more females than males in much of the world. Yet in places where girls have a deeply unequal status, they vanish. China has 107 males for every 100 females in its overall population (and an even greater disproportion among newborns), and India has 108. The implication of the sex ratios, Sen later found, is that about 107 million females are missing from the globe today.” -NY Times Magazine, August 17, 2009

Why Fund Women? Why now?

Chris Grumm writes, “There’s no shortage of sobering statistics that present a strong moral case for funding women – for example, women produce nearly 80% of the world’s food, but receive less than 10% of agricultural assistance, and a staggering 70% of those living in abject poverty are women.”

It’s not just good fundraising, it’s good business. The business case for funding women is well documented.  “Forget China, India and the internet: economic growth is driven by women.”-The Economist

For the first time in history, women are funding women in greater numbers and in millions of dollars. As novelist Harriet Beecher Stowe once said: “Women are the real architects of society.” Let’s continue to shift economic power into the hands of the builders – fund women first.

If you are a woman, there is no better time to become a fundraiser for women.
If you are a man, there is no better time to become a fundraiser for women.

What are some of your ideas for how we can help women fund women?

How would you package your fundraising materials differently?

What would be some fundraising events you would throw for women?

Why should we fundraise?
What difference does it make?
What do you care about?
Don’t you want clean air? Clean water? To help children? To help animals?
If you want to change the world, how are you going to make sure that you have the greatest impact?
Become a fundraiser, and exponentially expand your impact on your cause.

How can you fundraise?
Download a resource from the resource section on this site.
How can you get a job as a fundraiser? I’ve written a whole book about it. Available for download soon.

When to do it:
All year round.

You’ll need:
A major gifts program, with moves management to track donors. A relationship with your major donors. Grand vision for organization and people to communicate that vision with passion, either Board volunteers, executive director, or you. Source of potential major donors, a cultivation strategy, weekly meetings that allow each person involved in the ask to evaluate what worked.

What to do:
research
hone best prospects
ask board and staff about best prospects
communicate with prospect
call
email
call
meet
send info
ask

For more information on Major Gift Asks, download the chapter on the In Person Ask.

Ask yourself and those around you these questions.

1. What does your nonprofit spend the most money on?

2. What does your nonprofit waste the most money on?

3. How many people have been hired and fired in the last three years?

4. Does your executive director possess emotional intelligence?

5. When you have meetings, does everyone get a chance to speak? Does your executive director listen, and ask good questions? Is the tone of the questions genuinely curious, or hostile?

6. Does your nonprofit do all that it says it does? Is the mission clear to everyone who works at your nonprofit? Is everyone on the same page? Does the community see that you are doing the work you say you are doing?

7. Do you have a graph or pie chart showing expenses and income for the past three years? For the past three months? What do these graphs tell you? Where have expenses or income gone up?

8. Do you have a marketing manager, a volunteer coordinator, an outreach coordinator, or is your fundraiser expected to be these as well as fundraise?

9. Is your fundraiser given the support necessary to help them succeed?

10. How big is your major donor portfolio? Does your executive director make major donor visits at least three times a month? Is the director actively involved in cultivating major donors? Is the board making major donor visits at least once a month?

Bonus. Have you talked with everyone, from the highest board member to the lowest staff members, the secretary, the janitor, the people receiving services, community members, to ask them what could be improved, and where they see wasted effort or money?

When you have the answers to these questions, you’ll know how to measure where your nonprofit can be more efficient.

Any amount of running around and trying to fundraise will not do any good if the community sees that your nonprofit is not really doing what they say they are doing. Good programs who are achieving measurable results will be funded. And if your nonprofit is doing good work, but your fundraiser is not being supported by executive director, board, volunteers or staff, then not going to succeed.

One principle of lean fundraising is that you need to be willing to ask dumb questions, of anyone and everyone.