“I Am the Development Director, Event Planner, Grant Writer, Social Media Manager, and IT Department. Send Help.”

Stop me if you’ve heard this one

It’s 7:47 AM.

You’re on your second cup of coffee.

You have 14 emails flagged, three of which are marked “URGENT” by people who clearly don’t know what that word means.

Your calendar today includes: a donor meeting (you’re the development director), finalizing the silent auction spreadsheet (you’re the event planner), a grant narrative draft due Friday (you’re the grant writer), three social posts that should’ve gone up yesterday (you’re the social media manager), and figuring out why the printer is now making that noise (you’re, apparently, IT).

Also a random board member that doesn’t communicate at all unless he needs something just texted asking if you can “pop together some talking points” for tonight’s meeting.

Sure, Ron. Let me just pop that right on over.

Oh, and make sure you do that right between the pop tart you ate at 6 AM and the now watered-down-iced-coffee on your desk slowly developing a wet puddle underneath because you’ve been too busy putting out fires to take a single sip.

Why Does This Keep Happening?

Because nonprofit math is a hellscape. (Heck-scape?)

Small and medium sized shop fundraisers, which is most of you reading this, are asked to do the work of five people with the budget for approximately 1.2 of them.

And when something breaks, who fixes it? You do.

When something needs to get done, who does it? You do.

When nobody knows how to update the WordPress site, who figures it out at 10 PM on a Tuesday?

Also you.

It’s always you.

And if you’re uncomfortable saying it out loud, let me do it for you: you cannot do all of this well.

Nobody can. You are not falling behind because you’re bad at your job. You’re drowning because the job is six jobs in one, and has very little to do with the job description you fell in love with when you started, and at some point something has to give.

The question isn’t “how do I do it all?”

The question is “what can I stop pretending I can do well, and what do I actually need to protect?”

So What Do You Actually Do About It?

I got you Boo! And because I’ve been in the same seat you’re sitting, feeling discombobulated as you are currently, let me reach into my bag of nonprofit tricks to help you out!

I’ve got three things you can do to start climbing out of the 10,000-hat hole immediately:

1.     Run the “One Hour Audit”

Before you can protect your time, you have to know where it’s actually going. And I promise you: what you THINK you’re doing all day and what you ACTUALLY do all day are two very different things.

For three days - just three - keep a running list (sticky note, randomly downloaded notes app, back of a cocktail napkin, I don’t care) of every task you do and roughly how long it takes.

Don’t judge yourself. Just compile the data.

At the end of three days, look at the list and ask two questions:

“Which of these actually raised money or built a donor relationship?”

“Which of these could be done by literally anyone else? Like a volunteer. Or an intern. Or a $20/hour freelancer. Or someone on my board. Or my cat.”

I’ll save you the suspense: a shocking amount of your time is going to non-fundraising busywork.

That’s not a you problem. That’s a systems problem. But you can’t fix a problem you can’t see.

Audit first.

Triage second.

Sounds awfully similar to hot tips in a certain book that I can’t quite put my finger on where I’ve hear this before. :-) (Pssssst! It’s Fundraise Awesomer! That’s the book!)

2.     Kill, Delegate, or Downgrade ONE Thing This Week

Not everything. One single thing.

Because if I tell you to delegate ALL the things, you’ll freeze up, close the tab, and go back to doing all the things.

I know you. I was you.

So here’s the move. Pick ONE task from your audit and do one of three things with it:

— Kill it. Does it actually need to happen? Is this a “we’ve always done it that way” task that serves nobody? Stop doing it. Watch what happens. (Spoiler: often, nothing.)

— Delegate it. A volunteer can stuff envelopes. A board member can write some of your thank-you notes. An intern can schedule those social posts. Your ED can absolutely answer an email without you CC’d and then expected to track when the follow up happens.

— Downgrade it. Does that newsletter really need to be a 1,200-word opus with custom graphics? Or could it be four tight paragraphs and a photo? B+ work on the right things beats A+ work on the wrong things. (This doesn’t apply to my kids in school, so please don’t send this to their teachers. They should totally try to do A+ work on all the things. LOL)

Every. Single. Time.

One task. This week. That’s it.

3.     Protect One Donor Hour a Day (or Die Trying)

The most fun thing about wearing 10,000 hats is that the urgent stuff will always, ALWAYS crowd out the important stuff.

And for a fundraiser, the important stuff is donor relationships.

Grants won’t save you.

Events won’t save you.

Social posts definitely won’t save you.

Donor relationships save you.

They’re the highest-ROI work you can possibly do, and they’re almost always the first thing that gets bumped when the printer runs out of blue ink. By the way – why is it that even if it is a color ink that goes out, you can’t even print in black and white!? Is that a ME issue? Am I doing something wrong? Do I just have a dumb printer? Am I part of a print-ink-conspiracy? TELL ME.

Anywho.

Block one hour a day. Every day. Call it whatever you want - “Donor Time,” “Relationship Hour,” “Do Not Disturb Unless the Building Is Actively on Fire Time.”

In that hour, you do exactly one kind of thing: you talk to humans who care about your mission.

Phone calls. Thank-you notes. Coffee invites. Handwritten cards. A quick text checking in.

That’s it.

Not email. Not admin. Not the grant. Not the social post.

Just Humans. Just one hour.

Will the world end because you didn’t answer email for 60 minutes?

No.

Will your fundraising numbers start to shift because you finally did the ONE thing you were actually hired to do?

Hell Yes.

This Is a MAYDAY for a Reason

If you keep wearing all 10,000 hats, one of two things happens:

Either the hats fall off one by one and you spend your days chasing them around the parking lot, OR you burn out so completely that you leave the sector entirely. And the nonprofit world loses another great fundraiser because nobody ever told them it was OK to put a hat down.

For the love of all that is holy – it’s OK to put a hat down. It’s not quitting. It’s not failing. It’s strategy.

The best fundraisers I know aren’t the ones who do everything. They’re the ones who got brutally honest about what ONLY they could do, and ruthlessly protected that time.

You can do that too.

OK! YOUR TURN

I want to hear from you. Seriously. Hit reply, send me a DM, old-timey-horseback-postal service - I don’t care. Tell me:

How many hats are YOU wearing right now? And which one do you wish you could throw into the pit of Mount Doom tomorrow?

Maybe you’ve cracked the code on solo-shop fundraising and have a system that works. Tell me. I’ll share it (with permission) so other folks can steal your playbook.

Maybe you’re drowning and you don’t even know where to start. Tell me that too! Remember, like Planet Fitness, this too, is a Judge Free Zone.™

Send me your answer: patrick@dogoodbetterconsulting.com or just reply if you want to talk about how to stop drowning and start…fundraising awesomer!

Together, we’ve freaking got this!

-Patrick

P.S. This is one of a series of MAYDAY Distress Signals — real problems I hear from nonprofit pros every single week. If you’re tired of figuring it out alone, Do Good YOUniversity re-launches May 1st with on-demand training, community, and tools built for fundraisers like you. MORE SOON!