Picture it, Anaheim 2018. It was the 50th anniversary of CASE/NAIS. I stepped onto the stage in front of a crowded hotel ballroom. The seats were full, people had found space on the floor. The topic, effective partnerships between fundraising and finance. It feels like this is where I should tell you that then I woke up. Nope, that really happened.
A few years prior we onboarded a new CFO. The outgoing CFO was someone I considered a friend and a mentor, we are still in touch today. The new CFO was funny, in a comical way. He was never short on dad jokes. I quickly learned he would do just about anything for you, if you brought him a diet coke. We stood on the stage together in Anaheim with a slide projected behind us, on that slide, a picture of a can of diet coke. That was the secret to an effective partnership, you just needed a soda.
One of the first points we shared was calling out the obvious differences in our work, he liked to joke that it was the difference between counting and accounting. Boards are particularly interested in how much you’ve raised, CFOs are interested in cash flow. When organizations celebrate campaign numbers, those are total dollars raised, not total dollars received. Some of those mind blowing numbers include bequest commitments that won’t be realized until after a donor has passed. In my career I’ve raised many of those gifts that I hope I never see come to fruition because it will mean a wonderful person is no longer with us. Bequests are often the foundation of transformational gifts, but I digress.
Where the CFO and I found commonality was in understanding both of our goals, what others expected of us, and learning that the same question might have two different answers depending on who was asking. I knew that sometimes he just needed to know how much cash had come in. In turn, he knew that when talking about the total amount raised, donors wanted to know the big number for celebratory purposes. This idea of understanding each other’s needs felt incredibly basic to me but I knew it was a pressure point for many of my peers at other organizations.
I found building a strong partnership with the finance team a core element of my leadership strategy long before the diet coke CFO. It went back to his predecessor who taught me much of what I know about balance sheets, budgets, and endowment reporting. Thanks to him, I know what a three year rolling average is and how investment decisions are made. We worked together to help make annual giving tangible. He supported my idea to create a designated approach to annual giving by allowing donors to contribute to “buckets” that were the school’s primary areas of need each year – financial aid, athletics, and faculty. More on that another day. When I stepped on stage in Anaheim, I had six years of strong working relationships with CFOs behind me and I knew that same internal success eluded others.
I felt badly when I heard my peers complain about internal pressures because there was another leadership voice that was countering their own. Many felt their CFO was actively working against them. I’m all for healthy debate at the leadership level but that should come from a place of collegiality. Many of the stories I heard came from a place of animosity. So, we decided to talk about it at the 50th anniversary conference. Together, we shared how we made it work. We discussed how to strategically deploy explanations about finances, outlined how our teams worked together, even the software that was used and how we transferred data. We had more people than I could count who described the relationship between fundraising and finance as a pain point in their organization. It made me a little sad. Fundraising is a relational business. Those relationships need to be built internally as well as externally and who better to do it? Fundraisers have a natural inclination for that type of work. For organizations just starting out, we recommended sitting down and talking about shared goals, finding points of natural agreement, and building from there.
Internal relationships matter just as much as external ones do. Sure, colleagues aren’t writing checks that get you to your next campaign milestone but they can certainly be blockers to your success. Connecting with colleagues doesn’t simply make internal processes easier, it provides outside perspectives from others who understand your organization. Those relationships also build connections that create bridges between initiatives. Those bridges help the organization tell a cohesive story and increase impact because of the others involved. Building internal relationships matters. For me, it cost me a few cans of diet coke over the years but that little bit of caffeine sped up workflows, helped share consistent messages, and increased efficiency simply because we both knew we came from a place of positive intent. Together, we worked to inspire donors, share metrics that mattered, and bridge the gap between counting and accounting.
