Ken Burnett | Is fundraising an art or a science? And is that a useful question?

It seems to me that, while there’s clearly such a huge job to be done in fundraising now, some debates are not worth having. Even if there’s a point somewhere in the above, wrangling over art or science and whether fundraising is evidence-based or not add little that will improve how fundraisers satisfy and inspire their donors. Given our recent history it’s a bit like worrying over your choice of front door colour while your house is burning down. Of all the distractions that get in the way of fundraisers consistently delivering a better donor experience, arguing about whether fundraising is an art or a science is among the most futile.

You might, as I do, believe it is both. Or you might think it’s neither, that fundraising in essence is just a series of human interactions, rational or emotional, and shouldn’t get above itself. But it’s certainly not just one or the other. Taking sides would surely be absurd.

Where does it come from, this notion that relationship fundraising might be ‘an art that doesn’t require evidence to back it up’? I see no evidence for this at all. It would be foolish to seriously put such a concept forward. In all my years, I’ve never heard anyone of substance say anything of the kind.

I consider myself a relationship fundraiser. I didn’t have to be. It was only because the evidence for a more donor-based approach to raising money was all around me that first prompted me to write about it. I’ve never departed from an evidence-based approach. My early career was all about building donor databases through rigorous, persistent testing, an experience I’ve written about extensively over the years (see the links below, at right). Testing is both art and science. And it’s very expensive. So you don’t test what you already know. You test first what will make most difference. If it won’t make much difference, why bother to test it?

Fundraising is inevitably results-led, so everything we did back then was based on established knowledge or evidence, as it will be still with any professional fundraiser worth his or her salt. Investing in evidence before big steps is the only way fundraisers can safeguard the donors’ funds entrusted to them.

So where does it come from, this concept that relationship fundraising is an art that doesn’t require evidence?

Not from me. Point one in my ‘15 things I’d do if I were the new head of donor development’ is, I’d aspire to be the most learned fundraiser of my generation. I was doing donor service road tests back in the 1980s (see my book Friends for Life, here). Two full chapters of Relationship Fundraising (5 and 6) are devoted to research and all my books and blogs revolve around knowledge and experience that has shaped and supported my opinions. Evidence in one form or another underpins every page of Relationship Fundraising – the evidence of my own eyes, what donors told me, of my and my colleagues’ knowledge and experience and, wherever client budgets permitted, of direct research.

Knowledge vs evidence
Evidence is not quite synonymous with knowledge, as evidence can be faked, or misleading. In Relationship Fundraising, paraphrasing Ogilvy, I defined the difference between a merely good fundraiser and a great fundraiser as, ‘the great fundraiser simply knows more’. With knowledge and experience, evidence is either a given or isn’t necessary. Evidence supports knowledge and experience, but isn’t essential to either. You can know something simply because you’ve been there, seen it and done it. You don’t need to keep proving what you already know.

Gut feeling (which may be synonymous with instinct) also has great value. Ninety per cent of serotonin in the human body is produced in the gut. Guarantees of success are rare in fundraising and my experience says I’d rather trust my gut feeling – if it feels right – than any amount of academic research that doesn’t feel right when set alongside my experience and knowledge of donors, how they feel and behave. No amount of theory will trump the evidence of your own experience.

A few grey areas
• What people do matters a lot more than what they say they’ll do.
• If someone feels the need to call themselves an expert, they probably aren’t.
• Focus groups, frequently, get the soft issues wrong.
• By definition, all research needs to be qualified.

Ultimately, if it feels right, that’s enough reason to do it.
First, trust yourself. If it doesn’t feel right, it probably isn’t, at least for you. If it lacks integrity, or you think your donors wouldn’t like it, you shouldn’t do it, whatever your finance director says.

Continued top of column 2, above.