min read
Fundraising is a rewarding career, filled with purpose and a commitment to serve the greater good. However, there are many things in a fundraiser’s daily life that are mildly horrific.
Like hoping for a 2% response rate on fundraising emails…
Or knowing that as a majority, hours of meticulous work writing, editing, formatting, and receiving approvals for a direct mail piece will ultimately end up like this…
And you know the solution is online giving, but the budget for a platform keeps getting denied…
But then it finally gets approved on year three and you start questioning your choices by hour 22 of Giving Day…
Seeing the overhead budgets for fundraising events can be truly horrifying…
Especially when you get to said fundraising event and see your unsuspecting prospect…
On the upside, sometimes you get to come to the event dressed as the mascot. Definitely don’t feel like this welcoming guests…
Ah that wonderful feeling when a department tries to convince you the best use of resources is to send a direct mail piece to an un-engaged non-donor alumni pool. It’s not like it’s your job to know how that will turn out…
And half the time you can’t even reach out to good prospects because they are in development officer portfolios, even though they haven’t reached out to them in years and they’ve never made a gift…
Speaking of co-workers, have you ever tried to get the tech team to take one of the 50 fields out of the giving form? No, you’re right, we don’t actually want anyone to make a donation…
But you do have to appreciate them when they start having conversations about code and details of payment processors when you’re implementing the crowdfunding platform. Meanwhile, you’re feeling a bit like this…
After the long 9-5, you finally go out into the real world only to have someone start complaining about the emails they get from their alma mater about fundraising…
When your boss gets upset with you for sending out an email with typos, even though the copyeditor looked at it twice before you sent it out…
But through all of the challenges, sometimes you craft the perfect campaign and donors flood in, funding every project past their goals…
