Please welcome Brian Dowling and his expertise to the More Donors Questionnaire. Brian has invested more than 19 years working in Advancement and Development Services managing systems, gift processing, records, web sites, research, and operations.Brian joined the VGH & UBC Hospital Foundation in 2008 as Senior Vice President for Finance and Information Systems and is responsible for deploying creative information technology solutions to help the Foundation achieve its fundraising and engagement goals. Brian worked previously at the University of Michigan and was responsible for managing the technological infrastructure, gift processing and records administration for the Office of University Development in support of a $3.1 billion campaign. The database contained over 1,000,000 entities and average revenue was $250-$370 million representing approximately 184,000 gift transactions.
Prior to that, Brian worked at The University of Toronto. The university’s $1 billion campaign was Canada’s largest and most successful philanthropic effort in higher education. The database of over 700,000 entities supported a large scale advancement operation. Brian has also worked at a number of institutions in both the United States and Canada, where he gained understanding, knowledge and perspectives of managing in small, medium and large shops. This experience included multiple system conversions, web site development, budgetary and financial responsibilities, operations management and more. He has consulted in the United States, Canada and Australia, written numerous articles and presents regularly at conferences.
He invests his spare time in SupportingAdvancement.Com and is an amateur musician. Though Brian didn't mention it in my interview questions, I can attest to the fact he is also an outstanding photographer.
What is the biggest challenge your fundraising efforts currently face?
As with many fundraising organizations just being able to do more with less is a current but also an ongoing challenge. Independently funded organizations are all facing additional challenges in these economic times – which will likely still be challenging for the longer haul.
There are more charities chasing after donors who are less certain. Even though the wealthy are for the most part still so, the real portfolio losses over the last few years have often created a pause in decision making.
As fundraisers, we need to be more efficient, more accountable, work with smaller budgets and yet continue to increase engagement and contributions to the bottom line. From the infrastructure view, we need to do everything we can to keep the fundraisers on the road.
What are you doing to overcome these challenges?
The old saying “if it isn’t or can’t be measured, it won’t be done” is even more important in today’s world. We continually to move towards a more data driven culture managed by facts and not as much by stories. We’re starting the construction of a data warehouse to facilitate much improved reporting that will help to drive our major gift fundraising and accountability. Metrics that drive fundraising performance are always a “win win”.
What is the most successful change/program implementation you have made in your current role?
As an organization, we changed our organizational structure to create a number of efficiencies that just didn’t exist previously. We’ll be doing an office wide move to support the new structure so that those program areas that should be and need to be are all working together.
Changes in structure are never painless, never without concern and never without a lot of thinking and effort. Most organizations don’t do this as often as they should and we’ve all seen some of the silos that result from some of the more conventional thinking around organizational structure.
We’ve also implemented a ramped up lunch and learn training series on a wide variety of topics, everything from An Introduction to Google Analytics to How to Manage Your Files and Folders. Too often, training and professional development is viewed as conference attendance rather than a regular and systematic approach to providing knowledge internally. We’ve engaged niche experts in our organization to talk about their passion and where they have expertise. Training can create a lot of leverage during times of resource shortage and it is too often viewed as a “secondary” activity.
Where do you see social-media’s best application for fundraising?
This may come as a surprise, but at this stage in the game, I don’t. I still think that social media will come along in terms of direct fundraising, but the real “killer app” for fundraising online is still email. In the same vein, if you have a poor online giving site, and your organization’s web site needs a lot to be desired, you need to devote the majority of your resources to the basics.
Having said that, I still think that social media is both essential and critical and should be used as part of our media and messaging stream to drive people to our cause, events and to engage them in creative ways around and within our messaging. You need to take a medium to longer term view, but you should be integrating social media into your messaging and have these responsibilities as part of job descriptions and performance and accountability reviews.
What book would you suggest fundraisers read?
Well, I wouldn’t. The experience of reading is changing dramatically with the advent of devices like the Kindle, online reading and the iPad. Reading is becoming more of almost a “stream of consciousness” and the conventional approach to best, or most inspiring, or most intellectual may no longer be as effective as understanding the hyper pulse of change in today’s world.
I personally prefer the stream of information from blogs, online newsletters, Twitter and similar messaging streams. Caveat – I am in the “technology” business so this may be a more natural approach to the pace of change that I personally need to make decisions – and one that I’ve had to become accustomed to.
This type of messaging – and learning is also coming for fundraisers. There are more blogs, newsletter, free white papers than there ever have been, the key is to ferret out what is meaningful, and factual and relevant without succumbing to the ever shortening attention spans that we’re often subject to.
The readers of the future will be those that can amalgamate the information and misinformation streams in a meaningful way and be able to derive competitive advantage for themselves and their programs.
What question would you find most useful for readers to answer?
The same question as one of the ones I’ve just answered. What is your idea? What is the one thing you did in your organization that made the most difference this year? Why did it work and what would you do to change it?
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