Do you like gardening? – I know this might sound like an odd question to ask a fundraiser but, if you like gardening you will understand what I am about to say.

One morning while I was drinking coffee in my garden I noted a large weed that had spread itself all over one of my fuchsia plants. The interesting thing was that the leaves of the weed looked just like those of the fuchsia plant.

But, if you took a closer look you could see how the weed was chocking the plant by wrapping itself around the stalks and feeding itself from the plant.

This got me thinking about the weeds and fundraising. About fundraising activities that might appear ‘healthy’ on the outside but which in reality end up depleting our budgets and exasperating us.

So my question is are there any weeds in your fundraising plan and activities? – How can you identify them? And, more importantly, what can you do to pull them out? 

In my opinion, the place to start is by measuring the outcome of all your fundraising activities realistically and in a neutral way.

Are these activities bringing in the money? Are they bringing in new donors? Are they enabling you to keep current donors? Or are you running some of these activities because they are ‘pet’ projects of your CEO and other senior leaders?

Go on be brave and pull out those weeds out of your fundraising programme … you will feel better and you will get better results even in tough times.

We would be happy to give you a helping hand by putting your database through our Fundraising Fitness Test – giving you a wide range of valuable insights that can make your fundraising programme flourish.