Please raise your hand if you were:
Raising money in 1987 (Black Monday).
Raising money in 2000 (Dotcom crash).
Raising money on September 11, 2001 (9/11).
Raising money in 2008 (Subprime mortgage debacle).
And finally,
Raising money post-February 2020 (COVID-19 pandemic).
If you have been around a while, you have gone through several challenging economic periods in our country and our world. Of the five listed above, three were because of overheated markets where people rationalized wacky investments. “Irrational exuberance” is what then-Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan called it in 1996 or the “Theory of the Greater Fool” as others describe the phenomenon. These crises were all created largely within U.S. borders, though their impacts were global.
9/11 and the current pandemic fall into a different category. In some sense, they are both related in that they originated from outside U.S. borders. They both created an almost complete shutdown in domestic and international travel. They both created much higher security surveillance and contact tracing. And they both left us with a surreal feeling of “How could this have happened?”
Understanding that there are always exceptions to any takeaway lessons for fundraisers and fundraising managers, here are a few thoughts. I invite you to add more.
- Big, bad things are going to happen.
- Predicting and thus preparing for those big bad things does not generally seem to be in our nature.
- We soon forget the lessons we learned.
- We are programmed to forget the bad—which is connected to forgetting the lessons we learned. It is a form of self-preservation.
- If it is the first, second, or maybe the third time you have been through something like the examples above, you may be very scared.
- The more you experience crises like those above, the more likely you are to know you and those around you, will get through the difficult times.
- Donors will always want to help—especially during crises.
- Acknowledging a crisis and setting a short-term plan (three months, six months, nine months) to respond is essential—it gives people a way to act.
- Leaders will know how to identify and incorporate the positive changes made during the short-term plans into their long-term plans.
If you are leading a team or an organization, now would be a good time to reflect with your team replaying this latest crisis. What was it like when it started? How much did we understand? How did we modify our work? What changes did we see in our prospects? What are we going to keep going forward?
If you have not already done so, now is the time for that reflection and for a new, longer-term plan.
Contact us if you would like to bounce off some ideas about your plans or planning process.