A NEW KIND OF FUNDRAISING

Face it:  Everyone’s got budget issues.

From Chicago schools to U.S. public servant pensions, from corporations measuring productivity upticks to non-profits seeking more dollars, there’s never enough to go around.

Especially for those of us in staff departments with less-than-robust bottom line ties, such as legal, IT, and, yes, marketing and corporate communications.

We do believe the “never enough” money problems can be solved (in addition to delivering great results that contribute to the company’s margins).  And that’s thanks to our fund-raising gurus.  Here are some of their masterful tactics – tongue in cheek and otherwise – that might be adopted to our needs:

  • Create and sell a product.  The Girl Scouts do it très successfully.
  • Develop and run a campaign for funding – perhaps in tandem with colleagues.  Perhaps not.  [Though that calls for some pretty strong internal competition … ]
  • Hold a special event:  a formal dinner, a benefit concert, a walk/runathon. 
  • Conduct a crowd-funding opportunity – inside. 

And best yet:  Just ask, with a strong business case, naturally.  The face-to-face, personal request for monies is a hard one to turn down, note the professionals.  Do lose the hard-driving sales-personship.  Remember to continue cultivating your income sources.  And be prepared to regularly inform donors how their support was used – and the direct impact you achieved.

Exactly the type of things we do every day.

DOWN ON THE FARM

General Motors and silos continue to be linked in the media.

And in our minds.

According to new GM CEO Mary Barra in her Congressional testimonies, the auto company’s managers operated in isolation, failing to connect and act on evidence that’s now been linked to fatal accidents.  That, in the words of Harvard guru Ranjay Gulati, smacks of protectionist behavior, decision-making conflicts, and just general inside-out perspectives.

Sound like any business you know?

Regardless:  In the mid-Aughts, after studying a number of different companies (e.g., GE Healthcare, Jones Lang LaSalle, Cisco, Starbucks), Gulati proffered his four-C solution to silo-busting:

  • Coordination to share customer information and labor
  • Cooperation, along with metrics, that will dethrone the current power structure
  • Capability development, when customer-centric generalists also see a clear career pathway and
  • Connection, or strategic alliances with other companies.

Later in the decade (or in this one), he holds up IBM’s Smarter Planet initiative as an example of a sword that demolishes silos, saying that values and concomitant images, symbols, and stories, will support the beginnings of a new culture.

Ahem. 

There’s one ‘c’ he’s forgotten:  Communications.  A discipline that, better than any others inside companies, can explain, educate, and elucidate employees on ‘what customers want.’  A function that, almost automatically, delivers awareness and drives actions on behalf of the corporation.  A mindset that will, either alone or in tandem with L&D/HR, establish parameters and ways in which an outside-in perspective reigns.

Ee-i-ee-i-oh, Mr. MacDonald.