Fundraisers, and particularly major gift fundraisers, do the impossible every day. I recently tried to describe to my 6-year-old son what I did for a living, and the best I could come up with was, "I convince people to give their money away to help people they don't know and in most cases will never meet."

Before I could comprehend how ridiculous that sounded he'd asked, "How do you do that?" At which point I offered to buy him ice cream and quickly changed the subject.

I often tell nonprofit leaders we work with who are pressing for the elusive specific cash-flow projections for fundraising, that what we do is more art than science. That is true but at the danger of besmirching real artists everywhere, fundraising is an art driven more by dogged determination and persistence than necessarily by creativity. The best among us have a certain flare that helps our success, but like a duck gliding across a pond, it's the furious kicking beneath the surface that really moves us forward.

There are certain consistent behaviors that generate success in attracting significant philanthropic investment. By measuring these, holding staff accountable for them and celebrating these behaviors just as much as the gifts generated, we will grow our results and do it with a happier and more productive workforce.

You don't raise any money sitting at your desk

There are always call reports to be filed, brainstorming sessions with the program team to be held, strategy discussions to facilitate and the ever-painful expense report to be filed. I don't know any fundraiser at any nonprofit who isn't busy. The trick is to be busy with the right things. Fundraisers are outdoor cats and need to be out mixing among their donors and prospective donors.

We all know this. But to reinforce these behaviors, we need our "bosses" to measure these sorts of activities, hold us accountable and celebrate and reward those among us who do this well.

In my first chief development role, I instituted a practice I suspect my team hated, but it ultimately proved to be one of the most effective things I've done. Each of our 11 frontline fundraisers (myself included) had a performance goal of an average of seven in-person visits with donors or prospects each month.

After every visit, the staff was to complete a brief sheet with the details (the second thing I did was get us CRM software so we could automate this and many other processes, but that took a little longer) and put them in a box outside my office. After I reviewed and determined it "counted," each visit would be marked on a giant white board in my office.

At the end of the month, we'd circulate the totals and the running average. It illustrated how important I thought these in-person visits were, bred competition and, most importantly, got people out of the office.

We did lots of things with that team, and I'm not smart enough to tell you which things drove the most significant increases in funds raised. But I can tell you that I've introduced this discipline with every large team I've led since, and it's always resulted in getting people talking with donors more. I don't need science to tell me that means more money raised.

More prospects = more money

Aside from seeing less of the staff in the office, I noticed another phenomenon once I started pushing for people to meet more with donors and prospects. More prospects.

Let's face it, your favorite donor will only meet with you so often no matter how much she likes you. When your maniac boss is insisting you have seven donor visits per month and you have competitive co-workers driving their averages up toward 20, you've got to find more people willing to talk to you. And that started to translate into lots of new gifts.

At first I just started measuring numbers of prospects but over time, as both technology and I have gotten more sophisticated, I started measuring pipeline values of each staff member's portfolio discounted for probability. (If you want to insist Oprah is a viable prospect you are working that's fine, but we're valuing that $1 million gift you claim she is considering at .05 percent.)

When done correctly — fundraisers have to log all of their prospects and be honest about the probability — it is a reliable predictor of funds raised. As well as helping to answer those elusive cash-flow questions, it instills a way of thinking in staff members that focuses on not just the next gift, but also on the gifts that need to come after that.

Money

I'm sorry to disappoint anyone who'd hoped this would be an article from a fundraiser saying fundraisers shouldn't be held accountable to dollars raised, just actions taken. Nope. In the end this is the most important metric of them all — cash on the barrel. And I always like to benchmark it against funds raised over the same time the prior year. If you've budgeted exponential growth, you should start seeing that in year-on-year performance.

By measuring inputs (donor visits and pipeline value) as well as outputs (money) we accomplish two things:

• We incent and drive behaviors proven to result in raising more money, and use them as a predictor of how we're doing helping, thereby (hopefully) avoiding last-minute surprises.
• We hold staff accountable, and celebrate victories, on an ongoing basis and in real time, as opposed to waiting for the gifts to arrive to know how we're doing or to recognize staff.

I'd still argue we do the impossible every single day, but it sure starts to seem a little more possible if we focus on the steps we need to get there along the way.