Channeling a Business Guru for Fundraising Ideas

Channeling a Business Guru for Fundraising Ideas

By Tom Wilson Major Gifts Guru

I’m a big Jim Collins fan. Built to Last and Good to Great are fantastic books.

I’m especially fond of Good to Great I found one of my client’s CEOs had his management team read the book and discuss running their organization in Jim Collins’ terms. I had to really understand Good to Great to talk to this CEO in a language he could understand. It forced me to really understand Collins’ concepts.

A recent article in The New York Times, Jim Collins, No Question is Too Big by Kevin Maloney

was a great profile on how Mr. Collins works on his projects. This is the first of a series of posts that provide insight to major gift officers.

The first is his tracking of time.

Collins is highly disciplined and tracks his time in 3 major categories to meet his goals:

• Creative 53% (research and writing books)
• Teaching 28%
• Other 19%

He set these goals several years ago and keeps a stopwatch with three separate timers in his pocket at all times. Then he logs his time into a spreadsheet. He figures he needs 70 to 75 hours of sleep every 10 days and monitors his rest to meet this objective. If he doesn’t get rest, he can’t create.

Those of you who know me understand why I like this. As a staff leader, I’ve tracked the time of my staff at two different organizations for 6 months each. And, as a consultant I’ve tracked my time in quarter-hour increments for the last 18 years. When I perform a fundraising office re-engineering project I ask clients to track their time.

Peter Drucker had a great saying about knowledge workers in his 2001 book The Essential Peter Drucker:

“Effective knowledge workers, in my observation, do not start with their tasks. They start with their time. And they do not start out by planning. They start by finding out where their time actually goes.

“Then they attempt to manage their time and to cut back unproductive demands on their time. Finally they consolidate their ‘discretionary’ time into the largest possible continuing units.”

Major gift officers, we are knowledge workers – track your time and find out where you want to spend time and maximize that, and minimize the time you shouldn’t be spending (see time tracking chart at the beginning of this post).

Use a variation of the chart at the beginning of this post to find out how much time you are spending face-to-face with donors. Get your one-a-day donor visits in rather than pushing paper in the office? Track your time and find out.

What are your 3 key objectives for use of time?

This article was the first of a series. For articles 2 and 3, see below

• Channeling a Business Guru for Fundraising Ideas (part 2 of a series)
• Channeling a Business Guru for Fundraising Ideas (part 3 of a series)

Permanent Link: Channeling a Business Guru for Fundraising Ideas

http://majorgiftsguru.com/2009/06/channeling-business-guru-for.html