EPISODE 130
Episode 130 of Tales From the Trenches Tuesdays is the last in the series featuring Amanda Smith, a professional that has 20 years of advancement services experience to every conversation she has about fundraising — and she doesn’t pull punches. As Executive Director at Lehigh Valley Health Network, she’s built donor pipelines, coached gift officers, and seen firsthand what happens when organizations set goals that have no relationship to reality. She’s also someone who will tell you exactly what she thinks about those December 31st countdown letters.
We’ve trained donors to give on our schedule, not theirs. And when they only give at year-end because we’ve conditioned them to, we’ve created a pressure cooker for ourselves. The same problem shows up with goals. When a development shop has a windfall year — a surprise planned gift, an outlier major donation — that number quietly becomes the new baseline. No one stops to ask whether it was repeatable. The expectation just goes up, and the team is left holding a target that was never actually achievable.
Going from $5 to $15 million in a year is not realistic, unless you have a $10 million donor that has signed up and I don’t know about it.
That pressure doesn’t stay abstract. It lands on development officers, who leave — on average — in under five years. And every departure restarts a relationship from zero. The donor loses their connection to the institution. The institution loses the thread. A new gift officer starts over, hoping the trust can be rebuilt. Amanda’s ask is simple: know your pipeline, set goals with ranges, and be honest about which number is which. That’s not pessimism. It’s respect — for your donors, your team, and the work itself.
Just click on the picture of Amanda below to hear our conversation.
L’chaim,
jack
