Toolkit for Fundraising and Marketing Team Collaboration

From MissionWired’s Nonprofit Advisory Board

Fundraising is more than asking audiences for a gift: It’s a multichannel, full-funnel management of complex donor journeys, optimized to deepen long-term relationships with a nonprofit’s mission.

And marketing is more than brand management: Each communication shapes how a nonprofit is perceived from the top of the funnel down, impacting ongoing engagement across the entire organization.

With both departments working hard to carry out initiatives critical to their organization’s shared mission, sometimes the opportunity to break out of fast-paced, siloed work on individual projects and collaborate can be missed – and with it, the opportunity for the two teams to lift results together.

For organizations facing friction between these two essential departments, the culprit is often objectives that don’t overlap or align. When our teams make a conscious effort to bring seemingly competing agendas together, identify shared goals, and prioritize co-planning around those goals, we have the chance to ensure alignment and support one another’s work.

MissionWired’s Nonprofit Advisory Board recently convened a panel to dig into the difficult, necessary questions nonprofit marketing and fundraising teams can ask to uncover the misaligned goals, missed communications, and unbalanced priorities that might be holding their teams back from true collaboration. You can catch up on the full panel conversation here:

At the close of the discussion, leaders from the Nonprofit Advisory Board were asked to share one small change that organizations could make tomorrow to improve collaboration. Their answer centered around strengthening communication: bringing teams together to identify shared goals and identify opportunities to work as a unified team. Having the sorts of conversations that can help both teams remember that everyone is working toward one mission.

The collective challenge, then, is to try collaboration across teams for one campaign, a full month or quarter, or a single emergency push, and see how leading those efforts with a set of shared goals right from the start can massively shift behavior between teams.

So how can fundraising and marketing teams that may have been working in silos begin these conversations? And where can teams start to identify gaps and opportunities to align on priorities, KPIs, and ways of working?

Our Toolkit for Fundraising & Marketing Team Collaboration is built to support these cross-team conversations – with three exercises to encourage communication, build shared campaign plans, and agree on mutual KPIs to track and measure success. To get started building deeper connections across teams and working together to drive stronger results, download the toolkit: