The Five Strategies for Fundraising Success: A Mission-Based Guide to Achieving Your Goals [Hardcover]

The central thesis of this nearly 300-page volume is that the way you raise funds for your organization can help you achieve your mission. Warwick finds that too often organizations tie their fund raising to short-term, fiscal year goals that require fund raisers to "get the money in the door now" rather than taking the time to cultivate donors for larger, future gifts.

In The Five Strategies, Warwick introduces the reader to the GIVES System, a method for analyzing, planning and evaluating an organization's fundraising strategy. The strategies are: Growth, Involvement, Visibility, Efficiency and Stability, hence GIVES.

In discussing Growth as a fundraising strategy, Warwick is not focusing on raising more money per se, but rather on broadening the donor base, having more donors next year than this year, and still more the year after that. A Growth strategy, according to this book, is dynamic and is characterized by audacious goals, bold leadership and low entry-level gifts.

Involvement as a strategy takes organizations beyond seeking gifts from donors to building stronger relationships with them. When supporters are active and committed, organizations can raise far more money. Organizations for whom public opinion is crucial are encouraged to adopt a Visibility strategy. Characteristics of the strategy are broad public interest, many stakeholders and brand identification.

Raising money at the lowest possible cost per dollar raised is the key to an Efficiency strategy. Planned giving, major gift programs, foundation and corporate grant solicitation and monthly giving are among the tactics that can be employed in an efficiency strategy. Warwick warns, however, that efficiency isn't always the best approach. A careful analysis of the organization's strategic choices is required.

Endurance is the core attribute of the Stability strategy. Among the tactics that can be used in a stability strategy are to build an endowment fund; employ electronic funds transfer (EFT) for fulfillment of donor pledges and engage in diversified fundraising activities.

Selecting a strategy must take into account the life cycle of the development program, the age of the organization, or both. For each of the five strategies, Warwick provides several real-life examples, not all of them success stories. This is very helpful for understanding how it might work and in identifying potential pitfalls. Warwick points out that a single strategy is not likely to remain appropriate for all time for any given organization.

The book provides details on how to pick the right strategy for your organization, common obstacles to implementing the strategies, what fundraising tactics will work with each strategy and how to evaluate your strategies.

My only disagreement with Warwick is in his definitions of vision and mission. He defines vision as why your organization exists and mission as what it does. I see the mission as clarification of purpose and an indicator of why the organization is doing what it does, while vision is what the organization aspires to look like after it succeeds in implementing its strategies and achieving its potential. That difference of opinion aside, I think the book is a wonderful resource for everyone involved in the fundraising effort, from CEO's to development officers to board members to donors themselves.

Warwick's previous books have been related to direct response fundraising and most are "How-To" books. If you are looking for a book that provides a formula or set of instructions, The Five Strategies is not it. What you will find in this book, however, is a way to think strategically about your fundraising efforts. Mal Warwick's hope with The Five Strategies is that he can help those who work for and on behalf of not-for-profit organizations understand the consequences of the resource allocation choices they face and do a better job raising money for a sector that never has enough.