Does attending to the office do fundraising more harm than good?

Carrie and Laura picked up on something during the pandemic that perhaps others were overlooking; while all of us were working remotely, many of us were experiencing extraordinary fundraising outcomes yet always insisting that they were eager to get back to the office. Why? What necessity is there for attending to the rituals of the office when we can achieve the same or perhaps even greater outcomes from home? When it comes to fundraising, especially for those whose focus is on major donors, do the obligations of the office do more harm than good? These were the questions I discussed with Carrie and Laura today on The Fundraising Talent Podcast. If your team has been discussing the idea of not returning to the office, you’re not going to want to miss this conversation. Carrie was leading a remote team long before the pandemic forced us all to work from home, and she has found it to be an especially effective tool for attracting and retaining top tier fundraising talent. Rather than requiring their major gifts officers to locate to north central Indiana, Saint Mary’s College relies on a distributed team of fundraisers who are located around the country. Today’s conversation with Carrie and Laura begs the question of whether more organizations will begin to discover that a field approach makes it easier to attract the talent they desire and ensures that greater fundraisers will stick around a lot longer.As always, we are especially grateful to our friends at CueBack for sponsoring The Fundraising Talent Podcast. And, if you’d like to download Responsive’s latest edition of Carefully & Critically, just click here. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fundraisingtalent.substack.com