I’ve been working in digital fundraising for almost a decade now – and have spent the last five years building Hubbub – a digital fundraising and crowdfunding company. Many of the lean techniques we apply in startups can be applied in fundraising, but there are some crucial differences.

Most of the volume of fundraising that happens today is with major donors – and is correspondingly high touch, highly sequential, and the potential loss attributed to failure is very high. Ever wondered why most of the materials you receive from nonprofits – particularly in the education sector – are so dull and uninspiring? If a strategy or technique or ask doesn’t work with a potential £1m donor, and it alienates them, that is a super expensive mistake. It’ll definitely focus the mind on learning, but it makes experimentation and risk-taking very difficult. And experimentation is the cornerstone of lean principles.

This means most fundraisers have highly conservative, highly sequential approaches – which is highly rational. Whilst it isn’t impossible to apply lean principles here, it is harder.

However, there is a new area of fundraising where lean principles can be applied widely – and that is mass fundraising, typically through digital channels. Today, mass fundraising is attempted one or at most twice a year, in a batch format (telethon, direct mail). Batch formats make learning and iteration hard, as campaign messaging is decided in advance, then the button is pushed on the comms, and there is no feedback loop until the next cycle – by which time a lot of the learning has been lost or forgotten. Engagement rates in mass fundraising are generally very poor, but there aren’t many benchmarks to demonstrate quite how poor – so people are generally happy with their engagement rates.

At Hubbub, we’ve been running whitelabel crowdfunding platforms for universities and nonprofits for a few years (e.g. YuStart), and we have also just started to deploy Giving Day and peer to peer solutions for nonprofits. We have observed that the continuous, light-touch, self-qualifying outreach is a major departure from existing development, advancement and fundraising techniques, and requires skills much more akin to the experience of a small company generating leads, qualifying them, and iterating. As a result, many fundraisers don’t possess the key skills required – the kind of skills more common to the new generation of digital marketers, and also to the older generation of charity campaigners, from movement building, policy change, e-campaigning etc.

Lean principles offer some great guidelines for this new mode of fundraising – encouraging a much more iterative, measured approach, complete with A/B testing, feedback loops and real-time adjustments to tactics and techniques as well as to overall campaign messaging and goals. We think this is going to be a big area both for research and for practitioners in the next decade or so, and we’re keen to hear examples of lean principles being applied to fundraising in the education and nonprofit sectors. In early 2016, we’ll be building some workshops around leveraging these principles, so if you’re interested in finding out more, taking part, or offering your own expertise, then please get in touch.

We’ll be posting loads more in 2016 on this topic and we’re actively seeking collaborators!