Do you ever feel like you have way to many ideas? Or do you feel like you have a lot of great ideas and things you want to do but never end up with time to get them done? How do you manage your good ideas? Do you ever find yourself partway through a new book on fundraising and are overcome with the number of programs or techniques you want to change?
Every couple weeks there is something new that I want to try and almost every day there is a story or publication that I want to tweak to be more donor-centric. I’ve found that if you don’t make new ideas a priority they will never happen; there are too many daily things in the life of a fundraising professional. New ideas are also many times very scary for those around you to implement and support.
There are many techniques and things you can do to support new ideas in your office. Set aside time every day to plan and think about the future. Mark 15 minutes a day off your calendar or an hour a week with the intention of doing nothing but thinking and planning out the next step. Many of you probably already do this as part of your normal schedule. Make a list of every new idea you have good or bad. If you start creating a list soon you will start to see patterns and many times it leads to implementing these ideas in some way. After a few months of working with this list sometimes I will send a revised version to my boss or a colleague and say here is a list of ideas do any of these resonate with you?
New ideas are important especially in difficult financial times and as we prepare to fundraising with the next generation. We need to be nimble and cutting edge as an industry or we will cease to be successful. Foster a spirit of entrepreneurship in your office, encourage your staff to think outside of the box, and don’t be afraid to try something new.
Have you tried something new in the last couple months? Leave a comment and share it with us.
{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
Too many new ideas? Sounds like many entrepreneurs I know.
Often the problem isn’t dealing with all the new ideas, it’s doing so to the excusion of those more mundane things that still need to get done. Chasing butterflies is a common
metaphor for entrepreneurial people who get lots of new ideas and chase after most, if not all, of the more exciting ones.
And yet trying new things, thinking of new things, having those “Ah Ha!” moments when a new idea comes remains critically important – it’s where major success and reakthroughs happen.
The answer, of course, is balance. While you absolutely want to be open to new ideas, they need to be viewed in the larger context and balanced against everything else competing for the scarcest resource of all: time.
One of the ways that helps me to do that is a varient on your “make a list” concept. What’s critical about new ideas is that they not be lost. If you do nothing else with a new
idea, record it, in some way that is drop-dead easy for you. I carry a voice recorder, for example.
Then, periodically, make sure you have time to *review* everything. It’s one thing to write everything down, but useless if you never look at the list again.
One framework I’ve found very helpful is that laid out in _Getting Things Done_ by David Allen. Some see it as “yet another time management book”, but for me it’s helped. I don’t follow it religiously, but it’s helped to give me a framework to work within that allows me capture, review, prioritize and appropriately act on all those new ideas that keep coming.
Leo
Here is a great tool that I have used to organize my ideas for a couple of years now. It was designed by and for creative professionals, but works great for others as well.
http://www.creativesoutfitter.com/Products/Action-Book/4
Another book that helped me: Never Check Email in the Morning. I wasn’t, for a while, but then Twitter and Facebook and…guess I’d better read that and Getting Things Done again! Another resource: Behance. Their approach is simple, but I do like their paper tools.
Here’s something I have tried over the last month. Raising funds via Squidoo.com. I am always very skepticle of fundraising ideas, as the President of club in college, PTA President a few years ago, and fundraising for my daughter’s travel softball team, it’s interesting the way these tools have evolved.
Squidoo allows you to donate any earnings you have made to some of their organizations or keep the money for themselves by building one page websites. I like the foundation of the idea and I love building websites, so it seemed like a good opportunity to go in and check it out. The goal as I see it now (about a month in) is you have to build a network and be smart enough to gain links back and forth. And use tools such as Facebook, Digg, and Twitter to drive traffic.
We’ll see how it goes over the next 4-5 months.
To see an example, I’ve created a fundraising site caled that you can visit.
Sorry, not very handy with html tags…anyways, the website is http://www.squidoo.com/fundraising-1.