Are nonprofit leaders expecting too much of fundraising tech?

I’m headed to Omaha later this week, and one of the first things I’m going to find is a great Reuben sandwich. As the origin story goes, while playing cards with “the committee” at the at the Blackstone Hotel, Reuben Kulakofsky, a local grocer, ordered the now famous corned beef and sauerkraut sandwich. Impressed with this original idea, the hotel owner made the sandwich a permanent fixture on his menu. While Kenley, my guest today on the podcast, evidently isn’t a big a fan, I rarely pass up the chance to have a good Rueben.

Kenley is a member of the line-up for our Roadshow stop later this week in Omaha where he will be sharing his thoughts about how nonprofit leaders keep their heads on straight when it comes to the technology. In short, Kenley wants to impress upon us that perhaps our expectations are too high and, as one of my previous guest recently suggested, that we have put far too much faith in the CRM-centric approach to fundraising.

Kenley assures us that he is a strong advocate for many of these platforms however he wants more nonprofit leaders to understand that our sector’s software applications and database management systems will not solve our fundraising issues. He points out that fundraisers are bombarded with messages that imply technology has capabilities it doesn’t actually have.

Kenley insists that a lot the noise that tech companies create gets in the way of fundraisers being able to make sense of what will really ensure their success. Today’s conversation, like several others in recent weeks, reminds me of the assertion that Peter Thiel makes in his book Zero to One: we have to get better at discerning between those platforms designed to be competitive with versus complementary to our human endeavors.

As always, we are grateful to our friends at CueBack for sponsoring The Fundraising Talent Podcast.

The first stop of the Responsive Fundraising Roadshow for 2023 will be later this week in Omaha in partnership with the Nonprofit Association of the Midlands. If you’d like to register for this event, just visit their website at here.