Discover the hidden gaps that may be making fundraising harder than it needs to be.
I’m Ellen Bristol, the Leaky Bucket Guru. I didn’t plan to become one; it started with a question I couldn’t ignore:
Why do nonprofits have to work so much harder for funding than successful businesses do for sales?
Before moving into the nonprofit sector, I spent years building sales organizations and selling everything from office information systems to enterprise technology. In business, success is never left to chance. Sales teams follow proven practices: identifying ideal customers, managing opportunity pipelines, measuring results, retaining clients, and improving continuously.
These are not radical ideas; they are the basic habits of successful organizations.
Then I fell in love with nonprofits and saw that they had not yet solved this challenge.
Nonprofit fundraising buckets often leak in ways leaders cannot easily see. Donor retention is the most visible leak, but it is only one of many.
Fifteen years ago, I created the Leaky Bucket Assessment, a simple survey that now includes more than 1,600 responses. The newly refreshed version is available for free.
