7 Paths Blog

“Fundraising books all make it sound so simple,” a director of development said to me when I was consulting with her organization.

“When you combine 792 simple things combined you have is complexity,” I said.

I’m deep into writing a 200-page ebook—Green Light Fundraising: Your guide to raising $50,000 to $500,000 a year to light up the eyes of people you serve. Through the book I’m teach a system to make it possible for smaller nonprofits to put into place sustainable fundraising.

To be effective the system requires the organization to be highly organized in order to use volunteers. I’ve been looking for a way to keep the development staff of the nonprofits from becoming overwhelmed with the complexity of sustainable fundraising.

I think I’ve found a way through a New Yorker article on Intensive Care Unit in hospitals. The Israelis did a study and discovered that the staff in an ICU has to perform 178 distinct steps each day with an average patient.

With 178 steps to be performed in ICU each day missing even one or two steps can be the difference between life and death. In 2001 a physician, Peter Pronovost, who works full time in the Johns Hopkins ICU, began to wonder if a checklist would help the ICU to do a better job. Covering everything in a checklist would be impossible so he started with a regular source of infections in ICU, inserting lines in a patient.

He mapped out the five steps commonly taught to prevent infections while inserting lines. Then he had the ICU nurses check to see how frequently physicians followed the five steps.

At the end of one month the nurses documented that the doctors missed at least one step in more than a third of the patients.

The next month Pronovost persuaded the administrators to authorize the nurses to stop the doctors if they missed a step on the checklist.

Pronovost and his colleagues monitored what happened for a year afterward. The results were so dramatic that they weren’t sure whether to believe them: the ten-day line-infection rate went from eleven per cent to zero. So they followed patients for fifteen more months. Only two line infections occurred during the entire period. They calculated that, in this one hospital, the checklist had prevented forty-three infections and eight deaths, and saved two million dollars in costs.

If checklists can help ICU doctors execute their plan, I think checklists will be an excellent way to help nonprofits execute sustainable fundraising. I’ll supplement Green Light Fundraising with free, downloadable checklists.