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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Fachliteratur
- Sprache: Englisch
Maintain your focus, your productivity, and your sanity in the contemporary fundraising environment In Focused Fundraising: How to Raise Your Sights and Overcome Overload, accomplished nonprofit management strategists and leaders Christopher Cannon and Michael Felberbaum deliver a must-read combination of the latest mindfulness techniques and operational strategies that will equip you to succeed in an increasingly chaotic, noisy, and confusing fundraising environment. You'll find concrete strategies to navigate the challenges of modern fundraising, including technology changes, scarce resources, and shifting donor expectations. In the book, you'll also find: * Hands-on skills for sharpening your focus while those around you are giving in to endless distractions * An insightful combination of big-picture views and micro-considerations that offer a practical roadmap to set and stick with your priorities * Practical applications of tried and true mindfulness and nonprofit strategy research that you can implement immediately in your organization An essential, desk-side resource for nonprofit board members, managers, leaders, and team members, Focused Fundraising is a one-of-a-kind toolbox designed to help you tackle the challenges you face every day.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022
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Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Welcome to
Focused Fundraising: How to RAISE Your Sights and Overcome Overload
How to Use This Book
PART I: The Challenges of Focused Fundraising
1 The Constant Craziness of Nonprofit Life
Slowing Down Is Not the Answer
2 Focus Begins by Valuing the Work
Myth #1: Fundraising Is Primarily About Money
Myth #2: Fundraising Is Brainless Cheerleading
Myth #3: Fundraising Is Done by a Solo Solicitor
Value Leads to More Value
3 You Can Focus Because You Are Mindful
Mindfulness Aids Focus
Spinning Forward
4 The Tech Tug and Instant Overload
The Organizational Tech Tug: Keeping Up with the Dot-Joneses
The Organizational Tech Tug Means Continuous Change Management
The Personal Tech Tug
Instant Overload
5 Why Instant Overload Is Here to Stay: The 4 Ms
Should We Expect More or Less Distraction?
Can Our Amazing Brains Cope with the 4 Ms?
We Are All in It Together
A Day in the Life
How to Focus with the Four Ms?
6 This Is Not the Focus You're Looking For
Maggie's Story
The Depth of Focus
Goal-Oriented versus Present Moment–Oriented
Focus Does Not Follow Directions
Multi-Tasking on Purpose
Focus Is Not About Avoiding Bad Stuff
Focus Is Not Always Laser-Like
Focus Is Not Broken by Noise
Distraction Can Enable Focus
Maggie's Story Continued
PART II: Focus-First: The RAISE Framework
7 How RAISE Helps
Focused Direction
Making Room to Focus: A List, a Mob, a Waiting Line
Remember the RAISE Mantra
Framing a Topic to RAISE
8 Recognize Your Point of View
Four Key Perspectives
Steadying Your POV
9 Assess Your Standards
Common Pitfalls to Establishing Standards
Common Standards for Measuring Fundraising Performance
Best Practices versus Practices That Work Best
Knowing Your Standards Means Avoiding Noisy Data
10 Inspire Your Efforts
Bright Spots
The Spinning Top
Focus on the Top
Making a Choice
What Is Changing That Makes Focus Possible?
An Alternative to No: “Yes, and …”
11 Structure Your Work
Structure Is Personal
Being Overwhelmed Is the Point, Not the Problem
Too Much of a Good Thing
12 Evolve Your Approach
Where Are We Now?
Evolving the Pyramid
Angry Donor Policies: The Problem with Stories
PART III: Focused Fundraising Teams
13 The Importance of Culture
Culture and Change Management
Authenticity Is Vital to Evolve
A Tale of Two Fundraisers: The Artist and the Scientist
The Unfocused Fundraiser: A Cautionary Tale
14 Prospect Development
Prospect List
Getting the Initial Visit
Virtual Visits
15 Engagement Strategies
Brand Matters
Get Your Engagement Game Plan
16 Fundraising Operations
Technology Change and Operations
Give Gift Administration Its Due
You Cannot Improve a Process You Do Not Value
Focus from (and on) Governance
17 Strategic Information Management
Priming Principled Professionals
Righteousness of Recording Data
From Data In to Data Out
18 The Power of Maturity Models
Maturity Models
Major Giving Maturity Model
19 Focused Fundraising Maturity Model
Level 1: Frenetic
Level 2: Reactive
Level 3: Controlled
Level 4: Proactive
Level 5: Focused
20 Further Thoughts on Thought Work
Train Your Brain
Be Decisive
The Value of Heuristics: Big Rocks, Iron Triangles, and Rules of Thumb
Big Rocks
Iron Triangles
The 80/20 Rule
The Golden Rule(s)
Practicing Rules of Thumb
21 Causativity
Conclusion
Key Reminders Toward Focused Fundraising
Discussion Questions
Toolkit: RAISE: Practical Examples and Coaching Prompts
Topic #1: Merger or Partner with Another Organization?
Topic #2: A New Board Member Aims for More Individual Donations
RAISE Prompts for Self-Coaching
RAISE Prompts for Facilitators
RAISE Prompts for Peer Coaching
Notes
Bibliography
Acknowledgments
Index
End User License Agreement
List of Illustrations
Chapter 5
Figure 5.1 How Overloaded Are We?
Figure 5.2 What Contributes to Information Overload?
Chapter 9
Figure 9.1 SMART Goals to Help You Focus
Chapter 14
Figure 14.1 Applying the 3×3×3 approach to determine how ...
Chapter 15
Figure 15.1 Advancement Ecosystem Framework
Chapter 16
Figure 16.1 Governance Model Components
Chapter 18
Figure 18.1 Major Giving Maturity Model
Chapter 19
Figure 19.1 Focused Fundraising Maturity Model
Chapter 20
Figure 20.1 Scope, Cost, and Time as Levers for Focus
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Welcome to Focused Fundraising: How to RAISE Your Sights and Overcome Overload
Begin Reading
Conclusion
Toolkit: RAISE: Practical Examples and Coaching Prompts
Bibliography
Acknowledgments
Index
End User License Agreement
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Praise for Focused Fundraising
“This book tackles a topic—instant overload due to too much to do, too many distractions, and too little time—that is affecting everyone. Focusing on the important over the urgent is not always easy and Michael and Chris present tactics and some big-picture thinking that help fundraisers and the nonprofit sector. This book is full of strategies that I can use with my team.”
—Theresa A. Pesch,President and VP of Philanthropy, Hennepin Healthcare Foundation
“Focused Fundraising provides advancement professionals with tips and tricks that can help cut through the noise. Chris and Michael present step-by-step guides to deal with the daily grind and help you target what matters most.”
—Donald J. Whelan, Jr.,Vice Chancellor, University of Advancement, Texas Christian University
“In a remote/hybrid fundraising world, we all need fresh ways to prioritize, plan, and manage. Focused Fundraising is your essential playbook for navigating these uncertain times.”
—Eugénie I. Gentry, Yale University for Humanity Campaign Director, Associate Vice President for Development
“We always get the results of our choices. Focused Fundraising's common-sense approach challenges us to move beyond our old habits and make better choices of what we focus on.”
—Alan Fine, author, You Already Know How To Be Great
“Nonprofit work and fundraising requires daily inspiration so you can stay focused on what really matters, be resilient in the face of setbacks, and steadily move your vision and goals forward. With this book in hand, you've got a key resource to keep you motivated and on track.”
—Allison A. Holzer, co-author of Dare to Inspire: Sustain the Fire of Inspiration in Work and Life, Master Certified Coach and co-CEO of InspireCorps
FOCUSED FUNDRAISING
HOW TO RAISE YOUR SIGHTS AND OVERCOME OVERLOAD
CHRISTOPHER M. CANNON
MICHAEL FELBERBAUM
Copyright © 2022 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved.
Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey.Published simultaneously in Canada.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:
Names: Cannon, Christopher M., author. | Felberbaum, Michael (Director), author.
Title: Focused fundraising / Christopher M Cannon, Michael Felberbaum.
Description: Hoboken, New Jersey : Wiley, [2022] | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2022011364 (print) | LCCN 2022011365 (ebook) | ISBN 9781119835271 (cloth) | ISBN 9781119835295 (adobe pdf) | ISBN 9781119835288 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Fund raising.
Classification: LCC HG177 .C366 2022 (print) | LCC HG177 (ebook) | DDC 658.15/224—dc23/eng/20220603
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022011364
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022011365
Cover Image: © VectorHot/Getty ImagesCover Design: Wiley
Welcome to Focused Fundraising: How to RAISE Your Sights and Overcome Overload
IF YOU HAVE spent any time working or volunteering for a nonprofit organization, you know the constant craziness. Running 24/7 seems like the only option. With so much going on, is focus even possible?
The answer is an emphatic “Yes!” We have seen focus take hold at nonprofits large and small. And when overloaded individuals and teams finds focus, amazing things can happen.
You hold in your hands a vital resource to help you and your organization focus. Focus asks a lot every moment of every day, especially considering there is not a single nonprofit professional or volunteer we have met who isn't overloaded. That is why this book is about gaining focus amidst overload. With trusted tools and an open mindset, you can raise your sights and overcome overload. And so can your organization. Focused Fundraising will help you get there.
There are countless books to help you win your next solicitation or structure your next fundraising campaign. We wrote Focused Fundraising because, if you are like most of the professionals and volunteers we surveyed and interviewed, your biggest challenge is not fundraising technique—your challenge is finding time. Finding time to think. Finding time to plan and build for the future. Finding time to be there for your donors. Finding time for yourself.
Only you can bring what you bring to causes you care about. No matter where you work in the nonprofit fundraising process, nor how long you have been involved in nonprofit life, Focused Fundraising is your playbook to thrive in the constant craziness.
Focused Fundraising started pre-pandemic. Way back in 2019, when emails were too plentiful and social media choices were growing by the day (you know, pre-TikTok but post-Instagram), we recognized that distraction plagued our profession. We were constantly on the brink of overload, with too much to do and too little time. The RAISE framework, the core of Focused Fundraising, took shape with one part mindfulness, one part brain science, one part professional development, and one part organizational optimization. Research and personal interviews verified that distraction and overload threaten cause-related work everywhere. In this book, you will find the common causes of distraction and overload. Once grounded in the realities we all face, you will then learn RAISE—a relevant, practical method to set focused direction for yourself and your team. With a deeper understanding of focus and a new method to practice it, you can help your team climb the Focused Fundraising Maturity ladder.
The constant craziness of nonprofit life is clear to us—not enough resources combined with lots of demands. Many times, more digital tools, data, and choices do not simplify; they complicate. Eventually, we succumb to overload. So, over the past several years we have been asking some big questions of ourselves and our colleagues involved in nonprofit life. Now we turn these questions to you:
How can you leverage the useful parts of the twenty-first-century work environment while not getting derailed by the distractions?
How can you meaningfully rely on messages to get work done, and then wade through 300+ emails at the end of the day?
What do you do if you cannot delegate, or “hold time on your calendar,” or otherwise leverage the pithy time management advice we all have heard a thousand times?
How can you remain responsive to coworkers, kids, and spouses via text without the incessant “dings” distracting you from whatever is in front of you?
How can you leverage the best digital resources without getting too distracted from the choices and outcomes that matter most?
These questions themselves can be overwhelming. And, when you combine them with personal questions about priorities, the overload can grow even further. How should you organize your time? What priorities must you tackle and what can you ignore? What decisions and actions will yield the best results? What is a waste of time? Some of these questions may affect you. Some of them may affect your entire organization. Are policies and goals clear? Are expectations stated? Are processes efficient? Effective? Neither? What about the tools and systems in place? We promise this book will help you acknowledge the realities and find sustainable ways to rise above the overload.
When we started Focused Fundraising, little did we know a global pandemic would amplify the constant craziness. We pledged to not dwell on the pandemic. Most of us will want to forget all or most of 2020 and 2021. For those who could go to work, it meant worrying about masks and sanitizer and coughs and community spread. For those who worked from home, it meant Zoom after Teams after BlueJeans after WebEx after Google Hangout and on and on. If you were fortunate enough to escape the serious health and financial implications of COVID-19, you at least suffered from what has seemed like an eternity of Groundhog Days. Try as we did to avoid the pandemic as an overwrought, oversampled, overwhelming situation, one theme reinforced the need for Focused Fundraising: many of us are suffering from a freneticism like no one has experienced in the past.
Frenetic fundraising feels like the new normal. Frenetic fundraising seems like the only possibility. Even professionals and volunteers who never had trouble with focus began to fray during the pandemic. One fundraising leader known for her Zen-like calm told us that pre-COVID she never looked at her phone in meetings. Since the pandemic, her phone is always out. Zoom fatigue exhausted focus left and right. People who could sit through back-to-back in-person meetings in pre-pandemic days without issue found they tuned out 90 seconds into a virtual meeting. As you will read in the following pages, this is what we are all up against—more email, more texts, more chats, more posts, and more shallow experiences test our ability to stay on purpose and productive. The pandemic has not just damaged focus, it has brought it to a breaking point.
What has been inspiring, though, is that it is possible to gain focus even during a pandemic. We saw a Herculean effort by fundraising operations teams to spin up access, resources, and brand-new processes for work-from-home arrangements. Michael's experiences at Yale were similar to those playing out around the world. We went from “Of course you must handle gift processing in the office” to “Of course we can make it work from home.” We went from “When would you like to have lunch to discuss your pledge?” to “Do you prefer Zoom or WebEx to meet up?” As an industry (and a country and a planet), we pivoted and evolved.
How? How did we do things in a matter of days that seemed untenable and impossible just weeks prior? Focus! Well, focus and urgency. Most nonprofits changed the rules of the game in March 2020. It was smart but it was hard. The old saying that “necessity is the mother of all invention” was tested in a massive, real-time experiment. And, it turns out that the saying is true.
With these changes, though, came added distractions. Working from home meant handling kiddos and cats, dogs and doorbells. Attention to detail gets trickier when your office is also your laundry room. Working from the office is not much better. Office time now means coordinating calendars for hoteling spaces, limiting exposures, and prioritizing activities previously handled at the water cooler.
We are all navigating a new landscape. Some technology innovations (especially Zoom, which went from 19 million users in late 2019 to 300 million by December 2020!) irrevocably changed how we work. But change does not mean terrific. The gaps and shortcomings in virtual and hybrid work are apparent. The risks to our work–life balance and focus are clear. It is also clear that we cannot handle the constant craziness of nonprofit life without newfound resilience and a strong sense of purpose. In the following pages, you'll hone your personal style of focus based on a deeper understanding of mindfulness. You'll also learn about causativity, an alternative approach to productivity that incorporates principles of mindfulness.
Focused Fundraising offers you personal and team solutions for the constant craziness. Overcoming overload does not happen overnight. It is a process. What you will find here are stories from professionals and volunteers just like you. Whether you are a volunteer, an operations professional, or on the frontline, you can learn the techniques we provide. You can routinely set focused direction for yourself. You can also regularly set a focused direction for your organization. Focused Fundraising can help you make focus a habit.
How to Use This Book
Depending on your interests and goals, you can read Focused Fundraising beginning to end, or in a more targeted way. If you are interested in understanding the challenges to focus in nonprofit life, you will want to spend time in Part One, which catalogues the most common sources of distraction and overload based on our research and interviews. As you read it, you may wonder, “Are they talking about me?” If so, take comfort in knowing you are among many, many friends. In all the research we've done, not a single person we've spoken to has said “Overload? Nope, never happens here.”
If you want solutions you can try right away, you may want to jump to Part Two, which builds on an understanding of focus from the earlier chapters and gives you a framework called RAISE so you can focus without forcing it. With RAISE, we emphasize the master skill of setting a focused direction. Routinely setting focused direction for yourself means you can fly above distraction and overload. And when you do get bogged down, you can lift your sights back up. How does it work? RAISE was specifically designed for nonprofit fundraising professionals. It builds on the skills of empathy and insight, traits that draw all of us to nonprofit-related work. Each chapter in Part Two elaborates one of the five steps involved in setting focused direction.
If you want to bring greater focus to your team or your organization, you may want to go straight to Part Three, where you may recognize some familiar organizational dynamics that impede focus. However, most importantly, Part Four includes A Focused Fundraising Maturity Model. It was designed based on Chris and his firm's experience consulting top fundraising organizations, combined with Michael's experience with mindfulness, advancement IT, and causativity at Yale. You and your team can use the model to discuss how focused you are today. With candor, you can start anywhere on the model and use it as a backdrop for planning how you can develop greater focus.
If you picked up this book to learn, we hope you take a moment now to reflect on one benefit that would make the read worthwhile. Is it perhaps less stress? Stretching into a new role? Managing up? If so you may want to really register instant overload—the phenomenon of looking at your phone at one message, and getting sucked into five other things. If you're drowning in overwork right now, you may find value in a “round up” exercise called the List, the Mob, and the Waiting Line—a practice you can do any time to create some space for thinking bigger.
No matter where you're starting, we hope Focused Fundraising can serve as a stepping-stone for you. We hope it brings focus, joy, and meaning to your nonprofit fundraising work, and helps us all strengthen the work we do to address our collective needs.
PART IThe Challenges of Focused Fundraising
ARE YOU RUNNING day and night, trying to keep up? Overload is so common, it feels constant. To try to get it all done, we run from meeting to meeting, task to task, always checking for new messages and volleying replies. We are distracted by dozens of things a day that did not exist even a few years ago. To begin to gain focus, we start by recognizing this constant craziness.
1The Constant Craziness of Nonprofit Life
HOW ON EDGE are we from the 24/7 nature of nonprofit life?
How real is the constant craziness in nonprofits?
At large universities, hospital systems, internationally focused nonprofits, and small local organizations, we hear edginess from everyone we interview. Consider your daily interactions. What do you hear when you ask a colleague how they are? What do they answer?
Crazy.
Crazy busy.
Crazy has become normal. Flat out. Running. Insane. These are the answers we hear every day.
Crazy can feel good. A pioneer of mindfulness-based stress reduction recognized the thrill of craziness of modern life. Jon Kabat-Zinn used the phrase “full catastrophe living” from Zorba the Greek to describe the all-in, all-out nature of a meaningful life. When you are doing important work, you want in on the action. A top annual giving leader we know is like an Energizer® bunny, always revving up her team. A volunteer fundraiser on a small neighborhood youth organization inspires her fellow Board members with her energy every day. This energy fuels meaning, buoyed by cause-related work.
Mindfulness, though, makes the cost of craziness evident. The inspired team leader runs into slower-moving parts of the organization. “Why can't they move faster? Why don't they care? They just don't get it!” Hard-charging volunteers love the action, until they encounter an underresourced staff member just trying to keep the lights on. “Why can't we get going around here?!” We hear the same frustration from individuals trying to get to their priorities. One day they are checking things off the list, feeling good, and the next day the list is 10 times longer. All that running and yet they now feel further behind. These frustrations then intersect with the nonprofit industry's well-documented difficulties with staff retention and pretty soon crazy busy becomes burned out.
Slowing Down Is Not the Answer
The answer to constant craziness is not to slow down. Why would you want to slow down on things that really matter? Your mission deserves and demands urgency. Slowing down is a passion-killer. Slowing down supports the dark-but-sometimes-accurate meme that life is simply repeating “next week things will slow down” every week until you die.
The instinct to slow down is not misplaced, however. Because when busyness slips into overload, burnout is around the corner. Having juggled for too long, we become even more worried that balls will start dropping, and those balls will be the priority ones. If the image of juggling is not anxiety-inducing enough, some nonprofit professionals describe their lives as a house of cards. One bump and it all tumbles. And, of course, there is multi-tasking. Multi-tasking is perhaps the most common dilemma of the modern era. Over time the busyness and multi-tasking leads too many to describe the hassles of nonprofit life—the many irritations of volunteer and team meetings—as “death by a thousand cuts.”
Though this may sound bleak, there are alternatives.
In their Harvard Business Review article “Stress Can Be a Good Thing If You Know How to Use It,” Alia and Thomas Crum draw on their research to explain that acknowledging and understanding stress is essential to avoid being trapped in it. To enjoy work amidst constant craziness is to understand it, and use it. We need to acknowledge mental load.
Thankfully there is growing awareness of mental load. Mental load came to the forefront in 2017 from the feminist cartoon Emma. In the cartoon it points out that the majority of a couple or family's mental load often rests with a woman. Who thinks of the medical forms for the kids? Who plans the meals? Who remembers the family commitments? The burden of mental load is not the task itself. It is one thing to take a kid to the doctor because you are asked to do so, it is another thing to schedule the appointment, remember the prep work, get the forms together, write out a list, and ask your spouse to go. Going to the doctor is the task, the planning and remembering is the mental load. And many of us are overloaded by it.
Without acknowledging mental load, the tendency is to strive harder to slow down. Common recommendations are exercise, relaxation, productivity trainings, and so on. All of these can reduce stress and alleviate mental load. However, what if slowing down is not an option you have? What if you do not have the time to exercise? What if sleep does not come easily to you? What if you are a parent, primary caretaker, and full-time fundraiser? What if there is a new deadline for a grant proposal that represents 10% of your organization's budget? The mental load from these realities cannot simply be wished away.
To enjoy work amid constant craziness means learning new ways to handle mental load, not necessarily slowing down. What we have discovered in our research and our experience is that there are ways to think differently that reduce mental load and uplift energy. Over the past three years we have been conducting interviews, testing techniques, and researching the heavy workload and mental load that affect nonprofit professionals across the country. To share what we have learned from working with wonderful professionals at Yale and hundreds of other nonprofit institutions, we landed on Focused Fundraising. Our aim is to help you overcome overload and focus without forcing it.
2Focus Begins by Valuing the Work
A SOBERING JUNE 7, 2021, Chronicle of Philanthropy article on the challenges of retaining top staff stated, “51 percent of fundraisers expected to leave their jobs within two years.”
Yes, more than half of fundraising professionals do not expect to stay in their jobs. Why? Time and again, those on the frontlines as well as support staff say they do not feel valued. It is not just professionals who feel that way. Volunteers, who sign up to fundraise, tell us they do not have the support they need. There is a real cost to saying fundraising is important and then acting like it is not. The high rate of turnover and burnout in the nonprofit sector is bordering on a national crisis. Jason Lewis's The War for Fundraising Talent: And How Small Shops Can Win provides a stark, one-sentence explanation of the ongoing dynamics: “The [typical] organization lacks the culture to keep [the fundraiser] longer than eighteen months.”
Several forces devalue nonprofit fundraising. In a moment, you will read about three demeaning myths that do just that. These three myths disguise fundraising in the popular imagination and belittle it in the eyes of those who do it. The myths add to the hidden mental load, eroding focus. Results are left up to heroic effort by impassioned people working for low or no pay over consistently long periods of time. These purpose-defeating myths lead some of the best in the field to pack up their bags and go. And when they go, the causes they support suffer.
Myth #1: Fundraising Is Primarily About Money
I could never do THAT—I hate to ask people for money.
If you are in fundraising, have you ever heard this? And, if you are not in fundraising, have you ever said it? This is the basis for Eloise Brice’s Don’t Make Me Fundraise. If you are dipping your toes into fundraising, have you thought it or felt it? If you are a volunteer and you have been asked to fundraise, has this been rattling around in your head?
To hate asking people for money is to be human. Asking for money is associated with begging. But why continue to frame fundraising in this way? Most everyone is okay with recommending that a friend pay to eat at a certain restaurant or buy a certain app. So, what is so different about recommending that a friend donate to a nonprofit organization? We offer such consumer and personal recommendations daily to our friends and colleagues, yet that helpfulness can feel icky when philanthropy is involved. The misperception about asking people for money persists, despite the fact that we have never met a professional or a seasoned volunteer who viewed their fundraising work as primarily about asking people for money. Is money a part of the process? Yes. Is money the sole purpose of it? No.
Part of the reason fundraising is not well understood is that it is not generally taught as a discipline until graduate school. Did you choose fundraising, development, or advancement in college? High school? After a different career? The nonprofit sector represents 10% of the U.S. gross domestic product (GDP), yet most Americans are scarcely aware of the profession funding these nonprofits.
People get into nonprofit fundraising because they fall into it. For focused fundraisers, the reason they stick with it despite common misperceptions is because it is primarily not about soulless transactions. Many other jobs may be about money, but excelling in the field of fundraising means shifting your frame. Fundraising is a blend of meaning and money. Money, yes—because money is necessary. But not because money is the primary concern. Fundraising is first about relationships, purpose, and supporting a cause through goodwill and donations, not the financial transactions themselves.
Focused Fundraising puts focus first. Focus relies on a strong sense of purpose. In very tangible ways, nonprofit professionals and seasoned volunteers demonstrate purpose. They donate to the organizations they invite others to donate to. They recommend donating because they have a personal relationship with the cause. They lead by example. In this book you will meet focused fundraising teams who do exactly this, even in extremely trying circumstances.
Myth #2: Fundraising Is Brainless Cheerleading
Try a quick experiment. Close your eyes for 30 seconds and imagine someone who is a great fundraiser. Picture the qualities of this person. What do they look like? What is their personality like? How do they sound to you?
Cheerful. Upbeat. Peppy. Enthusiastic. Or, for those with a negative view on fundraising, aggressive, pushy, in-your-face. Too often we hear the negative descriptions. Of course, these more negative qualities might be involved in fundraising, but they are not the most important parts, as any seasoned professional or volunteer will tell you.
Fundraising for nonprofits does not fit generic stereotypes. Quite simply, many people view it as “Sales, but for a good cause.” There may be some truth to that statement, but not a lot. The pushiest used car salesman imaginable may come to mind. “What can I do to get you in this baby today?” If one's view is not of the pushy salesman, then the image is often of the cheer squad. Bake sales. Car washes. Gala events. All of these viewpoints may have some real-world application, but not a lot. In too many cases, the fundraiser is seen as someone who can be brainlessly cheerful, hold out a bucket, and just collect the change being tossed in.
Focused fundraising has nothing to do with this myth. Focused fundraising means recognizing a basic and important fact about fundraising. It is a fact so essential to long-term success in fundraising, it often goes unspoken. Those we most admire in the profession know it well. The focused fundraisers you will meet in this book, whether they are at elite universities or small churches, know it. And if you have had more than a few years of experience in some facet of fundraising, you know it. Quite simply, it is this: Focused fundraising is thought work.
Fundraising is thought work. Cultivation, solicitation, and stewardship all require strategy, planning, coordination, discipline, and a high degree of emotional intelligence. Expert practitioners do not view fundraising principally as “the ask,” because they know how much emotional and thought work goes into creating the conditions for success at the moment of the ask. Why does the organization need funds in the first place? Why do people and organizations support it? Why does a particular person support it? How will they know their support is being put to good purposes? And so on. To paraphrase veteran fundraising coach Chuck Loring, “A well-staged solicitation is like the cashier asking if you want to use debit or credit.” The thought work was all of the cultivation to get to a well-orchestrated Yes. The real big-picture thinking on the whole process is like the advertising for the store, the layout of the aisles, the messaging and branding throughout, and the engagement of the staff with the customer. The checkout is simply one part of that process.
It has been our privilege to put this book together after spending time with professionals of all stripes at some of the best fundraising organizations in the world. What we have found is that the best of the best are thought workers first and foremost. They connect with why their organization needs support and they align it with people who also connect to the cause and want to make a difference. You will hear some of their stories and learn some of their focus and organizational techniques in this book. Most importantly, if you understand fundraising as thought work, you will see why focus is so crucial to results.
Myth #3: Fundraising Is Done by a Solo Solicitor
Nothing strikes fear into the heart of novices quite like the ask. What if the person says no?
A real ask is based on a real relationship. Donations of any size are usually the culmination of intentional relationship-building and, in some cases, extensive negotiations. The moment of solicitation is critical, of course, but it is part of a relationship, and that relationship usually involves many people and many processes. While this is especially true for a large donation, focused fundraisers know that “large” should be in the eye of the donor, not a number they think is big.
Debunking this myth is important because it applies to everyone who works with or around individual fundraisers but do not make the ask. You yourself may not be a solo solicitor. You might be an administrator or faculty member, direct mail marketer, event organizer, gift processor, IT professional, stewardship writer, finance professional, volunteer, or any one of dozens of positions that fundraising depends on. Because fundraising is thought work, it requires a team of dedicated thought workers, all of whom care about the organization and the mission it serves.
Moving from “I am not a solicitor” to “We are a fundraising team, and I can help” improves team results. Why are we raising money? Whom do these funds serve? How does giving serve the donor? Why do people want to give to us? These deceptively simple questions are best answered not just by one or a few people who are involved in direct solicitations of donors, but by the whole team that is involved in supporting the organization. Hopefully this includes everyone. Why? Why must everyone know? Why must everyone care?
Focused fundraising is a team effort. The unique aspect of nonprofit enterprise is that a financial surplus does not go to any individual. It goes to advance the purpose of the organization. To maximize results, everyone needs to be in. Everyone needs to join in the thought work. Everyone needs to focus. Seeing it as a team effort further highlights the importance of focus, individually and collectively.
Value Leads to More Value
When these three myths are debunked, a heavy load gets lighter.
Top fundraisers and volunteers do not limit themselves by these three myths. They do not accept the unspoken misperceptions that non-fundraisers often have. They know fundraising's worth. And they enroll others in valuing fundraising and helping to get it the support it needs.
Valuing the work is a critical first step for focus. The next step is to understand the many obstacles that interfere with focus. Often valuing the work is crowded out by daily dings and pings. The average nonprofit professional might receive 20+ emails an hour. While editing one afternoon, Michael received a text with a sad emoji and the number “502.” It was a text from one of the fundraising leaders at Yale, and 502 was the number of unread emails in her inbox.
To develop focus amidst the constant craziness, we need to walk down a tricky road together, a road to understanding overload and distraction. We say tricky because it requires some introspection and some reflective thinking. If you can make the time to read and reflect, you will begin to recognize focus without forcing it. This will help you apply RAISE—an indispensable tool to elevate focus.
3You Can Focus Because You Are Mindful
WHAT HAPPENS WHEN chaos and mindfulness meet? They become friends.
