We all aspire to achieve great things, this means different things to different people. I was always focused on leading a team. I love working with people and more specifically, I love the energy that is created when I am engaged in inspirational conversations. It is for this reason that I consider myself lucky to be a professional fundraiser and even luckier to be leading a team of very accomplished and highly competent fundraisers. But there is a challenge that exists for many Directors in non profit organizations, and I believe it is an unspoken challenge. It is the trifecta effect, the challenge of leading your team, the challenge of working your own fundraising portfolio and the challenge of reporting up to the CEO. It is the curse I suppose of middle management, but it is not often discussed or addressed. It is for this reason that I’d like to share some of the strategies I have adapted over the years to deal with the aforementioned challenge. [Read more…]
Collecting Courage: Traversing the whiteness of the philanthropic sector as Black fundraisers
“Power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is love correcting everything that stands against love.” ~ Martin Luther King Jr.
Collecting Courage: Joy, Pain, Freedom, Love is a perfect example of what happens when two parallel paths converge to create something special and of significance.
On one pathway was Our Right to Heal, an initiative featuring the voices of ten Black Canadian fundraisers sharing their journey towards healing from painful and traumatic experiences. In May 2020, a few days before George Floyd was killed at the hands of the Minneapolis police on May 25th, the stories were published by the Association of Fundraising Professionals (Global). His death served as a flashpoint triggering worldwide outrage about police brutality against Black people and igniting protests against anti-Black racism.
On a related and separate path, our group of Black Canadian fundraisers selected Cap in Hand: How Charities are Failing the People of Canada and the World by Gail Picco as our book club selection for December 2019. When Gail joined us for the discussion, she shared her idea about a compilation of writings featuring the voices of Black fundraisers. In March 2020, Gail became the Editor-in-Chief of The Charity Report, a new digital magazine, and at the same time launched Gail K. Picco Books, an imprint under Civil Sector Press.
These two convergent paths intersected, creating a perfect storm and genesis for the book. Conditions and timing were right to address historic exclusion and oppression in the charity sector. In June, discussions got underway and Collecting Courage: Joy, Pain, Freedom, Love was born. [Read more…]
4 Common Fundraising Challenges – And How To Overcome Them
Raising enough money to support programs and services can be challenging, especially for small and medium sized organizations.
This year, Covid and the resulting inability to have fundraising “as usual” has brought even greater obstacles and anxieties to many organizations.
Are any of these four common fundraising challenges tripping up your organization?
Choose Your Nonprofit Leadership Style Today
Folks, buckle your seatbelts. We’re in for a long road ahead. If you haven’t moved out of the pandemic crisis or short-term adaptive operations phases, now is the time.
To operate safely and sustainably today, a long view, as well as a creative, solving nonprofit leadership style, is required.
And you don’t have to figure out what creative, solving-style leadership means all by yourself.
It’s All About Impact
I’ll never forget the day, my staff member, whose role is Latino Outreach, came into my office to let me know that a family who had lost everything in a fire had called our center in order to ask if we could provide them with a house full of furniture. They had lost everything in the fire, had no insurance and little means to replace their furniture. This is not an unusual request, in that our humanitarian center regularly helps people with all kinds of needs, whether that be food, clothes, furniture or mental health counseling.
What was unusual that day, was the fact that on the exact same day, we received a call from one of our regular donors. She wanted to donate a house full of furniture to our center. She knew that by giving us this furniture, we would normally turn around and sell these items through our thrift stores, which in turn directly supported our many outreach programs like our food pantry. Her furniture was very nice and would sell for a good price at our stores.
Before hanging up the phone, she asked if by chance we had a family who was in need of furniture. While she was fine giving it to us to sell through our stores, she would prefer it be given to a family who really needed it if there was someone who presented a need for it. [Read more…]
Stay Curious, Play the Infinite Game
In 1986, American philosopher James Carse introduced the concept of two types of games – finite games and infinite games. Finite games have a winner and loser. Infinite games have no finish line and the goal is to keep the game going as long as possible. More than 33 years later, Simon Sinek gave voice to this philosophy in his leadership touchstone, The Infinite Game.
Even if you haven’t read the book (though I highly recommend that you do), the tenets of it will likely feel like second nature to those of us in fundraising: we over me, progress over perfection and the importance of always keeping an eye on the big picture. To break it down in our industry’s nomenclature, meeting a fundraising goal is a finite thing; building a movement is infinite. [Read more…]
Creating an Environment for Fundraising to Thrive
Too often in charitable organizations, fundraising is seen as distinct from delivering on mission.
Yet fundraising cuts horizontally across an organization, touching virtually every aspect of its work. And, in order to raise money effectively, you can’t simply work hard at fundraising, you must also work hard at creating the right environment – the enabling ecology – for fundraising to thrive.
Fundraising’s enabling ecology approach suggests that the sustainability of your fundraising program depends on the strength, interconnectedness and balance of each of the approach’s four elements: strategies, infrastructure, culture and principles. And you must purposefully plan for each if you want to have the full involvement of your organization and ultimately raise more money. [Read more…]
Is Your Money Story Affecting Your Ask?
Spoiler alert: I strongly believe that the answer to the question in the title is YES. And not only that, but there’s a decent chance the impact your money story is having isn’t pretty.
So, what is a money story, exactly?
Most of us learn “stories” about money from the Big Three Influencers: our families, our communities and our churches (and other religions). Sometimes the messages are lovely, about sharing and abundance and villages raising children. MUCH more often, people are taught that money is scarce, that it must be earned with sweat, that it is infused with power, that it is linked to greed and evil. They learn that money is something others have more of, and that it creates imbalance. They learn that there isn’t enough. They learn that it comes with strings attached. They learn that asking for it is bad. [Read more…]
The Move from “Doing” Fundraising to “Being” a Fundraiser
Recently, I woke up to an inbox full of resources that aim to improve the “doing” of fundraising. At first glance, this made me smile.
Just 10+ years ago, I had to dig deep into cyberspace to find insights like the ones that came in like clockwork on this particular morning. Think: winning major gift strategies, proposal budgeting tips, mid-level giving mastery, donor retention via text, year-end strategies that sell, and so many more!
There is, remarkably, no shortage of tactics in our field.
Limiting Beliefs That Hinder Fundraising Success
As an experienced fundraiser and leader you might not remember all the limiting beliefs that held you back at the start of your career. Many of those beliefs are tied to the fears that surround asking such as: 1) “I don’t know how to ask”, 2) “I’m too embarrassed to ask”, 3) “I don’t know who to ask”, 4) “I don’t have time to ask”, and 5) “If I ask, they will say no”.
While you may have faced some (or all) of these fears and limiting beliefs in the past and moved beyond them as your career as a fundraiser evolved, there may be some members of your staff who are not as advanced as you are, and who may be struggling. This post is for them. I encourage you to share it with them, as well as offer how you overcame these obstacles to success.