Loading summary
Transcript1 lines
- [00:01]
A
If your fundraising feels scattered, that's not a motivation problem, it's a focus problem. On January 21st at 12:00pm Eastern, I'm hosting a free training on building a major gift system that replaces chaos with clarity and pressure with consent. If leading donor conversations without forcing the moment sounds like the direction you want in 2026, check. Check the show notes for the link. Welcome to nonprofit Lowdown. I'm your host, Rhea Wong. Hey, what's up, podcast listeners? It's Rhea Wong coming to you with Nonprofit Lowdown. Today is another solo episode and I thought it would be fun to start it off a little light with the worst fundraising advice I've ever heard. It is 2026, y', all, and it is time for us to kill the bad fundraising. Who's with me? I think our sector and our industry as fundraisers has really been harmed by a couple of bad actors. A lot of us have been on the receiving end of bad, icky, transactional, ATM style fundraising, and as a whole, it has given our sector a bad name. The thing is, I don't know any fundraisers, myself included, who wakes up in the morning and says, you know what I want to do? I want to treat people transactionally. Today I'd love to twist some arms today. I'd like to make people feel really uncomfortable. Today. Nobody I've ever met. Sure, there might be some psychopaths out there that really get off on that kind of thing, but for the most part, all the fundraisers I've ever met have been genuinely wonderful, generous, good hearted, compassionate people. And there's this element of the way that we fundraise that makes them feel icky because frankly, it is icky. So I'm going to get into what those icky bits are. But I do want to share a story with you because I think it is illustrative of the point that I'm trying to make here. I remember once I was giving a keynote speech and I was talking about fundraising as obviously I do. And after I got off stage, this guy came up to me and he was an executive director and he said, oh, you didn't give people the advice that I give people all the time when I'm fundraising. And I said, well, what is that? And he said, well, my advice is that when you're asking somebody for money, if you think that they could give you 10, you should ask for 30. Then they'll feel so bad that they'll give you 15 maybe, y'. All. My jaw dropped to the ground. I didn't even say Anything. I was so shocked, I just walked away. There are so many things wrong with that statement. But let us start with the first thing, which is, I don't know about you guys, I am not trying to fundraise through a sense of guilt or obligation. It assumes that discomfort equals generosity and that guilt is a legitimate motivator. At no point, I'm sure, did this fundraiser ever consider that the donor's emotional experience is at all relevant to the transaction. And the reason why this doesn't work long term, obviously, is that guilt based giving creates regret, regret creates avoidance, and avoidance looks like donor attrition. That's why people don't call you back, don't respond to your emails, don't want to go out for coffee because they have learned to distrust you. They have learned that would you like to go for coffee? Is Latin for will you write me a check? And the donor realizes, and often subconsciously, that the relationship isn't safe. And so when you spring and ask on somebody before they're ready, before you have received their consent, before they understand what it is we're doing together, before we actually invite them into a process based on their consent, they were painted into a corner. They were maneuvered into feeling relief. And the damage this causes is that donors describe fundraisers as pushy or manipulative even when most of us are not. Because, and this is just human nature, bad experiences will often stick with you much longer than good experiences. And so if, as a donor, you've had a couple of negative experiences, you are going to remember that much more clearly than any positive experiences you've ever had. All right, let's keep going. Just ask. If they care, they'll give. The problem with this advice is that it frames generosity as a moral test instead of a decision process. And let me just be clear, caring and confidence are not the same thing. If you've been engaged with someone who's a potential donor or someone you've been talking to for a while that you think could give a gift, and they're delaying. It's because they delay when they don't understand the impact of their role and the difference that they would make. Not because they don't care why it ultimately erodes trust, is it punishes curiosity and silence. So donors learn that uncertainty equals judgment. Where this really damages us is is that donors stop asking questions and they stop engaging because they've learned that any kind of interest that they show, any kind of curiosity, any kind of questions that they may have about whether or not an organization would be A good use of their resources. If this is the mission that they want to be on. We've taught them that anytime they stick their head up out of the ground to look around, we go after them and squeeze them for a gift. And so is it any wonder that people are reluctant to raise their hand, that they're reluctant to ask questions because it might be misinterpreted as an intention to give? Think about it in the context of being a kid in a classroom, if every time you raised your hand to answer a question, you were brought up to the board and asked to perform for the whole class. I don't know, maybe some of you might have been into that, but for the most part, I think most kids would be like, well, I don't want to perform in front of the whole group, so I'm not going to raise my hand. And this is exactly the kind of mechanism that we are teaching our donors when we are trying to force an action on them before we have received their consent, before we actually have a process, and before we've actually established trust. All right, let's talk about number three. Don't talk about money too early. All right, I have a story, you guys. So when I was at fundraiser, I reached out to a funder. Actually, it was a woman who was running a foundation, and I reached out to her explicitly to try to start a relationship. Now, the thing is, I'm trying to say this without seeming like a jerk, but I can be pretty freaking charming. And I really kind of laid it on thick with this woman, and it got to the point where she thought that we were friends. And so I got stuck in the friend zone. The problem with being stuck in the friend zone was then it made it very awkward for me to transition to an ask because I had built up all this relationship equity, and I hadn't talked about any. Any financial support. I have another story. There is a very sweet old lady who I started to reach out to, and she was super receptive. She took my calls, she wanted to meet me for coffee, et cetera, et cetera. But the problem is, because we never talked about money, I was basically babysitting her. I think she just really liked having somebody to talk to. And while that is lovely, because I did not bring up the money because I was not clear in my intentions about why I was calling and what the purpose of our gatherings were, it ended up just being a lot of wasted hours on my behalf, having coffees with someone who, frankly, maybe had no intention of ever giving. And so I fell into the trap of because she gave to other organizations, she was going to give to me. No doubt. I expended a lot of the organizational time and money in my time and coffee dates. So I'm sure you all have your own stories out here about when you have a relationship that you're cultivating and it just seems to go nowhere because you weren't clear about your intentions. Avoiding money conversations doesn't feel polite to donors. It feels unclear. And the surprise is far more damaging than transparency. Why this erode trust is that when the number finally does appear, if it appears, it feels abrupt or strategic instead of collaborative. And so what I like to teach my students is having the conversation up front about the intention and the purpose of why we are continuing our relationship, why we're building our relationship and doing cultivation activities with the goal of eventually co creating a proposal for funding together. So we already know on the front end people agree to opt into a process. So by the time we get to the funding conversation, they already know they have opted into the process. And so because people like to hide the ball, because we have feelings about money, because we don't bring up the money early on in the conversation when we do it. That's how fundraisers get labeled as awkward or indirect or emotionally loaded or not transparent. Now I mean to be clear here, I don't mean that the minute you meet someone you should hit them over the head with an ask. Obviously that's not what I mean, but I am a big proponent of consent based fundraising. And what I mean by that is that you are clear with people about, first of all, identifying people who raise their hands to say that they do want to be further engaged. You have an explicit conversation to qualify them, to see if in fact they have the capacity, interest, timing, reasons to be a donor. You invite them into a process and once they accept the process, then and only then are they actually in your caseload. And so by disqualifying people on the front end respectfully, for example, people who have no interest in giving, people for whom the timing is not right, people for whom there is no capacity, then you have been clear with them and been in your integrity about what it is you're planning to do and it ends up saving a lot of your time. Let's talk about number four, focus on the gift amount, not the relationship. So this is how organizations win a campaign and lose a donor. I see this a lot, especially with things like capital campaigns and year end giving. We have our goal and we are just running like the dickens at the goal. But when we're optimizing for only one transaction, we forget about the fact that there is a human being on the other end of that transaction and that that human being could actually be a longer donor. So a lot of times, I call this mariachi money. I don't know if y' all have ever been, say, at a restaurant, and there's a mariachi band who comes up and they're playing really loud and you can't hear anything, and you kind of give them a couple bucks to go away. So I see this happening with fundraisers, which they come in guns blazing, and they ask people for money. Maybe they do a urine campaign, et cetera, et cetera. The person might give them a couple hundred bucks just to have them go away. But where it erodes trust is that the donor realizes that they were valuable only at the moment of capacity. So I see this a lot where major donors disengage after one significant gift, and here's the more important thing they tell their peers. Why? I've seen this quite a lot where major donors give a small gift as a test gift just to see how they are stewarded. And they do that before they would obviously even consider a bigger gift. And if you're not good at stewarding the small gift, chances are you're not going to be good at stewarding the big gift. The other thing that I just want to flag here, that, as is true with all humans, people talk to each other, and major donors run in rarefied circles, especially if you're particularly geographically based. So, for example, right now I'm here in New York City. There are groups of people who are very, very tight. Their kids know each other. They go to the same clubs, they vacation in the same locations. They talk to each other. And so if somebody has a bad donor experience or is left with a bad taste in their mouth, having given to your nonprofit, they'll probably tell their friends. It's like that phenomenon of bad news travels faster than good. I say this all to say that when we are focused on raising a certain amount, I think we need to consider gauging success in different dimensions, not just the money raised. Oh, this is a big one. Number five, follow the script. How many of us out here think that there is a magic script that we should follow? And I understand scripts promise safety. They deliver distance. Why this does not work is that major donors can feel when a conversation is being steered instead of shared. It reminds me of my friend Jason, who was on this podcast, and he said that there were three levels of listening. Level one is you're just waiting for a break in the conversation to say what you want to say. Level two, listening is you're fully present, you're hearing what's being said. And level three, listening is you're hearing what's not being said. And level three, listening is very, very hard. When you have a script, you are engaged in level one listening because you're not really listening. You're going through the different points that you have in your head. You are thinking about how you want to steer the conversation, not organically of being present for what is being said. And the reason this erodes trust is that we all know when people are being performative, we all know when they're being fake. And when you're relying on a script, which is not to say that you shouldn't know what you're going to say ahead of time. That's not what I'm saying. What I'm saying is when you adhere too much to a script, it feels false. It feels like you are performing and the donor feels like they're being managed. And so if you're, if you are depending too heavily on scripts, fundraising starts to feel inauthentic and transactional because it is one of the things. Kel Haney said this to me and Kel Haney's background is as a theater director. The thing about great acting is it may be based on a skirt, but it feels like it's being said organically. And that is the best of all possible worlds. So as fundraisers, we have to have a structure, we have to know where we're going, we have to understand what the process is. And sure, we do have to have a script, but we have to practice it such that it doesn't sound like a script. We have to also allow for the spontaneity and the space of authentic human relationships and to actually hear what's being said. I'll just give you a quick example here. One of my students just texted me via Slack and said that based on a survey that she sent out to her donors, someone responded. And by the way, this is a person who is gearing up for a six figure ask that was not ever on her radar. She said that the leader of this organization was so inspiring to her and that she would do anything for her if she had not asked the question, if she had not been paying attention and hearing truly what was being said or being sent back, this six figure gift would not be in play. And so the more I'm in this business, the more I realize that the art of listening is the secret. When I was younger, I used to be under the misapprehension that, like, oh, I'm gonna do the dog and pony show, I'm gonna pitch, and there's gonna be some kind of magical combination of words that I'm going to say to make people do what I want them to do. Fast forward. There are no magical combinations of words. Or if there are, I have not found them. And by the way, this doesn't work with your doesn't work with donors, it doesn't work with significant others, it doesn't work with your dog. The conversation is the relationship, and the relationship is the unit of change. And so I think we have to be courageous enough to have conversations and to be fully present to hear what's being said, even if we don't like it. You know, I think the other thing is we are so afraid of rejection. We're so afraid of hearing something that we don't want to hear, that we don't engage in conversations that are genuine, authentic, and vulnerable. And I think that's true with our donors. And I think that's true overall in life. But the point here is, do not rely on the script. Okay? Number six. Stewardship happens after the gift. This one reveals everything. When I consider the word stewardship, a lot of times people use the word stewardship to designate the process that occurs after a gift is completed, after a transaction is done, after the money changes hands. But what that indicates is that the donor was never a partner, that they were just a payout. And the reason why it erodes trust is donors sense when appreciation is conditional. And so when we're building a relationship, there has to be a true and genuine sense of gratitude and partnership, not just I am grateful and appreciative after you give me the money. Because if that is true, that's when donors often say they disappeared after I gave money. I want to talk about the pattern behind all of these different pieces of terrible fundraising advice, and it is this. The fundraiser's goal matters more than the donor's agency. Let me say that again. All of this advice share the same underlying assumption, that the fundraiser's goal matters more than the donor's agency. So when we use pressure or guilt or urgency or silence as tools to move money, donors learn to protect themselves, not just from one organization, but from the sector as a whole. And that is how fundraising earned a reputation it didn't intend. So if you're listening to this and you are noddling along then the natural next question is, okay, Rhea, so what do we do about it? Here's where I want to introduce the alternative, something that I've been calling consent based fundraising. So when we have a consent based system that is designed on purpose for trust, it flips the dynamic. It centers trust over pressure, it centers relationship over transaction and clarity over coercion. So it treats giving as a voluntary, informed, collaborative decision, not something to be engineered. And the irony is it raises more money over time because donors stay and grow and advocate. If you're listening to this and thinking, this is why my donors are pulling away, or this is why I felt uncomfortable with some of what I was taught, I'm going to go much deeper into what the elements of a consent based fundraising model look like. And the other thing is most fundraisers are out here raising money, but they don't have a true system. What I mean by a true system is replicable, repeatable, scalable steps that anybody can step into and run. And so this is, I'm convinced, one of the reasons why we are always on the back foot with fundraising. Because oftentimes what I've seen is that fundraising rests on the shoulders of one heroic person who can pull rabbits out of hats. But guess what? When that person moves on, and sometimes that is a rainmaker fundraiser, sometimes it's a founder. That is a vulnerability in the system. That is a vulnerability because it is not a system. It is results built on the back of one person. So if this is interesting to you and you agree that 2026 is the year that we stop with the transactional fundraising and start to build consent based systems, join us for this free webinar. The link is in the show notes, but in this webinar we'll uncover the key touch points of what makes a consent based system and some of the tactical pieces. Because I know you all are about tactical and practical to implement this in your existing development shop. So the registration is in the show notes. And by the way, if you're listening to this, hit me up@hello, wong.com I'd love to know what some of the worst fundraising advice you've ever heard is. All right, I'll talk to you next week, friends. Hey fundraisers. Looking to mail those big fundraising asks? Check out my big Ask gift program@riawong.com forward slash bag. Say goodbye to uncertainty and hello to confidence with my program. Get expert strategies and personalized support to secure those game changing donations. Don't let fear hold you back. Join me and take your fundraising to new heights. We're enrolling now@riawong.com bag. That's riawong.com bag. So if you like big asks and you cannot lie, I'll see you in the program.