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Hey, you, it's Rhea Wong.
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If you're listening to Nonprofit Load on, I'm pretty sure that you'd love my weekly newsletter. Every Tuesday morning, you get updates on
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the newest podcast episodes.
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And then interspersed, we have fun special invitations for newsletter subscribers only and fundraising inspo, because I know what it feels like to be in the trenches alone. On top of that, you get cute dog photos. Best of all, it is free. So what are you waiting for? Head over to riawong.com now to sign up.
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Welcome to Nonprofit Lowdown. I'm your host, Rhea Wong. Hey, non profit fam. It's Ria Wong with you once again with Nonprofit Lowdown. I am coming to you right now in a phone cabin in sfo and I was tempted to do a rerun, but I know that folks are out here and they have questions about fundraising. So here I am just before my flight back to the wintry climes of New York City. Today, I want to talk about something that is a little bit of a pet peeve of mine. And I think that this is probably the single biggest reason why fundraisers are out here chasing people who don't want to talk to them. Burning out, feeling completely discouraged and demotivated, about doing a million phone calls and emails about meeting a donor for coffee and hearing crickets. It is honestly the most frustrating thing in the world because you're out here thinking that you've done all the things, but in actual fact, you're not getting the results that you want. The single biggest question I always get from fundraisers is, what am I doing wrong? Is it that donors are changing? Yes. Is it that fundraising is changing? Yes. And it is also that you probably most likely have not installed a clear qualification step. I know a lot of folks are out here thinking that they have qualified, typically. And of course not you, because you are a sophisticated fundraiser. But typically, what I hear is the first step is I ask, well, who is your donor? A lot of times I hear things like, well, everybody is our donor. Like, everybody should care about this particular thing. Well, if everybody is your donor, then nobody is your donor. So once we've identified who your donor might be, once we've identified people who are actually interested and engaged in what you do, what kind of qualification do you have? And this is where things get a little murky. Sometimes people will say, well, we've done a well screen, and I have a little bit of a love hate relationship with wall screens. I think it can be really useful information to have the problem that I have with it is, it is usually the one data point that people use to say that someone is qualified. I don't know that they're necessarily very accurate. They pull publicly available data. And so if you are the kind of person who lives in a high wealth area like San Francisco, New York, Louisiana, et cetera, they will typically calculate your net worth based on, for example, your real estate. And I say this a lot. I don't care how amazing you are as an organization, I just don't see someone selling their house just to give you a donation. If we want to actually trim down our list to identify people who raise their hand and actually want to talk to us, that means that we stop the ghosting. That means that we actually read the signs. That means we're actually engaging with people who want to be engaged with us. We cannot skip this, this qualification step. So I think skipping the step is probably the most expensive mistake that you are making in your major. So if you've ever had a donor ghost you after three great meetings, or an ask that felt awkward, or a yes that turned into a soft no, or a board member pushing you to just ask them already, this episode is for you. So today, what we're going to talk about is skipping the qualification step. By the way, what is actually a qualification step is the most expensive mistake a major gives. And basically by skipping this step, you are quietly eroding trust, donor confidence, and frankly, your revenue. Now let's talk about what qualification is and what it isn't. Like I said before, qualification is not a well screen. It is not deciding if someone is quote unquote worth your time. It is not moving them into your portfolio and it is not guessing based on vibes what qualification is. And the way that I define qualification is that there is mutual clarity, that there is a mutual consent and I am a big consent person. It is an explicit agreement to explore a deeper partnership. And it is an offer based on timing, interest and the intention of your donor. So what I want to say here is a donor is not qualified because you hope that they're going to give. Hope is not a strategy. They're qualified because they have opted in. And this, my friends, is the differentiator. But let's talk a little bit about why we skip the qualification step. And I think it's important to really sit in this because if we don't examine the reasons why, it's going to be very hard for us to solve the problem. So a lot of times we skip qualification because we are getting pressure from leadership to make Our portfolios look bigger to show that we are doing our jobs by taking actions, but those actions aren't necessarily deepening the relationship. We have a fear of missing the moment, right? We meet someone week, have a good conversation, maybe it seems like they have some wealth, we fast track them into the portfolio without actually qualifying to see if they want to be in the portfolio. We operate, and this is true for a lot of nonprofits in that scarcity mindset. And so we believe that if we're not chasing down every single lead and if every single person isn't brought into our portfolio, we are going to not raise the money, we're going to lose our jobs, we're not going to be able to fulfill the mission. It really comes from a sense of fear. We often confuse capacity with readiness. So just because someone has the money doesn't mean that they're going to give it to you. And so I think it's a little bit of having a real come to Jesus moment with ourselves. Just because Mackenzie Scott had a conversation or just because we talked with Oprah, just because we talked with someone who has capacity, it does not mean that they are necessarily interested in giving to us. And finally, I think that sometimes we confuse interactions with the next step. And that's really just ego based, right? Think of it this way. It's almost like confusing a first date for saying that someone wants to marry you. It is first step in the process. Let's not rush. And so if you're listening to this and you don't have a solid qualification process right now, I want you to think about, is the skipping of the qualification strategic or is it anxiety? What happens when you skip the qualification step? There are five things that demonstrate that you are skipping qualifications. So danger number one, premature asks. What that means is that you are asking before the timing is clear, you're asking before it. You're clear about the priorities of your donor, and you ask before the relationship has been sufficiently built and the gift window is real. I'm gonna give you a quick example of this. So as you can imagine, lots of people reach out to me. And I had someone reach out to me who I chatted with before. And they'd listened to a recent podcast episode of mine and felt like it really resonated with them. Scheduled some time with my team and in that conversation asked my team to ask me whether or not not I would consider a hundred thousand dollars gift. Now, while I'm flattered to think that they think that I could make a hundred thousand dollar gift, I Think what is instructive here is that there was no gift window. There was no conversation with me about my timing, my priorities, and whether or not a hundred thousand dollars was even a possibility. Which, by the way, it is not. It will be one day, but today is not that day. And so what happens when you rush to the ask is a couple things happen. You get soft nos, which is basically a no in disguise. You get ghosting and you get collapse of a momentum where you're like, what happened to that person? I thought we were on a track and they just went away. The danger here is that premature asks don't just delay revenue, they actually erode trust in you and in the system. Let's talk about what else happens when you skip culture, your qualification step, you get donor discomfort. When proper qualification has not happened, the donor has not agreed or consented to a deeper conversation, they don't understand the level of partnership that you are looking for and they ultimately feel surprised by the ask. And frankly, surprise in fundraising is never. Let me give you another example. When I was a little Baby Ed, before I understood the power of qualification, I reached out. I was able to create a relationship with a donor. Now the problem is because I had not qualified, because I had not been clear about my intentions, because I had not received consent, it got to this point where we were hanging out and I think that she thought we were friends and she was a lovely person in church. I certainly thought of her as a friend. But it got to the point where I couldn't ask her because it was just awkward. We had gone past the point where the window was actually open and because I had not been clear about my intentions or clear about the process, we just went past that. And now it would have been awkward because we were friends. Don't let this happen to you. Okay, let me talk about danger number three, the fundraiser shame spiral. This is real, y'. All. When you skip qualification or your asks flop, what happens is that you start questioning your instincts and you start replaying the conversation. You start to lose confidence and you hesitate next time and you really start to get into that imposter syndrome, which we know is a killer. Desperation is a stinky, stinky perfume. If you're starting to question yourself, maybe the leadership is as well. What I'd like you to realize here is that the problem wasn't you. It was about not having a clear qualification stage. It was a missing ingredient. It's like baking a cake. You can't expect that your cake is going to turn out well if you forget the flour. If you're listening to this and you're a fundraiser and you've experienced the shame, hear this. It's not you, it's not your fault. It's likely that you might have just skipped a step because no one told you how important it was. And that step was probably qualification. Let me talk about some other things that happen when you skip qualification. Danger number four, portfolio pollution. When you are skipping qualification, it looks like this caseloads are assigned. They're not earned. What I mean by that are you just get this random list of people who have not opted in, who nobody really knows. All they are is a number and a name, and then all they are are a bank account and a name and you don't know anything about them. And so you get into this transactional mindset where you're carrying donors who have never consented to be in this process, who really have no interest in it, and you spend a bunch of time and energy just culling this essentially dead list, trying to make something happen. Trying to make fetch. Fetch is not going to happen. You have a dead list with no momentum. Now, I'm not going to say that these lists are always dead, but without a mechanism for allowing people to raise their hand and without a clear qualification system, you're going to be wasting a lot of time fishing in these waters. And so what this looks like is that you have inflated portfolios, generally speaking, with major donors. I think that a portfolio of no more than 40 is realistic because how are you going to build meaningful relationships with more than 40 people at any given time? I can't even managed to call my best friends on a regular basis. What this also does is it gives you a false sense of what the value of your pipeline is, because even though it looks good on paper, you haven't really qualified. It's almost like when I was in high school, I had a crush on a boy named Alex. And in my mind, Alex was my boyfriend, but he had no idea because I never really talked to him. And so don't be like that. Don't have imaginary boyfriends. If you're going to be engaged with people as donors, you should have the conversation and they should know that they are in your pipeline. And what this all leads to, dear friends, is if you're doing all this and you're not getting any momentum or it feels a little slipshod and you're like, it feels a little bit like throwing a lot of spaghetti on the wall and seeing what sticks. What happens is that you end up exhausted. And I have seen four far too many fundraisers burning out, unfortunately. I want you to hear this. Unqualified donors in your portfolio are silent energy leaks. And the thing about it is, energy is the only thing that matters. Energy is what is going to fuel your mission. It's going to show you your results. And so when we're wasting a bunch of time and energy on prospects that aren't really going anywhere because they were never qualified to begin with, it's essentially little better than picking up the phone and a phone book and cold calling. It's not the most efficient, strategic use of time. Okay, and let's talk about danger. Number five, and this is the biggie, relationship damage. When donors are feeling rushed or processed or strategized or networked, it's not that they necessarily complain, but they're disengaging quietly. They ghost. And they're also probably telling their friends. And that quiet disengagement is expensive. Rarely in major gift work does something explode. It just dies slowly. And by the time you realize that your pipeline is dead, it's too late. So we've talked about why it happens. We've talked about how to know if this is happening to you. We've talked about the dangers of not having a clear qualification process. But let's talk about what proper qualification actually protects. When we are operating at our highest and best and we have a clear system for qualification. It protects timing. It protects the trust of our donors. It protects emotional safety. It protects staff confidence and the clarity of your pipeline. Why? Because it creates shared expectations, clear next steps, and a defined roadblock. The most important thing that it does is it replaces guessing with consent. I'm not into the vibes anymore. I'm into getting. Consent is sexy. Anyone out here who's watched heated rivalry, you know, consent can be very sexy. The natural next question you might be asking yourself is like, cool. Rhea, you've convinced me of the importance of a qualification process, but what does that even look like? So I want you to listen to this podcast, write down these questions, and just reflect a little bit. This is a diagnostic. Ask yourself before your last major ask, could you clearly answer? Number one, did they explicitly agree to explore a deeper partnership? Number two, did they understand what that actually meant? Number three, did you confirm timing? Because as we know, timing is everything. Number four, did you confirm the type of impact that they care about? And finally, number five, did they say yes to the next step? And if any of those steps are fuzzy, you skipped qualification. Now hear this. Qualification is Not a hurdle. It is an act of respect. And it makes fundraising cleaner and calmer and more predictable and, and more human and more aligned to your integrity. And it prevents you from asking too quickly or too soon. It prevents donor discomfort, it prevents fundraiser shame and it prevents relationship damage, which I know is the number one thing that a lot of us are out here. Because the truth is, if you are a fundraiser, you are a deeply relational person. I already know this about you. You did not get into this business to make people feel bad or awkward. You got into this business because you genuinely care about the mission and, and you care about people. And so having a very good, clear qualification process and by the way, not being afraid to hear no. Because if you ask someone if they want to be in this process with you and they say no, that is a gift. Because then you're not going to waste a bunch of time engage them in a process that they have no interest in. If this episode made you realize that your team is asking or cultivating before qualifying or guessing, instead of confirming, I want you to try join me for an upcoming live training. I'm hosting a webinar I'm hosting a webinar on March 10 about early warning signals and the major gift crash that you don't see coming. So if you want an opportunity to sit and diagnose where your fundraising might be leaking easy takeaways that you can do to make your fundraising better, more effective and less icky, then join us March 10th at 12pm Eastern. It is free. There will be no replays. So if you want this, you got attend live. I have some extra bonuses for folks who attend live. What you'll get is a diagnosis and an outline of a permission consent based fundraising system that is scalable, replicable and frankly a lot less icky for the fundraisers and donors. Because here's the thing, I don't think anyone is out here saying that they want to feel icky, buffer raising or want to make their donors feel icky about fundraising. So if that is you and you want to learn how to do fundraising in aligned, non icky, consent based way, then definitely join me on the 10th. I will put the registration in the show notes. It's free. What have you got to lose? I'll see you there. And so last thought here is that when you fix qualification, everything downstream gets easier. So I invite you to stop guessing, start leaving. I will see you on there. Hey fundraisers. Looking to nail those big fundraising asks,
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