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We Are For Good Podcast - The Podcast for Nonprofits
709. Working Session: Fundraising as a Team of One: What to Do When You Don’t Have Time for Everything - Christina Martin Kenny
00:27:21
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- [00:05]
Christina Martin Kinney
If you are there and you are overwhelmed and you are burning out, I want you to know that burnout is not a personal failure. It is a signal. And it is your body and brain saying that something needs to change. Listen to that. Honor that, and I hope you take some time to get the support you need.
- [00:30]
Podcast Host
Welcome to working sessions on the We Are For Good podcast Podcast. In every session, we're tackling one essential topic and give you practical steps to take meaningful action within your mission. Today, we're bringing you the experts and playbooks to help you move forward with clarity and confidence. Let's get to work.
- [00:46]
Becky
Hey, friends, it's so good to see you back here. You've only got me on the podcast today, and we are working through another incredible working session. Christina Martin Kinney is back, and she is such a tour de force in the nonprofit sector. She's a career fundraiser, a founder of Guava Tree Strategies, and she literally wrote the handbook on today's topic, which is how, when you're a fundraising team of one, what do you do when you don't have time for everything? So if that is you, which I would wager that if you work in the nonprofit industry, 100% of the hands lifted in that situation. This is your working session today. Christina also just wrapped up a first cohort of her community program that she built around this topic. And today she's bringing the entire playbook into this working session. We're going to talk about what to prioritize, what to let go of, and how to actually move the needle in your work when you feel like you're juggling all the things. So, Christina, welcome, my friend. I'm ready to get into it. Are you ready?
- [01:55]
Christina Martin Kinney
Yeah, Becky, let's do it. I'm so happy to be here.
- [01:58]
Becky
Well, welcome back, my friend. We are going to make sure to drop your other podcast episode that we've had, which was incredible, the art of sustainable fundraising and building resilient nonprofits. We're going to drop that into the show notes. You can also access that. But I want to do some tone setting real quick. And I want to ask you, because you have been a team of one many times, what is the biggest mistake solo fundraisers make? And then what is the mindset shift that it takes to change literally everything? We're starting out with a big question.
- [02:31]
Christina Martin Kinney
This is a great question to start with. And first, I do want to set some framing that this conversation is for anybody who holds the majority responsibility of fundraising for their organization. It's not just for people with the title of development. It's for executive directors, that one board member who happens to do all of your orgs fundraising. It is for anybody who feels like the weight of raising your organization's money is solely on you, or even if it's you and one other person. And the one reframe I want to start with is that there isn't a mistake that solo fundraisers are making. Because when you are in that role, you are in constant survival mode. You are always reacting to something. There is always something to be done. There is so little time to take a step back and look big picture. And it's not that solo fundraisers or teams of one are making mistake. It's that organizations are making the mistake in thinking that one person can do all of the things. And when you have that, you know, there is so often I see organizations hire a director of development to be the sole fundraiser. It's okay to outsource some work. And I know we're talking budgets. I'm not exclusively talking about hiring a consultant or a contractor. I'm talking about can you find somebody who can do your tax receipts for three hours a week or to check your database, process donations? Because when you have somebody who owns everything, whether your title is director of development or executive director, whatever it is, there is absolutely no possible way that you can set the strategy for the organization, talk to your donors, steward them effectively, write grants, managed institutional funding reports, write tax receipts, check on donations, that you just can't do it all. It is literally not possible. And that is probably only a slice of what a lot of the people who are listening to this conversation are doing. Because I've done it and I'm, I'm listing these things and I'm thinking, yeah, maybe that was about a quarter of my responsibilities when I was a team of one. And there is this, you know, when we talk about outsourcing work, there's this assumption that outsourcing comes with a problem price tag. Well, it doesn't have to. Yeah, there's a lot of fractional roles out there and people like me that do this kind of work. But you can have a board member who writes your thank you letters. You can have board members call and steward your donors again, you can have that board member who has a niece or nephew who's a sophomore at whatever college and wants to be involved in the organization some way. You can give them a role to issue tax receipts or pull spreadsheets every week. Right. So there is no single mistake anybody's doing. The mistake is Assuming that anybody can do everything, and that's the reframe, you know, it's okay to do less. This is the biggest thing that I tell organizations that they struggle with, because this conversation that we have been having for decades, but especially, especially since last year when federal funding cuts started to happen, there's this, you know, diversify your revenue. We need diverse revenue. And yes, but you can be 100% funded by individuals and have diverse revenue. So many organizations hear diverse revenue and they think we have to apply to a hundred grants a year. We have to, you know, have major donors and we have to have corporate sponsors. And if you are putting in all of this work and you maybe only have one corporate partner or you only get two grants a year, then it's okay to say, you know what, we're not going to apply to as many grants next year. We're going to focus on stewarding the current grant relationships we have and maybe apply to three or four more, but we're just going to do less.
- [06:43]
Becky
I feel like I just heard the audience give a collective exhale because one, I think it's so important to name that we are not failing right now. We are overwhelmed and burnt out right now. And two, just this notion that this is not all on your shoulders is a very powerful mindset. Reframe. When you look at the work to do within the mission, I hope you don't look at it as, oh, this is on me. Christina is right. You have such a community and a bench of rabid fans that are behind you, that are apart of that activation and amplification of your organization. So some really great tips in there. Okay, I want to get into this working session because I want to know, when you can't do everything, what do you actually do? Like, walk us through how a team of one figures out where to focus in terms of what moves the needle and what's just noise.
- [07:46]
Christina Martin Kinney
Well, the first thing you have to figure out is what is the noise. Right? So one of the things I like to do, I do this with all of my clients. And I will preface this by saying a real raw, honest moment right now. When I was a team of one, I wasn't doing any of this because I was so underwater, I couldn't even think three steps ahead. Right. It was just relatable. Do, do, do, do, do. And so, so I say this to say that, you know, finding the time to actually think through these things, I recognize that that is a challenge. But I started to formulate this playbook when I was again A team of one, but with an organization that was very financially healthy. And my role was really just to steward. And they were content with their budget. And I was really given this luxury of how do you survive in a role like this? And that's when I started to build out this framework. And I never knew what I was doing with it until much, much later. So the first thing you have to understand is your revenue has to match your time. And so I tell everybody to do a time tracking exercise. There are great resources out there. You can literally just use a spreadsheet or. Or a timer on your phone, or you can use something like the free version of Harvest. And what you need to do is you figure. You need to figure out where all of your money is coming from. If you are 100% funded by individuals, great, that makes this easy. But you need to figure out what is the revenue slice of your pie chart. And then you have to manage your time. So if your pie chart looks like 30% individual giving and 20% corporate, whatever it is, how much of your time in a given week or month are you spending on that revenue source? And it should be proportional, right? And the question you asked about, what is just noise is everything that falls off. So if 30% of your funding comes from individuals, 30% of your week, probably 35, should be calling donors, meeting with donors, writing notes to them, putting contact reports in your CRM. Right? The time needs to be proportional. That's how you start to figure out what is the excess. And some of the excess does still need to get done. Right? But that's when you can go back to your leadership and say, this is how I'm spending my time. Right? Because the hardest part of being in these types of roles is that when you say to leaders, I can't do it all. This is too much. There often is not any kind of sympathy for that. It's often, well, figure it out. Manage your time better. I mean, the number of times that I was told that being a team of one when I was struggling was probably a time management issue.
- [10:53]
Becky
Oh, my gosh.
- [10:54]
Christina Martin Kinney
And it's not. So you really have to figure out how you are spending your time. And then I have something which I'm gonna. We can put. I think Becky and John Julie can put this in the show notes. It's called the Good Enough Feast. Ooh.
- [11:10]
Becky
Yes.
- [11:11]
Christina Martin Kinney
And it is literally now I say checklist. That does not mean to do. List all of you who go and download this. This is not. Oh, my God. This is more work to do this is everything that needs to function in your organization so that you can actually do this work in a way that allows you to focus on what actually matters. So first, systems, you have to have good bones in order to do this work. You need a good donation processing platform. I hate to break it to you, but PayPal is not it. Give Butter is phenomenal, right? Let's give a shout out to the GiveButter folks. But the number of organizations that they know PayPal isn't working for them, right? Or they know their donation process processing platform like it. It just, for whatever reason, it's cumbersome, it's hard to use, but it's like, well, I'll get around to it. It's like, that is like priority one. It needs to look good to your donors, and it needs to function properly on the back end so that you understand the data behind it. If you want to know how much money last month, you can easily pull a report and Give Butter that shows you that your donation processing platform then needs to connect to a simple database or CRM. Many organizations are operating with just a spreadsheet. A spreadsheet is something that you constantly have to update that is more work for you. And I, again, not to make this like a Give Butter promotional podcast, but the thing I love about Give Butter is for small organizations. The free version can function as your CRM because you can go and look at how many people gave last year. You can pull those kinds of reports. You just need to be able to visualize your data in a very, very simple way. There's also tools like Little Green Light that I've heard wonderful things about, but you need to be able to visualize things, because otherwise, you know, and the things you need to be able to see are total dollars raised, donor retention rate, average gift size. Because too often what happens is everybody relies on their financial accounting to look at how their fundraising is performing. And they get to December, or worst case, January, and they're like, huh, we raised a hundred thousand dollars less than we did last year. I mean, I literally just had a client that had absolutely no idea that they had raised $100,000 less than they had the year before. And why couldn't they realize that? Because it was an executive director team of one who just did not have the time or the capacity to pay attention to these kinds of things, like many people who are in this kind of role. So you really need good systems, and those are the bare bones of those systems, right? If you have an email platform that you can Also connect to your database and you don't have to like have a fancy integration. You can use Zapier, but then you can see your email performance. How many times are we emailing our donors and how many times are people giving? Right, that helps you inform your strategy a little bit. And this is all stuff that, once it's set up properly, does the work on the back end for you. If you are sending out emails once a week, once a quarter, whatever the feeling strikes you, and you don't actually know any data beyond how many people are opening or clicking on your emails, then your emails are not serving your organization in any way. Maybe you sent an email and you got $1,500 from that email, but that doesn't actually tell you anything, right? Unless you understand how it connects. So and speaking of emails, automated acknowledgement letters sent after every single gift. And when you know stewardship, when you are a team of one, stewardship is always, always, always the first thing that falls off the radar. This is why donor retention in our industry hovers around 40%. And for first time gifts, it's, I don't even know. I just saw a new statistic and it was the lowest it's ever been because you don't have something automated, right? And my favorite automated thank you letters are not branded. They don't have your logo on them. They're not beautifully designed and carefully read. They're, hey, Becky, I saw that you made a first time donation to our organization. That means the world to me. Thank you so much for investing in our work. This is what we do. We hope you stick around warmly, Christina. It's just that simple. And every time I've ever gotten one of those, I do this for a living. Every time I've ever gotten one of those non branded automated letters that doesn't look like it's branded, I'm like, wow, did they, did they actually just write this to me? Because this doesn't look like it came
- [16:12]
Becky
from the shock of getting an actual human in this day and age breaks through.
- [16:22]
Podcast Host
Taking a quick pause to tell you about something we're really excited about. So during monthly giving awareness week from May 11th through 16th, GiveButter is giving back. For every new monthly donor who gives $5 or more, your nonprofit earns an extra $10 donation. That's $25,000 in matching funds are available to organizations just like yours.
- [16:43]
Becky
So if you've been thinking about growing your recurring giving program, this is your sign to start. Head over to givebutter.com to learn more or follow the link in the episode's description. Now let's get back to this amazing conversation.
- [17:02]
Christina Martin Kinney
It's. It's not even the. It's not even the shock of that. It is when something looks like a regular email instead of this beautifully branded. You know, those are great. You should write newsletters that are beautifully branded and show things, but we lose so much of the, like, humanity sometimes. And when your first point of contact after making a donation is just this plain text email that says, thank you for being here. Even when I get those and I know they're automated, it just feels so much more personal. Right. And that goes a very, very long way. So anybody who thinks, you know, oh, well, we don't have time to send a newsletter because we don't have time to design something, then don't. Then just write emails.
- [17:49]
Becky
That's it.
- [17:50]
Christina Martin Kinney
Just write like you're writing to your best friend.
- [17:52]
Becky
I think that's. There's so many good tips in there. And I cannot overemphasize enough how important it is to have your tech stack set up for you. It is such a fast, fast acceleration of what we can do to automate our mission. So if someone is listening to this on their lunch break, Christina. And they're feeling that overwhelming, and they're feeling stretched thin. Can you walk us through your playbook a little around this topic to help us move from that overwhelming, overwhelming feeling to that activated feeling?
- [18:26]
Christina Martin Kinney
Yeah. So this is, I mean, you're in a constant state of overwhelm. That's the hardest part about it, right. Is how do you take a step back? I, you know, when I ran this community, the biggest drawback was people feeling like they wanted to be engaged. They wanted to get support from being in a community that's specifically designed to help you when you are in this role. But how do you take the time out of your day, week, month to actually do something that's supposed to help you? And that is a very difficult position to be in. So if you are listening to your lunch break and you're like, this all sounds great, but I. Everything I just said about that. Good, good enough checklist. Right. It's all overwhelming. There are three things that I think you should focus on every single week, no matter what. Take your to do list, which is a mile long. And instead of how am I going to get through this? Think one thing that is going to drive revenue. Submit a grant, Schedule a call with a prod with a prospect. Right. One thing that is going to move your revenue forward. One thing that is going to help build a relationship. Write a handwritten note to a donor. Do a plain text email. Meet a board member for coffee. Right? Or schedule a call time with that prospect that you've been meaning to call forever. Right? Just one thing that builds and moves a relationship forward and one thing that strengthens your systems, whether that's running the deduplication in your CRM. If you have a fancy CRM that does those things. Building a new donor welcome series. Automating your email acknowledgement or updating your automated email acknowledgement that hasn't been touched since 2020. Because we've all been there, right?
- [20:16]
Becky
Been there. Yes. I want to acknowledge I'm guilty of this.
- [20:20]
Christina Martin Kinney
Every week you have three priorities. Revenue driving, relationship building, system strengthening and over time. If you just think the only things I have to do this week are three of those things, it brings everything down because those three tasks are going to drive meaningful progress. The effects will be cumulative. You know, it's, it's not oh well, you're only doing three things a week. It's. You get into this momentum, right? There's a copywriter I follow and she does this thing called tiny tasks before 10 and every morning before 10 o' clock she does everything on her to do list that she knows will take less than 10 minutes to do. And I have implemented that in my own work. And let me tell you, it is life changing because so many of the things we really, really put off emailing the donor, right? It literally takes seven minutes to write the email. But we put it off for so many reasons, for whatever reason, what will take less than 10 minutes to do? And just morning you're drinking your coffee, you just dropped the kids off at school school or took the dog for a walk, whatever it is, and you're just going to sit down and instead of opening your inbox and immediately feeling overwhelmed or opening slack, you're going to say here's my list. What can I do in less than 10 minutes? And I'm going to do as many of those things as I possibly can.
- [21:45]
Becky
I, I just think that this is so helpful in so many ways because you're right the way that, that overtime, I mean the second core value of we are for good is we play the long game if that will exponentially grow and it that you are also focused on strengthening those three things that you are moving the needle each time. And I just have to say I really relate so much. I have a neuro spicy brain so it's very easy to get overwhelmed and Feel like all of your focus is so disparate, but I really think this is a powerful framework. I appreciate you sharing this free resource to just get people focused on the three things that move the needle. And guess what? That's going to be a dopamine hit for you. That's going to release some of that, you know, cortisol. All that is making you feel so overwhelmed. So let's try this. I want to get into the one good thing. Christina, we're going to close out with something specific related to this sort of topic today. What's a one good thing that you could leave behind that somebody could implement today?
- [22:50]
Christina Martin Kinney
You know, a lot of what we're talking about here has to do with time and protecting your time and protecting your energy and dialing things down, doing less. Right. Protecting your time is not a lack of effort. It is a strategic decision. That is my one good thing. Right. That you have to protect your time. And honestly, everything we're talking about here today is going to support your organization in the long run. Because when you are doing everything, nothing is a priority at all. You can't do everything. And every yes is a no to something else. Right? And so you have to be fiercely protective of your time so that you can move the needle forward. We've all heard these horror stories of people ending up in the hospital from burnout. Right? And that does not have to be you. Take a vacation, like, schedule some time. Take a walk. Yes, take a walk, you know, touch grass, all of these things. But you have to protect your time these days of, and I say this with so much empathy of having been there these days, of just powering through meeting after meeting after meeting. And then it's four o', clock, and what did I even do today? Right? I mean, so much of our time is spent in meetings and nonprofits. My goodness, do we love meetings in this sector. And that's why when Pete, when I get pushback, when I say, only do three things this week, and I'm like, honestly, that's probably all you're going to have the time to do. If you factor in all of the meetings that you have to do, and everything else is really just those three things, because it's protecting your time and your energy. And for people, especially founders and executive directors or nonprofit leaders who are carrying the emotional weight of what they are doing, you cannot do it all. It is just too much.
- [25:04]
Becky
And I really appreciate, as we're winding down, you naming the thing because, you know, Dr. Thomas Curran came onto the podcast and he was also a keynote speaker for Impact up and he talks about how we are in this era of perfectionism that is completely impossible. Our bodies cannot rise to this level of work, our minds cannot synthesize the level of things that need to be done and we are just tired. So I thank you for naming that. You are always fantastic when you come onto the podcast and lead so well tell our listeners how they can connect with you and what they can do if they come over and check out Guava Tree Strategies.
- [25:49]
Christina Martin Kinney
Yeah, well, you can connect with me. I'm on LinkedIn all the time. Christina, Martin, Kenny. My website is guavatreestrategies.com Like Becky said at the beginning of this, I literally did write the handbook. It is called the Solo Fundraiser Survival Guide and you can access that. There's a little sample of it that we're gonna put in the show notes with the checklists. But really the best way to connect with me is also just, you know, send me a message. I love connecting with other people in this space. My inbox is always open to anybody who just really wants to talk or empathize. I call myself a recovering Director of development because I am. And if you are there and you are overwhelmed and you are burning out, I want you to know that burnout is not a personal failure. It is a signal. And it is your body and brain saying that something needs to change. Listen to that, honor that. And I hope you take some time to get the support you need because you deserve to do this work without burning out.
- [26:59]
Becky
That's exactly right. And you deserve to do it without feeling alone. So if you are feeling alone, but come over to the We Are For Good Community. It's we are for goodcommunity.com sign up. It's free. It is not only your support system and your Rejuvenation Height team, it is also your space to learn, continue to grow, celebrate this work and stay in it. So thank you once again. Cmk. Please go check out Christina and Guava Tree Strategies and know that you are in this. You have got this and we've got you. Take care, friends.
- [27:36]
Podcast Host
Hey friend, thank you so much for joining us today. If you find yourself looking for a place to stay connected and keep learning between episodes, I hope you'll come and join us inside the We Are For Good community. Yeah, it is free. It's full of incredible non profit leaders like yourself and it's now an app in the Apple App Store and Google Play Store. So you can take this community with you wherever you go. Head over to. We are for goodcommunity.com to find us. We cannot wait to see you inside.