Removing Barriers: How to Gain Clarity for Tangible Year-End Fundraising Results

Okay, all right, so good afternoon or good morning to those of you in other time zones. Welcome to today’s webinar removing barriers, how to gain clarity for tangible year and fundraising results. And presenting today is Mallory Erickson. Mallory is an executive coach, fundraising Read More

Okay, all right, so good afternoon or good morning to those of you in other time zones. Welcome to today’s webinar removing barriers, how to gain clarity for tangible year and fundraising results. And presenting today is Mallory Erickson. Mallory is an executive coach, fundraising consultant and the creator of the power partners formula through which she’s trained more than 80,000 fundraisers. She’s also the host of what the fundraising podcasts and the author of what the fundraising embracing and enabling the people behind the purpose, which explores how a shift away from the scarcity thinking drives greater impact and sustainability. Most recently, Mallory founded proactivated, where she continues to innovate how fundraisers build mission aligned partnerships with confidence. Now, before I hand it over to Mallory, please note that the webinar is being recorded and will be sent out later this week, also with so many people in the webinar, questions added to a continually scrolling chat can easily be missed, so be sure to add your questions to the Q and A section for easy visibility. So welcome, Mallory. You are all set to get started.
Amazing. Thank you, Lori, and huge thanks to the whole DonorPerfect team. I’m so excited to be with you today. Keep it coming in the chat. I want to know where you’re calling in from, if you want to share what organization you’re with. I love watching connection happen in the chat during during these webinars. So thank you so much for joining me today. There’s so much content that I want to go over with all of you, and like Lori said, my name is Mallory. I’m the founder and CEO of practivated, a donor simulation tool to help you practice for donor meetings. We have an incredible partnership with DonorPerfect as well. I’m also the creator of the power partners formula, author and host of what the fundraising. I’d love it if you found me and connected with me on LinkedIn, told me that you were here. I really love being able to stay in touch with everybody who comes on these webinars. And probably like many of you, for those of you who aren’t familiar with me or my work, I became an accidental fundraiser, first actually, as a managing director and then a nonprofit executive director. And I want to know how many people are here with me today who are also accidental fundraisers. So you can just put a Y in that chat, and I expect to see it go as we There we go.
So I know that I’m not alone and you are not alone either, but I had all of these sort of delusional expectations of what it would look like to be a fundraiser that I was going to have going to have consistent fundraising success, that I was going to feel like this empowered and confident leader, that I was never going to work more than 40 hours a week, that I was going to have donors coming to me, and the reality was quite different. And I call this my impact report fake phase, where I really felt this pressure to put up this appearance everywhere, like I had it all together. But the reality was, it was a constant hustle. I was working 12 to 15 hour days, sacrificing my health, my relationships. I ended up developing really serious chronic pain, completely burning out and getting to this moment where I was like a year from now, I cannot be doing this anymore. I need something to change in order for me to stay in the nonprofit sector. And I ended up having this incredible combination of life experiences where I was certified as an executive coach, trained in habit and behavior design and design thinking, and those frameworks came together and completely changed the way that I fundraised. And not only did it have big financial implications from you know, I moved an organization from, like, 200,000 to 2 million, and then another from 1 million to 3.8 but I started to feel fundamentally different as a fundraiser. And I was like, if I can love fundraising, anybody can love fundraising. And that’s what led me to create my signature program, the power partners formula. And I’m so excited about the content that we’re going to go over today, because the power partners formula fuses together all of those different frameworks that I mentioned, executive coaching, habit and behavior, Design, Design Thinking mixed with fundraising strategy. When I launched this program, I started to have, I started to get emails from folks who were inside the program saying I just moved my organization from $200,000 a year to $700,000 a year, or I just passed the million dollar mark for the first time, and I would log into the course. It’s an online course. I would log into the course to try to figure out, Okay, what did they do? How do I help other people replicate this? Which modules does it look like were the most important or valuable? And I kept finding, time and time again that there were a lot of people who had only finished phase zero of the course, and phase zero of the course is really what we’re focused on today, the barriers, the things that get in the way of us being able to take the most emboldened, embodied, clear fundraising action. You actually know so much more than. You think you do about your donors and fundraising and what to do, but we have all this stuff, and I’ll explain what that stuff is in our brain that gets in the way of us being able to take that most aligned action. And so today is such a critical topic area, because it really is about creating capacity inside of you instantly by removing these barriers that are so typical for getting in our way. Now I have to tell you, I was in Montana last week doing a keynote for the Montana nonprofit association, and I played a little trick on them to start. And I thought about playing the same trick on you, but then I thought, were on a virtual webinar and you might actually just leave. So I don’t have you as a as a trapped audience in the same way. So I’m just going to tell you what I did in that room on Friday, and I’m going to explain how that sort of leads into understanding our barriers. So I get on stage, I introduce them to power partners, and then I say to the room of 350 people in 10 seconds, I’m going to pick one of you at random to come up here, and you have two minutes to pitch your organization with your best power partner, energy, okay? And maybe you can tell me in the chat how that would make you feel if I had done that right now with one of you, if I said I’m going to select somebody from this audience and ask them to come up here with me right now. Leslie, would cry. Okay, you’re probably not alone. Leslie, well, then I made it even worse, you guys, I put a timer, and I said, get that pitch ready. Y’all, we have 10 seconds and I’m going to be picking looking at one of you out there. Okay, panic. Cathy, okay. Stephanie works best, under pressure. Here’s the thing, though, y’all, there was nothing logically that should have made them afraid of going up there and talking about the organization. I didn’t say I would rate them. I there was nothing actually at stake, right? Logically, but their fear and their stress, like so many of you who are expressing it in the chat, were completely real and totally valid. And here’s what happened in the room when I when I put that prompt up there, what do you think? Did they feel their heart rate start to pound and they start to tighten up? Right? Some people started to experience that. They started to go into freeze mode, okay? For others, they thought, this is a great time for a bathroom break. And y’all, I literally put this on my slide, which they did not know when they got the first prompt. And apparently three people had left for a bathroom break when I gave that original prompt, right? So some people were like, This is a great time for a bathroom break. Other people decided that they hated me, right? And this was officially the worst Kino ever, and they were going into fight mode. Okay, so these responses, all of those responses, whether you, you know, couldn’t move or got up and went to the bathroom or were immediately super angry with me, all of those responses are built in protection systems, and they are designed to keep us safe. Okay, what happened in that moment was that I activated their amygdala, and maybe some of yours also. So do a little nervous system regulation if just seeing that slide pushed your heart rate up, right? But what I did was I activated their amygdala, their lizard brain. Okay, back brain. That’s our fight, flight, freeze response. It’s our stress response, okay? And I did that in a very particular way. But before I explain, explain that, I want to say that, you know the science fear, what happened when I activated their amygdala was that I activated fear. And fear is a primitive, fast response mechanism that is meant to protect us from immediate threats. Okay? It is a very necessary part of our evolution, and it doesn’t have great discernment between whether or not a lion is going to eat us in the woods or we have to go and walk into a donor meeting. Okay? And so in that moment in the room, when I put that scenario in front of them, their stress response came on in all those different ways, because I actually created this sort of, this sort of hyper stressful situation. There was uncertainty about who was going to actually get called, who was going to be brought up there. There was a fear of rejection. What if people don’t like what I say? What if they don’t like my organization? There was an immediate pressure. I mean, the countdown timer. Y’all, I’m getting nervous looking at my own countdown timer. These are people who are just like you, nonprofit leaders, who are already overworked, already tired, doing so many things. And then in addition to that, there was this sort of power dynamic, right? Was anybody going to say no to me if I called them up on stage? All of those things that I mentioned, uncertainty, rejection, pressure, overwork, power, dynamics, all of those things have been scientifically proven to increase our anxiety, stress, chronic stress and burnout. Okay, and guess what? All of those things happen every day in fundraising. Amazing, okay? Uncertainty, rejection, power dynamics, overwork, pressure, they are a part of fundraising. And so what we’re going to be talking about today is how we deal with that, how we address that, instead of pretending like it shouldn’t be there or good fundraisers wouldn’t feel that way, because, let me tell you, after training over 80,000 fundraisers at this point, they’re probably that number is probably higher, but I can’t count higher. I know that these are things that every single fundraiser deals with. And the reason why it’s so important to understand this and to know this is because when anxiety and stress are activated, when we’re in chronic stress, when we’re in burnout, it actually removes our capacity for connection, compassion, empathy, closeness, feelings of trust, social recognition, our ability to be innovative, Collaborative, flexible. I mean, the list goes on and on. When our back brain is leading the way, when our stress response is leading the way, our brain has two jobs, don’t die, and can serve as much energy as possible. And so what it does is it shuts down all these other parts of our brain that we need the most when it comes to leading our organizations and fundraising, especially in 2025 it turns them off, and so we have to have tools and strategies that incorporate and deal with anxiety and stress activation if we want to fundraise in a way that’s really rooted in connection, relationship building, if we want to be those innovative and collaborative leaders that I know we want to be. Okay, are you with me? The chatbot very quiet, and I’m wondering if that’s because everybody’s like, whoa, or if you’re still here with me. So can you let me know like you are here you are ready to roll Okay? Deer in headlights and drama. Oh. Terry, hi, okay, alright, Look, I I promise you that everything I throw your way I’m going to show you how to handle, how to deal with, but this is why it’s so important to understand what’s happening in your brain, right? Because if we’re going to really talk about removing the true barriers that are in the way of of some of your fundraising ability and success and things like that. We need to have some recognition around what’s happening, what is biologically holding us back from taking some of the actions we’ve been trying to take. I love this quote. I interviewed this guy, Arash, on on my podcast, what the fundraising and I’ll drop the link in a second for you as well. But he is the head of the fear Research Lab at Wayne State. And he says this quote, you know, fear is supposed to be fast. It isn’t supposed to be logical, right? Its job is not to be logical. And so if you want to listen to more. He talks about, like, the science of fear, and all the different ways scientifically that we can reduce fear. But I think it’s really important to understand, like, when fear shows up, its only job is to be fast, right? So we think, Oh, it’s strategic, right? I thought that thing. And so this must be a strategic decision, but if it’s coming from a place of fear, we actually really can’t rely on that in that way, because its job is not to be logical. Its job is to be fast. Okay? And I want to clarify something so stress isn’t bad, okay, we need stress. Stress is a motivator. It’s a very important part of our lives. Cortisol creates focus. There’s all these components of stress that are really important. Okay, the problem is, is what happens when the stress response doesn’t end? Okay? So your stress responses, your sympathetic nervous system getting activated, it needs to end. Your parasympathetic nervous system needs to come back online. We’ll talk about this a little bit later with some somatic tools, but the whole point of stress is that it’s supposed to ebb and flow. The biggest problem that we see in the nonprofit sector, and that I see with fundraisers every single day, and was 100% true for me, is that the stress response is not ending. And when that happens, when the stress response does not end, when we get stuck in stress, fundraising can feel like this, so please let me know, is this a photo of you? Because this was 100% an accurate, real life photo of me as a fundraiser, just trying to figure out, like feeling so scattered about all the different things, all the different possibilities, just like spinning the plates and maybe my little Canva graphic doesn’t resonate with you, so you can let me know. Is this an exact picture of you as a fundraiser? And I don’t even know if you can tell what’s happening there, right?
Okay, yeah, I’m sorry. I don’t mean to, like, start with any, like, gut punches, like, this is my desktop. You a lot of times, okay, but this is what happens y’all. This is a stress response. This is not us trying to be. This is not us pursuing excellence in our work. This is not us being trying to be the best leader that we can be. We might think that, but what this actually is, is a stress response. Okay, so I just want to make sure that that we understand that, because one of the things that’s so important about your about your fundraising, and your in particular, is that donor behavior is a response behavior, and it’s primarily a response behavior to our behavior as fundraisers, how we show up, how we open opportunities for connection, the different touch points we put in front of our donors, okay? And what drives our behavior as fundraisers is what’s happening inside our brain and body. And this is why we cannot disconnect these things okay? Because if we just keep thinking that our donors are going to, you know, show up or behave a certain way or give without being asked in a certain way, or without having these conversations or these touch points, then we are going to be disappointed, and we’re going to feel like, number one, we don’t have control, which we do, and we’re going to start to feel like it’s happening to us and we’re at the effect of our fundraising instead of really driving it. Okay, because when we don’t understand this. Fundraising is is a self fulfilling prophecy. Okay? Fundraising is a self fulfilling prophecy. You can only raise the amount of money that you believe is out there to be raised. There is so much science that supports this. I didn’t I did an interview with this guy, Dr Christian Bush, on the podcast years ago as well. He wrote the book The Science of serendipity, and he talks about results that they saw in their studies, just when somebody checked a box saying that they thought they were a lucky person, versus people who didn’t think they were a lucky person, they would be set up for the same scenario, and the people who thought they were lucky would find money on the ground or connect with somebody in a coffee shop who could get them a job, and the scenario was identical, but the people who felt they were lucky found those things okay. So our brains are so incredibly powerful, and fundraising is a self fulfilling prophecy. We have to decide what self fulfilling prophecy we want to create okay and truly like your end of year fundraising depends on that. Okay? So I talk a lot about in my work the cognitive behavior loop. This is the idea that our thoughts and our beliefs inform how we feel and then ultimately how we show up, and the results that we get from that, okay? And one of the things that I think is important to understand is that the actions that we take, often, we just look at the actions that we take, and we don’t think about the energy with which we do that action. Okay? And so it’s really important to understand that it’s not just whether or not you’ve done something or, like, check that box, but how you did it. I mean, tell me in the chat is just having a donor meeting enough. Like, are all donor meetings the same? Whether you show up with a certain type of energy or another, or, like, you know, positive energy or right? They’re not all the same, right? And sometimes people will say to me, Mallory, is it bad that I watch Netflix for two hours a night? And my my response to that is, well, how do you feel after you watch it? Right? Because the action, the action is not about good or bad, it’s like, what is the energy behind that action? Why are we choosing to do that thing? How do we feel after? Did we really stay in alignment when we made that choice? If you watch it two hours of Netflix a night, and you sleep like a baby because of it, and it totally relaxes your body and and like brings you back into yourself, and it feels great, and you’re consciously choosing it. There’s nothing wrong with with the actions, right? But it’s about awareness around the the actions that we’re taking. Okay? And so one of the ways, in my coaching framework that we taught that we have sort of a better sense of the energy with which we’re we’re bringing into actions, is this idea of catabolic and anabolic energy. Okay, so catabolic and anabolic energy, those are energies that exist in the universe. They are real things for this and for the purposes of this, they’re the only two that we’re going to talk about related to, sort of like how we feel, but catabolic energy is really depleting, defeating energy. It’s where we can feel a sense of dread, and we get tunnel vision. We think everything is sort of right or wrong. There’s a lot of judgment in catabolic energy, and we feel really at the effect of our life, okay? And so I want you to just think for a second like, you know, recall when you most recently experienced catabolic energy. What was the experience like, you know, what did that energy feel like? And then, how did it influence how you showed up? How did it influence your performance? How did it influence how you. Showed up, and maybe you’re like, Mallory, I experienced catabolic energy when I saw that slide about you inviting people up to give their pitch. That’s okay, but, but also, like, think about it related to your fundraising. When you experience this, I just want you to like kind of process that you don’t have to share it in the chat. You’re obviously always welcome to. But I know this is a little bit personal anabolic energy, on the other hand, is a fueling energy. It’s where we see a prism of opportunities, joy, connection, more sort of like helpfulness, being in service of people. We experience fearlessness when we’re in really anabolic states, and it’s a lot less judgmental. We’re more curious and more open, okay, connected. I want you to think about when you most recently experienced anabolic energy. I want you to think about what that experience was, and what that energy felt like, and how it influenced your performance when you felt it. So just take a moment and sort of like digest that a little bit. Okay, so a lot of times catabolic and anabolic energy can come from, can both, like, sort of come from, and also perpetuate some thought patterns, typical thought patterns that get in the way of holding us back, okay, so in fundraising, a lot of the internal barriers that we experience are called the gales, okay? And these are four different types of thought patterns that really hold us back, limiting beliefs, interpretations, assumptions and Gremlin Okay, so and I, we’re going to talk about each of them, from like the weakest to the strongest type of thought pattern. Okay, we’re going to talk about it specifically related to your fundraising. But I see you Maxwell, and I will tell you that everything that I teach and talk about is can be applied to anything. But so often, like when I was in Montana on Friday, five different people came up to me and they said, You know, I’ve done work like this, like I’ve worked with a coach, or I’ve worked with a therapist, or I am a therapist, so I know a lot of the things you’re talking about, and I’ve never thought to apply it to my fundraising. So so often we like compartmentalize the parts of ourselves. And so even if you’re familiar with some of these practices, you might have never applied them to fundraising before, and they are so, so, so powerful when you do Okay, so we’re going to talk about the gales, and then I’m going to be giving you, and then I’ll give you tons of different strategies for dealing with all these different things. Okay, but awareness is a very, very important part of removing the barriers. So we really do have to start here. Okay, so limiting beliefs, okay, limiting beliefs are is something that we accept about life, about ourselves, about our world, about our fundraising, about our donors and and it limits what you think you are or what you think you can do. So when people say things like, we don’t have donors who can give that amount. That is a limiting belief, okay? And maybe you’re like, No Mallory, we really don’t. It’s a limiting belief. Anything that is that certain, certain unless you have asked every single donor in your database. It is a limiting belief unless you have data, 100% data then it is a limiting belief, because you are putting certainty on something with a mental model that is keeping you stuck truthfully. And so we because we avoid asking for donations, or we hesitate to approach people, or we don’t want to ask for too much, or all these different things, because we’ve made up our mind with certainty about something okay. And I want to tell you for for a moment how powerful this is okay. So in prior to like 1954 I think it was the we believed as a society, humans, believed that it was physically impossible to run a mile faster than four minutes. We were like the human body cannot do it. We cannot run a mile faster than four minutes in 1954
That record was broken. Okay, and the person ran the mile in like three minutes and 56 seconds, or something like that. But here’s the amazing thing, after he did that, person after person after person started to run the mile faster than four minutes. This is how powerful our brains are. This is why you cannot find the way forward if we are certain it isn’t there. Our brains simulate our reality based on our thoughts and our beliefs. Okay, so one of the biggest ways to start to get curious about a limiting belief is, like, how true is that belief really? Do I have data to back that belief up in its entirety? Like, why do I have that level of certainty what might also be true? Okay, anything. And I’ll talk more about curiosity later. But we just want to sort of get curious about some of those limiting beliefs that we’re like so set on in our ways. Okay? The second type is interpretation. So interpretations are opinions or judgment that we create about an event or a situation or a person or an experience that we believe to be true. Okay? And I am going to ask you to participate in the chat on this one, but let’s say you haven’t heard from a donor in 72 hours. How many of y’all just me a little why in the chat? If you go right into I must have said something wrong in that email. Something didn’t go right in that donor meeting that I’m now going to second guess and spiral around for the rest of the day, like I did something wrong. Right? Here we go. Y’all, this is an interpretation, okay? We and we don’t know that like it, yes? Tracy, yes, unfortunately, and I just want to say that, like you are not bad and there’s nothing wrong with you, because that’s where your brain goes. That’s your stress response, right? It’s trying to protect you. It’s trying to it’s not correct. It’s not correct. That’s not why they’re not writing you back. But it feels that real, because your brain is trying to protect you. It’s trying to get you to play small. It’s trying to get you to not risk anything, right? And so it’s really important that we start to notice these things, like, Whoa, I just jumped right into that interpretation, right? When people would be late in the past, I would have this, oh, they don’t respect me. What that had nothing to do with why people were late, right? They had time management challenges. Or we’re back to back, or we’re doing way too many things, taking care of way too many people, right? But we go right into this interpretation, and once again, we are certain without data. Okay? So some ways to challenge interpretations when they come in is, you can ask yourself, like, what’s another or like, opposite way of looking at this situation? Sometimes with my clients, I will have them write down their interpretation, and then on the other side of the page, I have them write the exact opposite interpretation, right? Here’s why this is so important. Because if you think, okay, that donor hasn’t gone back to me in 72 hours, or two weeks, or whatever it is, and you your interpretation is that you did something wrong, how many donors do you think you’re going to reach out to today? How many give me a little guess in the chat? Okay, if you are, like, 01, 100% right, because you’re like, oh, I don’t know how to do this. I’m bad at this, like, and so you’re not it’s going to stop. It is going to create a barrier to your fundraising success. But if you say, oh my gosh, I know it’s such a busy time and everybody’s getting inundated with, like, you know, notifications and emails and all these things, like, never before, I’m going to need to follow up a few extra times. Or maybe I just need to surface this with a little one liner at the top, like, if that’s your orientation, like, it’s probably timing, oh, they have two little kids. Like they’re super busy. It starts to open up that that movement, right? You get out of that binary, absolute judgment about what must be true that then holds you back from taking any other action. And instead, it’s, it’s openness about, oh, yeah, there’s a lot of different things that could be true here, right? And in that openness, you are not held back in the same way. Okay? So that’s a little bit about interpretations. Assumptions are the belief that something is true because of, you know, thoughts, opinions, perceptions, because of your past or something that happened before in the past. Okay, so, and we do this for better and for worse, sometimes in fundraising, right? But it’s like, oh, because that donor said no last year to sponsoring a table at the gala, we’re not going to ask them this year why? Like, it’s 365 days later, and everything about the world has changed. How on earth do we know that that person is not interested this year? Right? Like, everything is different. And so we make a lot of assumptions about our donors based on how they behaved in the past, and when everything about their circumstance is changed, we make a lot of assumptions about laps donors, because behavior is changing, right? We make an assumption, oh, they’re not going to keep giving because they haven’t given in two years. We have no idea financially what they’ve been going through for the last two years. So why are we going to make an assumption, as if we know that they’re definitely not going to do this thing because they didn’t do it last year, right? So one of the challenges, one of the sentences to challenge this thinking, is to say to yourself, like, just because it’s happened in the past, why does it have to happen again and then, like, what has changed since the last time that I experienced this that might lead to different results this time, okay? Because once again, right here, we are talking about the barriers to your fundraising. And so once again, if you don’t challenge these assumptions, we end up making a bunch of decisions for our donors. We leave them off of we leave certain people off of things because of their past behavior. We don’t invite people to be a part of something because of their past. Behavior or what they’ve told us in the past, even though, once again, everything has changed, right? Like life is dynamic. Lots of things are changing all the time in our own lives, in the world around us, in your organization, and so if we don’t catch some of these assumptions, then we end up once again, creating self fulfilling prophecies based on the past instead of really where we want to go in the future with our fundraising. Does this make sense? Y’all with me?
Okay, yes. Okay, alright, okay. So the last one I’m not going to talk about in super detail, but I do want to bring it up, because it is a part of these types of thought patterns. Okay, so the Gremlins are our underlying self critic voice that we are not blank enough. Okay, we are not smart enough. We are Not Funny enough, we are not pretty enough. I hear all the time from people fundraising, and it this like, literally breaks my heart. They’re like, I’m not charismatic enough to be a fundraiser. Those are our like, inner critic. Okay, they are our that, once again, it’s a form of protection. It’s a form of our body trying to keep us safe. By saying, don’t, don’t move, right? Remember, don’t move. Stay alive, conserve as much energy as possible. That’s the whole point. So it’s it’s trying to keep us small. It’s trying to have us play it safe. Oh, well, maybe somebody somewhere wouldn’t like you, and so you better just not talk to anybody ever again. Okay, that’s its role. And I don’t ever think we completely lose our Gremlin but I will say that you can do a lot to take the microphone away from your Gremlin. Okay, so that’s self critic. That’s always there to a certain extent. I feel my self critic come every single time I’m I’m up leveling, I’m doing something, for the first time I hear it comes. Like, there it is. And I’m just like, oh, there it is. Like, of course you’re here right now. Like, this is scary, this is intimidating, this is new. And so like, of course, you’re showing up right now because you want to protect me. That makes perfect sense, but I don’t need your protection. So for you with your Gremlin like, just start to notice. Just start to notice those voices. Notice that it’s not you even just that awareness is going to start to create opening and curiosity and space and clarity around your fundraising, okay? Because at its core, the gales are about judgment, right? That is the thing about all of them. They are about this, like certainty, without without data and that, and it’s certainty to keep us stuck, to protect us. Okay? So I’m so glad Stephanie that this is resonating with you truly, like this has the capacity all those open tabs on your computer. I mean, I don’t know about you, you guys, but like, the amount of free templates and downloads and scripts and all these things that I would download and open and I would think, Oh, this is what’s going to make my fundraising easier, right? How many of you have downloaded all the things trying to figure out how to make fundraising easier? Because those things, they make fundraising simpler. Okay, they make fundraising simpler. They are important because they make fundraising simpler, but they don’t make fundraising easier, because fundraising is hard and it is vulnerable and it is personal, and so if the only way to make fundraising easier is the stuff we’re talking about today, because ease is in relate in your brain and your body, and it’s related to your stress response, okay, so I just want to make sure like that, that that is clear. Okay, let’s talk about removing barriers. Okay, I always want to give you way too many things, so I’m doing it once again. So tool number one, recognize when stress is present. We have talked about this a lot already, but I just wanted to highlight one other piece, fear can be very, very, very tricky, and so I want to bring your awareness to this. Fear can sound like compassion. Okay, maybe you’ve said this. Maybe you want to tell me in the chat they’re really too busy to come to this event right now. Okay, fear can sound like compassion. Fear can sound strategic. We should wait until the campaign is further along before making this ask, okay? Fear can sound strategic. Fear can sound protective. We don’t want to bother them with too many updates, okay, fear can sound protective. Fear can sound like loyalty. We shouldn’t reach out again. They are they’ve already given once this year, okay? Fear can sound like loyalty. Okay, so fear feels reasonable in the moment, but it is pulling us away from connection. And so if your goal is to foster connection, y’all, you’re going to need to risk discomfort. Human relationships involve discomfort. New relationship. Relationships involve discomfort. Inviting somebody to give their best gift involves discomfort, not because it’s wrong, because it’s vulnerable, okay. And so if your goal is to foster connection, if your goal with end of year is to bring more people in, invite people to give their best gift, raise more money, then this is a piece of the puzzle, and we have to recognize and start to see things for what they are. Okay. We have to be able to start to notice, ooh, that’s a fear thought, not actually related to strategy or, Oh, that’s a fear thing. I thought maybe it was this, okay. So I want you to just take a quick moment and do a little personal reflection. I want you to think about one thing on your to do list that you haven’t taken action on, because what you’re now realizing is there might be some hidden fear or discomfort. Okay, and you don’t have to tell us what it is, but maybe you could just tell me in the chat that you’ve like recognized one thing, or you found one thing, or, you know what I’m talking about. Okay, so because a lot of times, yes, more than one totally Erin, I love that you said that, yes, a lot of times we there are these things that sit on our list for a few weeks and we’re like, oh, I just didn’t have time. But when we’re really honest with ourselves. Some of those tasks are two minute tasks, five minute tasks. We we could find the time for them. We aren’t finding the time for them because they involve a level of fear and discomfort, okay, and so this is so normal, okay? And we’re going to talk about some strategies for reducing fear to help you get over that action line with those things on your list, but I just want you to know how normal that is. I also wanted to share with you, you guys, this is brand new, but I am, you know, I run this company, practivated, where we do, we help you practice for donor conversations and in a simulated AI environment. And we just analyzed 106 fundraisers across 370 donor conversations inside our platform, and we saw some really amazing trends related to what we’re talking about right now. What happens when fear shows up in a meeting? What happens when fear shows up in a relationship? What’s the way? What are some of the hidden ways that it shows up in donor conversations and in our relationship building? So if you want to, if you want to look at that study and sort of see some of those other pieces, download, download that. I meant to get the link, but somehow I didn’t, so you have to use the QR phone on your phone. Sorry about that. Okay, so this level of awareness is so important because without awareness of our emotions and some of these things, our fear continues to be faster than logic. Okay, the next thing I’m going to say here is really, really quick. I say it all the time, but when you notice that fear, when you notice the discomfort, the most important thing to do is to acknowledge and validate that fear. All you have to do is say, oh, it makes sense that I feel that way. You’re not saying, oh, yeah, that donor definitely hates me. All you’re doing is saying, Oh, it makes sense that I feel that way. It makes sense that I’m feeling a little tender around this. It makes sense that I’m nervous, okay, just acknowledging and validating how we feel. And this is both true in terms of how we talk to ourselves, but also how we talk to our donor, how we talk to our team members. Just acknowledging and validating how somebody feels is like throwing a bucket of cold water on a fire. It actually allows us to down regulate and be able to move forward. A lot of times we get stuck because a lot of times we get stuck because we feel like we can’t. We feel like we can’t, like do that. We need to tough love ourselves. We need to, you know, figure out how to, you know, just pull up our pants or whatever and keep going. I’m not going to say the other word, right. This came up last week as well in one of my sessions. She’s like, I feel like I should just be able to, like, you know, go, grind, push harder, whatever. Those things actually don’t work, especially, especially, especially when stress is involved. Okay, so the next piece here, and I’m going to try to grab Julie that that for you while I’m while I’m doing this. So one of the things that I that I want to highlight is that curiosity is the antidote for um, is the antidote for judgment.
Okay, clearly I cannot multitask. I don’t know if anybody got that link on their phone that can drop this in the chat, but I’m going to ask for some community support here, because I cannot keep talking about this and get this for Julie at the same time. So if anybody can grab this and share it with Julie, that would be so amazing. Okay, so the thing I want you to understand is. We talked a lot about how the gales are related to all of these different pieces of judgment. And the opposite of judgment is curiosity. So one of the biggest Hacks is actually just to be able to create curiosity around everything you saw, all of that when it came to the gales, when it came to, when it came to, like getting out of each of those types. And so I just want to, like, bring that up, because that is, like, the quickest and fastest way to be able to move through something like this. And then the other piece here, okay, Julie, I did figure out how to get it, okay. The other piece here is to think about the opposite story we talked about that a little bit related to interpretations in particular, but in general, just giving yourself the exact opposite story, you’re not arguing with yourself about which thing is true. You’re really just getting curious and saying, Okay, well, what’s the exact opposite of that? Okay, what’s the exact opposite of that? What might also be true, and just by putting the exact opposite, what our brain actually does is it starts to recognize that there’s a lot of gray area in the middle, right, that there’s a lot of opportunities. Remember how I said anabolic energy is that prism of opportunities? And so a lot of times, like just by putting that opposite story, and we’re able to see that actually, there’s a lot of different components here. There’s a lot of different possibilities here that donor doesn’t definitely hate me and is never going to give or never going to talk to us again. Okay, tool number four that I want to make sure and thank you, Michael, I love it. Thank you so much. Okay, so tool number four that I want to make sure we talk about is around somatic exercises. So a lot of the strategies that I’ve been talking to you about today are cognitive strategies, right? They’re reframing in your head, curious. They’re happening inside your brain. Sometimes, y’all, we are too stressed that our brain, we can’t get out of it in our brain alone. Okay? And maybe you’ve found yourself in a situation like this, where you’re you’re spiraling, you’re negotiating with yourself, the first thing definitely like, acknowledge and validate how you feel. See if you can, just kind of like, pull out of that, get curious around it. But if you can, you’ve got to go into your body. And also, somatic exercises don’t always have to be something that you use when you’re in like a dire situation, like somatic exercises, like going for a five minute walk around the block in between calls, or listening to some like, pump up music before you do a webinar. Like I do every single time. And Lori’s always like, I’m like, I’m going to go on mute for a second for my last song right beforehand, right? So you can actually, like, move like, bring somatic exercises into rituals to help, like, regulate your energy, regulate your nervous system at different times. And so one thing I want to one what I want to say about somatic exercises is, oftentimes, when we think about somatic exercises, we particularly think about down regulation tools. Okay, so how many, how many of you have been told, you know, you’re stressed out, and you’re told, okay, just take some deep breaths, or, Oh, meditation would be really good for you. Okay, anybody is that like the number one thing you get told when you’re really stressed out? Yes, okay, so this is super normal, right? And I’m not saying those things are not good. Down regulation tools, incredibly helpful. There’s something called Box breathing. That’s a great example of that different grounding exercises, something called bilateral tapping, that can help down regulate your nervous system. All those things are really helpful. Meditation, breath work, all of it, but sometimes, because of where our energy’s at and where our stress response is, those strategies can actually increase our anxiety. So before I started public speaking, people would always say, Take some deep breaths before you go on stage. And I would try to do that. And I literally would start to feel like I was going to explode out of my body, like I was, like, just trying to, like, do that deep breathing, like it was the wrong energy. And so what I actually needed in those moments was up regulation. Those are that’s things like upbeat music, going for a walk outside, jumping on a little mini trampoline. Okay, sometimes you’ll notice, and maybe if you have kids, you notice they really like to wrestle before bed. My husband always used to be like you’re getting them riled up, but actually it would help them sleep so much better, because they needed to up regulate in order to down regulate. So I don’t expect you to, sort of like understand immediately all these different things. What I want you to understand about somatic exercises. Well, two things, one is that DonorPerfect sponsored last year this really incredible stress management course. I’m going to drop this in the chat too, and this is like a 30 minute course with all different types of exercise, cognitive tools, somatic tools. I walk you through them. I show you them. It’s only 30 minutes long, so highly recommend if you want some more guidance there. But one of the main things I want you to understand is that it’s really about having a toolbox of different somatic tools that you. Can try out and test out in different moments, different scenarios, different environments, like, need different things, right? Like you might not in the middle of a staff meeting or a board meeting, feel like you want to do butterfly hug. You know that’s okay, but maybe in those meetings you’re focused on your feet and doing a grounding exercise, because you can do it in a in private you’re or nobody’s noticing what you’re doing. Okay? So it’s just important to, like, feel like you have a number of different tools that you can pull on in those in those moments. Okay, so, okay, tool number five, y’all, I don’t even know this probably should be like 12 different tools, but this is around having your own back, and one of the things that I want you to recognize is that
one of the most powerful things that you can do is like Support yourself, is to talk nicely to yourself, to say positive things, to give yourself compassion. And I remember when I first started talking about the gales with people and how to sort of question or get curious around the gales, people would say things like, wait, you want us to talk to ourselves. And I’d be like, Oh honey, like you are talking to yourself all day, every day. The question is, what are you saying? Like we already are talking to ourselves all the time, but how are we treating ourselves? How are we talking to ourselves? Because here’s the deal, y’all, you’re never going to be able to remove these barriers. You’re never going to be able to build the self fulfilling prophecy that you want for your fundraising, if you’re beating yourself up constantly about every single thing that didn’t go exactly as planned and what you didn’t get right, right, perfectionism is a stress response. It’s a protection response. And if we don’t have self compassion for ourselves, we are not actually going to take risks, because then we know, then we know what happens to ourselves when we get something wrong and nobody, let me tell you another thing, nobody wants to do things that they are being talked negatively to throughout the entire time they’re doing them. I had this really weird experience recently where I realized so before I had kids, I did CrossFit with my husband, and I loved it. I felt so strong and powerful, and it was such a good mental health thing for me, and but ever since I had kids, I’ve hated it, and I could not figure it out. I could not figure out why I hated this thing that I used to love. And I finally, the other day, I was in the gym after years of like, Why do I hate this thing? I can’t get back into it. I can’t build a habit around it. I never want to do it. I realized that since having kids, I am so mean to myself when I lift weights. I’m like, Oh my god. I can’t believe you lost all that muscle mass. Oh my gosh. I can’t believe you didn’t work out more during your pregnancy so that you could have retained blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I’m just so mean to myself, so no wonder I don’t want to do CrossFit exercises anymore, because I don’t want to hear that voice all the time. And so let me tell you something. If you are doing that in your fundraising, you’re also going to never want to fundraise. Okay, you’re going to never want to fundraise, to talk to donors, to have donor meetings, to do those things, if every time you do, you are so mean to yourself, okay? So cultivating self compassion, having your own back is a really big piece of this puzzle. I also want to encourage you to get support through community and connection, whatever that looks like to you. I love DonorPerfect. I love the ways they gather communities on the webinar with their users, all of those things. Find your people right. Find your people, whether it’s a local Ed cohort or working with a coach in a group coaching program, whatever it is like, get support through community and connection. Not all of them are cost anything, even. And then the other thing is, show yourself shine. So in habit and behavior design, we talk about how important it is to give yourself positive reinforcement for taking the actions that you want to take. So that’s not just about the outcomes. Okay, y’all we are going into end of year giving, and I know you have goals and metrics and all those things that I know they matter, but remember what I said before about pressure and overwork and uncertainty and rejection and all of those things y’all you need to motivate yourself to be able to do a ton of actions that you’re not going to get, that you’re not going to get an instant feedback loop around. And so in order to continue to motivate yourself to take those actions to put yourself out there, to be vulnerable, you need to show yourself shine when you take those actions. So that can be as simple as good job Mallory for sending that email like that was scary, right? So for all of you who identified people on identified things on your task list that have been sitting there for two weeks, three weeks, but, but they are short tasks, but maybe. Be fears involved. I want you to be brave. I want you to do it today, and after you do it, I want you to show yourself shine. Okay, I have a few things I want to give away, and then we’re going to ask some we’re going to do some questions at the end. But one of the things I think is so important to understand is that if you want to raise more at end of year, okay, you have to feel better to do better to raise more. These things are intimately connected. Okay, when fundraising feels better to you, it feels better to your donors. So removing the different barriers that we talked about today, that is really the first step having awareness around those different components. These are the first steps in helping you to be able to be a more embodied and aligned version of yourself. Okay, so when we were putting together this webinar with me and the DonorPerfect team, I was like, there’s really, like two parts around end of year that I want to talk about. There’s removing the barriers, the things that get in the way that even if we have the strategy, even if we have the templates, even if we have the blah, blah, blah, we can’t actually action on because there’s all these other things in our way. We have to talk about that, and then we need to talk about how you ask people for money. So our next webinar, you can scan this QR code again, because I’m the QR code queen, even though you cannot actually like do every QR code on a on a computer, which, once again, I’m realizing now, but I dropped the link in the chat too. So you should absolutely come to part two to this on October 15, where we’re going to get super, super, super tactical around, how you make the ask, how you move relationships forward, how you structure conversations, and I’m even going to throw in some, like, extra special pieces around how you get the meetings to make the ask in the first place, especially right now, when I know you know, there’s just so much happening and folks are really getting, you know, hit from a million directions with prompts and emails and all those things. So make sure that you sign up for Part Two, making the ask all the things, and then I’m doing something super simple, so or super special for y’all today. So I love my partnership with DonorPerfect. I love that DonorPerfect was the first platform to really like embrace practivated as a bundle. It’s not an integrated product, but bundles it with their software. And so I’m doing, I’m doing something super simple for everybody on the call, whether you’re a DonorPerfect customer or not, we’re going to do a giveaway of a full year inside practivated. So if you want a safe space to role play practice donor conversations, get coaching around the clock, 24/7 from our incredible AI coach inside the platform, TiVi. Want feedback on how you’re having donor conversations, you can get one year inside proactivated for free by just filling out this link. And then my team member made this like super cute little spinner thing, and I draw somebody’s name, and we’ll email you, and you’ll get, you’ll get a free year. So just make sure you fill it out. I put the actual link inside the chat right there. So I’ll leave, I’ll leave this up to make sure that folks get a chance to grab this and and you know, so much of what we talked about, so much of what TiVi is trained on, is really helping also identify the gales in your conversations and in your strategy. And she’s a coach, right? So she will sort of like surface some of those things, or notice some of those things, and then give strategies, reframe suggestions, everything, everything, the link isn’t working. Oh my gosh, y’all what I looked before I tested all of these links. Oh, it worked. Wait, it worked for me. Okay, try a refresh. Maybe too many people went there at once. Hit refresh. Okay, get the link. I’m trying to follow. What’s happening in the chat? Bad link. Bad link. Okay, but some people are having it work, so I don’t know what to do. Y’all, it should look like this. We’re going to test it live. Oh, it’s not working for me. That’s not a good sign. Oh, there we go. Okay, so refresh, refresh. If you, if you, if you didn’t get it, okay. Okay, I did resend the link. Okay, okay, sending it again. Okay. We have a few minutes left, and so I also put up on the, on the on the board, the my QR code, but I’ll put that in the chat as well. Lori, do we have any questions that we want to make sure we answer before we hop off.
So far, we only have two, I’m going to say so far, because this is around the time people start putting questions. The first one came as soon as they we logged in and they asked. I have heard the nonprofit. Must register with all 50 states in the USA in order to fundraise nationally. Is that true?
So I steer far away from any advice you should be getting from a lawyer or a CPA. And so I think there are different regulations across different states around how fundraising kind of what that registration looks like, and how fundraising in different ways needs to happen in different states. So I do not actually want to answer. I would just consult with your lawyer and your CPA.
Okay, I have to be honest. I agree because I was reading that I’m like, I feel like I’ve heard so many things and I don’t I had which one’s right? Yeah. Okay, so the next question is that, well, they claim they were totally on board about having a growth mindset and not letting fear control you. Now, what do I do about the other people on my team who are controlling everything out of fear I’m hampered by their anxieties, not mine?
Yeah, so, you know, I had to pick what we talked about today. And definitely there’s a whole other session about kind of like CO regulation, and what happens in group environments when people are stressed and dysregulated. And, you know, our nervous systems co regulate, right? And so in many ways, stress is contagious, and calm is also contagious. And it doesn’t mean that there are things that we can’t do in those moments, but there’s a few things I would think about. Number one, if you’re surrounded by people who are always running at a super high stress, like in a high stress way, those somatic tools are going to be particularly important for you, because that type of stress transfer is happening on that, like, body level. And so even if you don’t necessarily understand why that person is stressed, but you can feel their stress, what you need, what you want, are tools to actually be able to reduce the feelings of stress in your body, and that’s really where those somatic tools come into play. So that’s that’s number one. The other thing that I mentioned about acknowledging and validating that is something that you can do with everyone on your team, and you should, and same with curiosity, right? And once again, acknowledging and validating does not actually mean that you are, that you are validating why they feel the stress, but you’re validating the fact that they feel stress, right? So even when I’ve had to manage up into executive directors, who were, you know, like that, I would be like, Okay, well, I hear, I hear how stressful This is feeling for you, and I want to understand like it makes perfect sense that, like leading this organization, you know that you would be stressed like probably anybody in your situation would be stressed by something like this. I want to understand a little bit better. Could you tell me more about X, right? And so just in doing that, you’re using two of the strategies that we talked about. You’re acknowledging and validating their feelings, right? Anybody in your position, it makes sense that anybody in your position would feel that way, right? Not that. Thing that’s happening is stressful. You’re acknowledging and validating feelings down regulates our nervous system, and then you’re getting curious. You’re trying to help pull them out of a binary way of thinking of a certainty, just by getting more curious, trying to learn a little bit more. And then maybe you say, like, is it possible if, or have you ever seen it where Blank, blank has happened instead, right? So you’re just trying to open up like the you’re trying to essentially bring them into more anabolic energy by diffusing their catabolic energy, recognizing, not with, not with telling them there are these things called the gales and blah, blah, blah, but you’re like spotting them, and then you’re using some of those strategies with them. Does that make sense?
I hope so. I think so, yeah. Okay, so we’re getting a lot of anonymous questions here. What is what is design thinking? Just curious. You mentioned in your introduction that after your initial burnout, you trained in design thinking and as an executive coach, yes.
So design thinking is, well, it’s probably too much for me to really explain on here with the time we have left, but you can look at, I just dropped a link in the chat, so I worked with folks over at IDEO, and it’s really like a human centered approach to design and innovation, and you can, you can apply it to anything from like product development to, you know, creating a fundraising system. And it’s just really how you think about and sort of like organize the desired behaviors that either you want to be. Taking, or you want other people to take, to take, and then you design around that, around what are some of their like, natural tendencies, or my natural tendencies as a person, when I was designing around myself to start, and then what were ways that I could sort of build fundraising systems and habits and and tools that that fit into that centered around who I was as a person.
Okay, looking at the time, it’s 201, I’m like, we have one more question. Do you want to answer the last question? Yeah. Okay, so again, this one’s anonymous. How can your wonderful advice be applied to board members and predecessor who is still a major part of the organization?
Yeah, I mean, I think this is really similar to sort of what I said before, like, I think recognizing that all the tools that I gave you today are both for yourself, but they are things that you can share with your team. You can either share it with your team, like I saw some folks in the chat saying, I want to share these slides with my team and and I want to, like, talk about these things as a team. And that’s that’s like one route, but the other route is just to start to bring those, those tools into your meetings, right? So you can bring in curiosity into those meetings, wondering about things, noticing your own stress and staying grounded right, like, maybe not getting as much in in some of the like, reactionary combat mode in those board meetings. But say, like, tell me more about why you think that. Like, I hear you saying that our donors only like, like, hate text messages, but tell me more about why you think that you know. And, oh, have you, like, heard this research around X, Y and Z? Like, I’m just curious. Like, how that you know, how that fares with what you’ve noticed and what you’ve seen? And, like, is it possible, if, right, so it’s just you’re not, you’re not getting into, like, actually, there’s this article that blah, blah, blah, blah, right? Then the that’s not a conversation that’s going to happen very well. But the more we can like get curious, the more we can like demonstrate that we’re challenging some of our own thinking. Like, wow, that’s so interesting. You’re really challenging my thinking there. I want to think more about that. I’ve always been wondering. X, right? So the more you embody the things that we talked about today, like those, there are ways to model that and to bring that into group discussions and group dynamics that are really valuable for everyone.
Okay, all right. Well, I think we are over time, but so what I’d like to do is to thank you all for joining us today, and a big thank you to Mallory for such practical insights. As you head into year end, remember you don’t have to stay stuck in being overwhelmed. Use Mallory’s tools from today’s session to clear away the barriers. Focus on what’s most or what matters most. Move forward with confidence, and you can finish the year strong. As Mallory mentioned, she’ll be back with us in October to present, making the ask turn your fundraising conversations into authentic opportunities. We hope to see you then, and I hope you have a great rest of your day.
Thank you so much. Everyone. Have a great day.
Great thanks.