The Conversation After the Event

Okay, all right, we’re letting some people file in here. We’ll give it just another second or two. Okay, all right. So, good afternoon or good morning to others that might be elsewhere. Welcome to our webinar, the conversation after the event. And presenting for us today is Read More

Okay, all right, we’re letting some people file in here. We’ll give it just another second or two. Okay, all right. So, good afternoon or good morning to others that might be elsewhere. Welcome to our webinar, the conversation after the event. And presenting for us today is Mallory Erickson. Mallory is a founder and CEO of Practivated, an executive coach, fundraising consultant, and host of the What the Fundraising podcast. She’s dedicated to transforming the nonprofit sector by helping fundraisers move beyond transactional approaches to build lasting mission-aligned partnerships through her Power Partners formula. Mallory has trained over 60,000 fundraisers, blending executive coaching, behavior design, and strategic fundraising. Her book, What the Fundraising explores how shifting away from a scarcity mindset leads to greater impact and sustainability at Practivated, which Mallory founded in 2024 She continues to drive innovation in fundraising through technology coaching and science-backed strategies. If you’re ready to fundraise with confidence and alignment, Mallory’s work is for you. Now, before we get started, I have just a few housekeeping items to cover. If you have questions, put them into the Q and A. We have a lot of people registered, and I want to make sure that we get eyes on your question, and we will answer as much as we can at the end of the presentation. The session is being recorded, and it will be sent out later this week. All right, so Mallory, you are up.
Amazing. Thank you, Lori. Thank you to the whole DonorPerfect team. I am so excited to be here with all of you today. So, thank you so much for joining me. Keep the chat going, because even if I can’t keep track of everything in the chat, I love watching fundraisers and nonprofit leaders connect with one another. We’re going to start with a little friendly competition. Can you let me know in the chat if you are a Ted Lasso fan like me? I really, really loved Ted, and big fan of his coaching style. I think I saw one, no, but or nope, absolutely not. Okay, well, everybody, this is why everybody should find their own coaches, their own coaching style. So I really love Ted Lasso. So we’re gonna play like a little, a little friendly game, okay? I want you to imagine that it’s three months after your last fundraising event, and Ted tells you, ‘Hey, I’m going to drop an additional $100,000 into your organization’s bank account for the first organization that can get five event attendees on the phone as fast as possible. Okay, from your event that was three months ago, now you have two different options in terms of how you’re going to go about this and how your post-event behavior is going to influence this, right? So maybe you’re like Finish Line Fiona, okay? Finish Line Fiona finished her last event three months ago, she sent out one mass thank you. Then she sprinted to the next thing, and she just realized now, because of Ted’s competition, that a bunch of people had replied, and she had never gotten back to them. She meant to call the donors who had given really big, but now she’s remembering the week totally got away from her. She’s feeling really guilty that it’s too late to call, and the first time guests weren’t segmented in her email, so they’ve been getting communication like they’re longtime supporters. She’s feeling super paralyzed around who to call first, because everything feels so late. Then we have starting line Sarah. Okay, starting line Sarah tagged her five segments before the event itself. She called the donor who gave big within 48 hours just to listen, listen, and she feels great about getting back on the phone now. Every guest heard from her in a way that fits who they are. Some replied, and there was some email back and forth. There are five of those folks also that she feels like she can get on the phone really quickly. She’s feeling confident about being able to win Ted’s competition, so I want to know who you would like to be. Okay, and that’s what we’re going to be talking about throughout this webinar. Is are you finish line Fiona or are you starting line Sarah? And I’m going to be honest with you that I 100% in my nonprofit career was finish line Fiona, so there is no shame or blame there. We’re going to talk about all the things that turn us into finish line Fionas and all the things that we can do to become starting line Sarahs, because these are two completely different futures for an organization, and the difference actually isn’t just in how hard you work, it’s whether you’re treating an event. As the finish line or the starting line. Okay, so for those of you who I haven’t met before, it is so nice to meet you. My name is Mallory Erickson. Lori gave me an incredible introduction, so we won’t go back through all of those details, but I also just wanted to say that I am an accidental fundraiser. I became an accidental fundraiser first as a managing director, and then as an executive director, and I would love to know. Just give me a little why in the chat if you also identify as an accidental fundraiser. I need to know where my other accidental fundraisers are at here with me today. So, I had all these dreams and beliefs about who I was going to be as a fundraiser. I was going to be having donors come to me, etc. etc. and I call this my impact report fake phase, where I 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 ended up developing chronic pain, really hitting like complete burnout, and getting to a point in my career where I was like, I can’t keep doing things this way. What ended up completely changing my experience was getting certified as an executive coach, trained in habit and behavior design, and design thinking. Those frameworks came together and completely transformed the way that I fundraised, and not only was I able to raise a lot more money, but I started to love fundraising, and all of that has led to the research and work that I’ve been doing over these last five years helping fundraisers understand that donor behavior is a response, and it’s primarily a response to our behavior as fundraisers, and I don’t say that to, like, put a bunch of pressure, additional pressure on you, but for you to actually recognize how much agency and opportunity you have to to build towards different fundraising outcomes. Okay, and so in, in the book I talk a lot about the relationship between what we do as fundraisers and donors’ responses, but then also what drives our behavior as fundraisers? So, I’ve coached and trained over 100,000 fundraisers now on all of these different components, and we’re going to be bringing all of those into our conversation today. I also, because you just can’t take the fundraiser out of me, love a good giveaway. Okay, so I know I might have spiked your nervous system a little bit with the competition at the beginning, but now I’m going to give everybody a chance to win something. So, this is going to be a signed book, a signed what the fundraising book of mine. And actually, if you win the book, I will do an hour like book club coffee chat, whatever you want. If you want it, if you’re like Mallory, we don’t want you, we just want the book, that’s cool. Just do the book, but if you want it, and you want an hour coffee chat with me, or book club for your organization, or anything like that, that’ll be included in the winner of this little giveaway as well. So, I’ve dropped the link in the chat for those who don’t like the, who don’t like QR codes, so you should be able to grab that too, but yes, I do love, I do love a good giveaway. One of the things I talk about a lot in the book is how and what creates this disconnect from maybe who we want to be as fundraisers and how we ultimately show up, because over the years, coaching and training over 100,000 fundraisers, I’ve watched great people stall donor relationships after an event and not realize it, and I’ve watched great people misqualify donors from an event and waste so much time. I’ve watched great people lose confidence in how to activate donors after an event and then leave the organization altogether because they feel so defeated, and I’ve watched so many great managers burn out, and Lori mentioned a little bit around the fact that I built Practivated, which is the first ever fundraiser readiness platform that builds skills, confidence, and muscle memory in tandem through practice and coaching and insight and repetition, but what I didn’t realize when I was building Practivated for fundraisers, what I didn’t expect was what Proctivated would teach me about why donor relationships really aren’t moving forward. And now we’ve been able to analyze donor conversations, 1000s and 1000s of donor conversations, across tons of different fundraisers, event-related event follow-up conversations, in particular, and there’s some really interesting and critical insights in terms of how you follow up after an event to really intentionally move a relationship forward. There’s a lot of language in our sector about building a relationship, right? You just need to go out there and build a relationship, but if you were like, if you’re like me, that always felt a little bit ambiguous to me. I was like, what do you mean, build a relationship, like the way that I build a friendship? Am I supposed to build a relationship and see if I can get this person to like me enough that maybe one day they want to give me some of their money, but I shouldn’t talk about money, because that makes it transactional.
I’m just trying to build a relationship that never worked for me as a fundraiser, and the truth is, it doesn’t actually work for our donors either. The point is not to just build relationships, it’s about intentionality and conscious decision making, and this is a huge place where our post-event communications really, really break down. Okay, so here’s what usually breaks down. We are putting so much energy into the event, 90% of our energy is going in to the event itself. Okay, and then event follow-up becomes so hard, and once again, I just want to say that there is no shame or blame here. Okay, events used to bring me to my knees. I could, like, have a bubble water with you and tell you the story about the time I backed the U-Haul filled with silent auction items into my sister’s friend’s car, like y’all, or the time I drove away with the gas pump still in my car. All of these were event nervous system related. Okay, I know how stressful that event can be. Yes, go guys, I have some great war stories here, but I want you to understand part of what is happening in the brain and body that’s making post event follow up so hard, because part of the puzzle is motivation and part of the puzzle is around fear. Okay, our brain stops pushing related to completing the event, and also there are these fear signals that come up that sabotage our the way that we’re trying to ultimately build relationships and connect with donors. So, let’s talk about the motivation side first. Your brain treats the event as the goal, right? So all your motivation is organized around crossing that line. When you cross it, your brain files the job as done. It’s like check box, okay? This is called the arrival fallacy. The drive that carried you to the event drops off of a cliff the moment that it ends. Okay, this is a completely normal biological response. Okay, so our events – there’s so many ways that motivation is really enhanced around events, right? So we have that arrival fallacy. Dopamine is for the chase, so we’re getting a lot of dopamine that’s fueling the pursuit and the design and the setup of the event, but it isn’t there right after. Okay, rest is now certain, so we get this present bias because we can take the rest right now, and the relationships still feel ambiguous and far enough in the future that we can pull back from them, and we have no other big deadline, right? We just crossed the deadline that we had, and so that all of these things decrease our biological motivation to take additional actions and do additional things. I want to know the chats gotten a little quiet, and I don’t know if that’s because I’m sure it’s because you’re listening and taking notes, but I want to know if this resonates with anybody. Has anybody noticed that they cross that finish line of the event, and then all of a sudden their motivation is like, yep, okay, great, you’re with me, okay, here we go. So this is not you, this is the science of motivation, which is directly connected to fear and discomfort. So now y’all, we have to talk about fear for a second, dun dun, and if you are not familiar with my work, work, I talk about this in most of my talks, this piece of it. So, for those of you who have to sit through it again, I promise you, you need to hear it every single time. But our brain has multiple parts to it, but where fear comes on, so when you’re putting together the event, you probably have a bunch of nervous system, prefrontal cortex, you have the strategy of the event. Then maybe you put together your strategy for your follow-up at the event. After the event, that strategy was created in your prefrontal cortex, your logical cognitive thinking brain. When you go to actually take that action to follow up with the donor who gave big or follow up with somebody who didn’t show up that you expected to, just to check in on them. Another part of your brain comes online, your back brain, your amygdala.
I saw that word in the chat earlier, I’m not sure who it was from or what it said, but our amygdala is our lizard brain. Okay, it’s our stress, it’s where our stress response and nervous system get activated, fight, flight, freeze, etcetera. Okay, and fundraising really impacts our nervous system. Okay, there are a lot of natural things that occur in fundraising that have been scientifically proven to increase stress, chronic stress, and ultimately burnout, uncertainty, and ghosting, rejection, pressure to meet targets, overwork, isolation, which should be on here, power dynamics. Okay, all of these things are natural components of fundraising, but they’ve been scientifically proven to increase stress, chronic stress, and ultimately burnout, which does not mean we should all leave fundraising, but we should know this in order to design for habits and behaviors that take this into account. Okay. So the reason why this is so important to understand, not only because it feels awful, and we should just be taking care of ourselves and each other, but when stress, when our back brain is running the show, it also turns off our ability to take action and our capacity for connection, compassion, closeness, trust, innovation, collaboration, flexibility, all of the curiosity, all of the core skills that we need get turned off when our back brain, when our fear is driving the show, because that back brain has two jobs, to keep you alive and to conserve as much energy as possible, so it’s like shut down everything else. Okay, now maybe you’re like Mallory. I am a totally confident fundraiser. I experience no fear. I know that giving is good for the donor, and that this is about alignment. So, I just want to suggest, because I think we all experience fear, myself included, that fear can be really tricky. Okay, fear can sound like consideration. They just gave us their time at the event. I really don’t want to bother them more. Fear can sound like humility. Who am I to follow up with that donor? They definitely want to hear from the ED. Fear can sound like perfectionism. What if they ask me a question I don’t know the answer to? I shouldn’t risk it. They just had a great experience at the event. I don’t want to ruin it. Fear can sound like a timing, timing and strategic timing. The moments passed, it’s too late now. We should wait until blank is ready to reach out to them again, so I want to know. I want to know who has maybe had some tricky fear statements that sound familiar here, that perhaps this has showed up and held you back from reaching out to a donor. Yeah, maybe you want to say all day, every day. Yes, 100% accurate. Yes, this is totally, totally normal. Fear is so tricky like that. Okay, and I talk about all of this a lot more in my book. So, if before you were like, I don’t know if I care to win her book, but now you’re like, wow, I really wish I had signed up for that giveaway. I’m going to give you one more chance to do it, and I’m going to add it into the chat as well. Okay, because I talk a lot about the nervous system and stress response and all that in the book, but for the purposes of this webinar, we really need to talk about following up with donors after the event, because here’s the problem: our motivation is low, and we are like, we cross the finish line, but all of these people just came to your event, and they think they’re at the beginning of a relationship with you. They just got so excited about the work that you do, about the event. They just connected with people, they just learn new things. All of that is happening at the same time, and so we hit this motivation gap where a donor’s motivation is literally the highest it could be. They just had this really connected touch point. It’s a peak moment for them, but for us as fundraisers, our motivation has crashed, and this moment where we could be building deeper relationships towards the fundraising sustainability and donor community that we want all year round. We’re missing it in this gap.
Okay, so I really want to point this out, because I know that it – I know how exhausted we all are after an event, and so we’re going to talk about some habits and behaviors to help you with that, to actually be able to close this gap. Okay, because you cannot willpower your way past your own biology. Okay, that again, this is not about shame or blame. This is not about, like, oh my gosh, I’m such a bad fundraiser. My motivation always drops at the end of an event, y’all. It’s normal that that is how our body works. Okay, and we cannot just like tough love ourselves or willpower ourselves or discipline ourselves to actually do things different. Okay, and, and, and, so we really need to understand this related to our own biology, and we’re going to talk about five habits that can help you turn event attendees into ongoing community of donors without it being a huge like time suck or energy suck. Catherine, I see your comment in the chat, and I so appreciate it. She just said not just exhausted after an event, it’s the pressing need for the next next task effort, etc. that comes right on the heels of that event, 100% right. And so some of what we’re going to talk about is how you actually build some of the post event activities in. To your pre-event activities, and I know, I know, but hang with me for a second. When your motivation is higher, but then I also want to talk about how you create connective tissue between that event and potentially other fundraising activities, or just donor relationships that lead to additional fundraising. Okay, and yes, depending on the role that you have in your organization, like you might have a different spheres of influence on how you can influence the activities that are supposed to be happening after event and event, or the priorities that are supposed to be happening after an event, if you are that person who can make those decisions, you should be implementing 100% of these things, and if you are not a person who influences all those decisions, you’re still going to have habits and behaviors that are going to be able to help you even in the midst of those other of those other activities. Okay, so you guys ready to go? Are you guys ready to go into the five five habits? Can I give a little, can I get a little y in the chat, so you, I know you’re all with me. Okay. Alright, cool. Um, amazing. Okay, so habit number one is around doing pre work before the event itself, when motivation is already high. Okay, so if you think about all of the things that you want to do after the event, so like segmenting the list, so that you do personalized communication for first event attendees and, and folks who have, maybe, who didn’t come to the event, you can, that one, you can’t put the people into the segment yet, but you can start to build all of the architecture around it, right, and you can say, okay, these folks have registered, and they registered, and they were first-time event attendees. I also select suggest my clients a lot, like if you have people who are sitting at the silent auction booth, and maybe have a little bit of a down moment after registration has happened, build those segments right then and there in the middle of the event, don’t wait until the event is completely over. I have one client who, like, they don’t leave the event venue until the segments are built, because they know the motivation to do it the next day is going to be so much lower than just getting it done and doing it right then and there, so that they can actually send the emails the next day. Okay, I will give you an example of segments in one second, right. But part of this is around, I don’t know if you can see my cursor, but part of this is around understanding that your motivation is is going up and up and up until the night of the event, right. And so any of the things that you can do ahead of time here that impact your donors here is really valuable, right.
So maybe that’s starting thank you notes that you personalize after, but you still have a big bulk of the work done ahead of time, or you know, trying to find you’ve put like gift baskets together if you were going to send those out and you’ve done whatever work you can do ahead of time before the event as part of those event activities, so that when you know naturally your motivation is going to be lower, you have less things to do. Okay, somebody was just asking about segments. Okay, so the segments I often, I often look at for post event communications are a first time attendee who gave, a first time attendee who didn’t get, give right, because it’s just a different type of communication, right? The first time attendee who gave is a thank you for coming and a thank you for your first gift, and some curiosity around that. The first time attendee, no gift is still so much gratitude for coming to the event, sharing a story with them. Like, I hope you loved hearing Ariana’s story around X, right? And then a major partner who attended, if you have sponsors or table sponsors or anything like that, a lap stoner who came back. I love this, somebody who’s been disconnected from the organization for a little bit, and then came back into the event, into your community, and then a loyal recurring recurring supporter. Those are the segments that I typically think about. I’m sure you could make more. These are my five favorite, and so setting these up in the communication templates up ahead of time, so helpful in getting it out the door after after the event. Okay, so that’s habit number one. And again, I talked about this related to segments in particular, but anything that you can do ahead of time as a part of the event planning, do just knowing that naturally your motivation is going to be lower, okay? The second habit is around leading with gratitude in your post-event follow-up, but understanding that can still feel scary, okay? So, y’all, I know we’re like, it’s a thank you call. Why am I nervous? I shouldn’t be nervous, but still, member fear is very tricky. We all, we were all we were supposed to do is make a thank you call, but instead our brain has said maybe it’s a bad time, I don’t want to catch them in lunch. Nobody likes a call out of the blue. Has anybody heard themselves say anything like that before that has held you back from making a thank you call? Super, super, super normal. Okay, so yes, the post-event communications and calls and touch points should be leading with gratitude, and we need to acknowledge and validate that that might still feel scary. It doesn’t mean that what we’re doing is wrong. We should absolutely be doing it, but it’s our nervous system saying play it safe, don’t do anything, don’t move. Right, that’s our back brain’s job, that’s our stress responses’ job, is to get us to not move, to not risk anything else. It cannot tell the difference between a lion’s going to eat us in the woods and a donor is going to pick up during lunch and have to go really quickly, and then we’re going to feel weird about it. I will tell you, people still do pick up the phone. Okay, I have run a thank-a-thon for years, people do still pick up the phone. Yes, not everybody picks up the phone, but people still do pick up the phone. Pick up the phone, and then you’ll be able to make your way through the list even faster. Okay, I, we couldn’t go through this with, like, yes, I don’t pick up the phone, that’s true. I don’t pick up the phone, but actually you’re bringing up a really important point, right, which is that it’s very easy for us to take our own behavior and project it onto our donors, right? Like, I don’t like text messages, you know, donation text messages, so no donors will like donation text messages, but that’s not true. The data shows us that tons of people like donation text messages, right? And people love to communicate in different ways. You and I, we are maybe getting 12,000 spam calls a day, so we’re a little bit more skeptical.
Other people not getting 12,000 spam calls a day. Who knows? I’d like their phone number, but they’re still picking up their phone. Okay, so four touches. I want you to think about your gratitude and your sequencing over the 30 days after the event, in terms of saying thank you within 24 hours, making it personal with a call or two, or two minute voicemail, depending on how you communicate with your donor, maybe you text a video message, thank you, show the impact of their gift. Now you’re not, you didn’t solve world hunger in two weeks since your event, but use operational transparency to show some things that have been happening in your program, thanks to the support of donors like them. And then at the end of the 30 days, open the door for a deeper type of engagement, an additional type of engagement. We can’t talk about every single detail on this call, but DonorPerfect and I put together a fundraisers event follow-up kit to actually walk you through all four of those stages with a checklist and templates and all the goodness. I think Lori’s going to put the direct link in the chat for those of you who don’t like QR codes, but we put together the entire entire entire process for you inside here. One other suggestion I want to make around taking these actions, taking some of these touches, is to use something called body doubling to help you get over the action line, so body doubling is something that are us, you know, if you’re neurodivergent like me, you might be more used to using, but it’s actually a habit hack that’s really valuable for everybody, and yes, and it’s actually doing something with a partner, so whether you’re remote or in person, you can go on Zoom on video together and put yourself on mute, make your thank you calls at the same time, while you’re seeing each other. In fact, in political fundraising, they have something called call times, where when a politician needs to call a donor, there’s somebody’s whole job is to just sit next to the politician, that’s their whole job is to body double with the politician, because they know how scary phone calls are. Okay, so use body doubling to help you take some of the actions that are inside that fundraiser’s event follow-up kit. Okay, habit number three, you need to be building specific and intentional relationships that involve next steps. Okay, so I mentioned at the beginning that Practivated, and the data we have inside Practivated, has taught me so much about where conversations and where relationships are breaking down, and the data has been actually kind of like mind blowing to me, because one of the things that we’ve really learned is that y’all have great relationship building skills, you’re great at building connection and doing some initial kind of like funder alignment, but conversations are breaking down in very specific places across. So all experience levels of fundraisers, okay, ask effectiveness, probably no surprise there, but also structure flow and transitions, and define next steps, insight gathering, asking deeper questions, adaptability under pressure, and relational depth, okay, and I’m going to explain all of these things and why they come through, but it makes a lot of sense, right? Like, when we are stressed, one of the ways that sometimes our stress can materialize is in things like people pleasing, or in, you know, just sort of like staying surface level with somebody, and so it feels like, okay, we’re building a relationship, but we’re actually, we’re just like building a conversation that felt good, but it doesn’t go anywhere. Okay, the sign of a qualified donor is not that you had a positive lunch with them that felt good.
I hate to say this, I feel like this little bit of a gut punch, but sometimes we’re like, oh, that donor’s qualified because, like, they were so positive in that lunch, and it was so nice to talk to them, and we really like each other, but if you didn’t talk about the organization, about impact, if you didn’t learn more about them in terms of what really drives them, what they care about, would they like to come to a volunteer day, what do they hope in terms of the impact their donation makes on the organization, and if you did not leave that conversation with a clear next step on the next phase of that relationship, then you are not building an intentional donor pipeline. You might be making a friend, but I don’t think that it works to make a friend and get that friend to like you enough that one day they want to give you some of their money. The purpose is around finding that alignment and impact and intentionality that we are building towards the same things. Okay, and I really don’t like relating fundraising to dating, but one thing I do want to make really clear, right? This is not people are always like, don’t be transactional, don’t talk about money. First of all, there’s lots of ways to talk about money that are not transactional, okay? But the other thing is, I’m not saying, like, if it was a first date that you’re saying, hey, I want to get married tomorrow, okay? There’s always saying you’re saying, hey, one day I hope to get married. Are you also looking to get married one day? If we are aligned, if we fall in love, if we want the same things, etc. etc. then would one day you want to get married too, right? So it’s like it’s like just the clarity and transparency that the purpose of the relationship building, if it progresses and goes well, is leading towards the same shared goals and outcomes for each person. Okay, so one of the pieces here around this deeper relationship building is around asking deeper questions and acknowledging that you’ve seen that you saw the donor in the event. Okay, so there are these openers that actually help you start a conversation and go deeper, right? Like I’m still thinking about that moment when this speaker said blank, I saw your head nodding in the audience. I noticed that landed for you too. I’d love to connect and hear more about your experience hearing that story. Or you asked a really good question at the event and it stuck with me, and I wanted to follow up on it properly. Or I saw your name on the list and realized we’ve never actually talked and I wanted to change that. I’m sorry I didn’t get time with you at the event. Okay? Or you came on a busy weeknight, which tells me this matters to you. I’d love to know what drew you in. These types of questions are how you intentionally build a relationship that is rooted in the organization. Now, this morning at 6am I did some practice conversations inside Proactivated. I’m not going to show you the whole 20 minute one, although DM me on LinkedIn if you want the whole thing, but I want to show you how a question like this opens up learning immediately. Hi, Alex. This is Mallory Erickson calling from Global Student Embassy, and I’m just calling to connect, and thank you so much for your donation during our event last week. I realized I was looking through all of those online gifts and saw your name and realized we’d never really actually had a chance to talk, so I wanted to change that.
Oh, wow, I did not expect a personal call. That is really nice of you. I’m really glad you reached out, Mallory. The event and that story you shared just stuck with me, so it felt right to contribute. What you all are doing seems really meaningful.
Thank you so much for saying that. And you know, you came out on a busy weeknight, which told me that this work really does matter to you, and so it means so much when we can find. Other folks who are invested in environmental restoration, organic agriculture, and obviously our local community work with youth. I’d love to know, you know, what drew you into the event in the first place? Was there anything in particular?
Yeah, actually, I’d seen that story you all posted about the students working in the garden with the older farmers, and it just hit me in a really genuine way. It reminded me of the kind of hands-on programs I wish I’d had growing up. So, when I saw there was an event where I could learn more, I figured I should just go.
So, think about from that tiny minute and 30 seconds how much I learned about the donor, right, to be able to build on if I was really able to listen to his responses, right? Like, I have questions I want to ask him about being a kid, and what he wished he had most been exposed to. Does he have any agriculture experience? Like, was there anything about the farmers in particular that really like lit him up, seeing that experience. Does he do any mentorship work like this with youth with other organizations, or is he involved in volunteering in any way? Would he ever want to come out to a garden work day with our students? Right, and I do some of those things throughout the rest of the conversation with them, but I wanted to show you, sort of like how naturally those openings can lead to conversation, put somebody at ease, really acknowledge that you saw them, that you’re even acknowledging that we didn’t have a chance to talk, right? So you’re acknowledging with that a little bit of vulnerability, like I wish I had gotten some time with you, so that’s why I’m reaching out right now, right, and you could see the ability for me to be more authentic and grounded, and then to learn so much about him. Now we’ve talked about fear a little bit already, but I really want to point something out here. When our nervous system is activated, we want safety, predictability, and control. Okay? Right? When our back brain is online, we want safety, predictability, and control, and so what we do is we actually don’t ask deeper questions, we don’t actually get more curious, we don’t do good insight gathering, because we’re like, well, I don’t know what they’re going to say, I don’t know what they’re going to say, and that’s going to increase the uncertainty of where this conversation could go, and I’m nervous, so I can’t do that, right? I don’t want to do that. All this is happening subconsciously. Okay, but we, we will stick with our script, right? We’re like trying to stick with a script, and what we’re actually doing with that is breaking the ability for this to be the beginning of the of the of the of the sorry, I see the request for the booklet, so I’m putting it back in the chat of the relationship with them. It’s also an example of how we really misunderstand confidence. Okay, because a true sign of confidence in fundraising is not cure, is not, is curiosity not certainty. A lot of times we think that a fundraiser or ourselves are confident because we’re like, oh, that donor doesn’t like text messages, or our donors don’t like text test text messages, but that certainty is actually not a sign of confidence. It is a sign that our brain is in protection mode. We are in binary thinking, right or wrong. Curiosity is truly the sign of confidence. Okay, when we aren’t truly confident, we aren’t asking those deeper questions that create more uncertainty around the relationship or the ask, but if we play it safe, we miss the deeper relationship, we miss the intentional relationship, and ultimately the transformational gift. Right, this is why it cannot just be about a thank you. Right, the whole purpose, their motivation is at the top. The whole purpose is to learn, right. Curiosity is what opens the door to real connection. Okay, so here’s some, here’s some additional types of questions that are worth the uncertainty in gold, right? What made you say yes that night? When have you felt most connected to this work? What would a gift here feel? What would make, what would make a gift here feel meaningful to you? Okay, what first drew you to this cause? What changed you most want to see in the world, what matters to you that we haven’t talked about yet. Okay, this is how you open up the learning and the insight gathering for you, and the opportunity for real, deep, genuine connection. I’m going to give you another example of me doing this right now with what would make this gift feel really meaningful to you? Like, tell me about sort of your deep sort of hopes and inspiration around what sort of got you to raise it, nerves and all.
Well, for me, meaningful is pretty simple. I like knowing something real. Is going to happen because of that money, not in a vague it supports our mission way, but in a this actually funds X way. When she spoke about finally having someone in her corner, what struck me was how small the intervention sounded, but how big the impact was.
So, my question to you is, How often have we seen a confident principal sounding fundraiser? Maybe we’ve been this fundraiser quietly talking themselves out of following up with the donor, right? There’s so many times that we maybe before even picking up the phone to make that call, or in the call we talk ourselves out of asking that question, right? We’re like, oh, maybe I shouldn’t bring that up, because what about blank, or I don’t know how to transition them from this to this, so I don’t even want to bring it up at all. Or what if they say no to coming to wanting to be deeper involved, more deeply involved? And then I’m feeling rejected. I want to know in the chat if you have ever seen or been the fundraiser quietly talking yourselves out of following up with a donor or asking a deeper question and gathering more insight in an intentional way to move the relationship forward, right? And part of this is because we are thinking that, oh, we want this conversation to go well, right? We’re like, oh, I want this conversation to feel good, so maybe I don’t want to open up any uncertainty that could possibly mean it won’t feel good, but actually, y’all, these questions are what make the conversation feel better. They are 100% what makes the conversation feel better. Okay, and build a more connected relationship. I’ve mentioned that a lot of the data we have here around donor conversations come from a report that we’ve put together at Proctivated that analyzes like 2000 different donor conversations and across like 500 different fundraisers, there’s event stuff in here, and this will show you like exactly where conversations are strong and where they break down, and exactly what you can do differently to build and strengthen donor relationships. Okay, so I really highly recommend you take a look at the benchmark study from this year, very, very helpful in realizing your agency and opportunity around how you can build these intentional relationships. Okay, so habit number four is building is muscle memory builds motivation and gets you over the action line. So one of the things that we’ve started to talk about with practiced, and I want to make very clear, whether you are in practiced or not impractivated, and you do this through body doubling with a team or role playing in person with your team, I do not care, but I want you to understand the gap between what we think we should do or know we should do and actually do, because there is a gap, right? My guess is a lot of you on this call are like, I know I should be doing blank, but each year you’re having trouble getting yourself doing it, right? I don’t know if you’re ready to admit that in the chat, but that was 100% me too. That gap between what we know we should do and what we, and what we are, and what we are doing is this readiness gap. Okay, I don’t know what’s going on with the QR code, but I dropped the link in the chat as well, so everybody should be able to grab that. That’s very weird. Sorry about that. I’m, I’m the person who’s not great at QR codes. Um, luckily I hand, I, you know, I’m used to handling my imperfection. Okay, the readiness gap, so the gap between knowing what to do and actually doing it is readiness. That is the gap, the readiness gap. The only way to close this gap, okay, is by building skills, confidence, and muscle memory at the same time. The only way to close the gap between insight and action is readiness. Okay, a lot of tools out there say that they are closing this gap, but they’re not. They’re just giving more insight, more knowledge. That knowledge is only going into your prefrontal cortex, which means it is not getting integrated when your stress response, when your back brain is online, which means you cannot access it in the moments where you are trying to take the action. The only way to close these gaps is to build skills, confidence, and muscle memory in tandem, and we know this works, okay? When you are building these things at the same time, we’ve seen a 280% increase in human-driven donor touch points.
We’ve watched onboarding go from eight weeks to two weeks. We’ve seen tremendous changes and ask effectiveness. So, however you’re able to build readiness on your team, okay, I want you to understand that you need to build skills, confidence, and muscle memory in tandem. Okay, so I want you to think about the tender moments that you feel the most unsure about. Okay, like brainstorm in your head, this is the thing I feel so awkward about. This is the type of donor that I feel the most nervous to call. This is um. You know, this is a conversation I feel really vulnerable around, because I was very surprised by how much they gave at the event. Okay, whatever those things are, your most tender moments, I want you to practice those scenarios, varied practice around those scenarios. So, if you need to set up the scenario somehow, maybe with you and a colleague, or if you have practiced, or if you want to learn about proctivated, you can get in touch with our team or DonorPerfect. We have an incredible partnership with DonorPerfect. If you’re a DonorPerfect client, you have like preferred pricing and all that stuff as well. But the idea is that you’re practicing small, small simulated moments. The goal is not to practice a meeting end to end and build a script that is actually worse for us, because then we go into the actual meeting and we’re trying to pattern match against that script. It doesn’t go exactly as the script said, we’re like trying to stay on the script, and then our brain actually freaks out. What you want is diverse, varied situational practice, so that your brain builds the cognitive flexibility and resilience to understand and be able to handle whatever comes up. If you think about it, like an athlete, right, that athlete is never training for a very specific game end to end, they’re practicing all of the scenarios that could happen in the game, so that they are ready when the game comes. Practice is the most underrated talent development tool in fundraising, and if you are here to tell me that, well, I’ve been fundraising for 20 or 30 years, so I don’t need to practice anymore. I just am going to drop this here very lovingly, because in, we would never say in a million years, Lebron James, he is such a good athlete, he’s such a good basket player, he doesn’t need to practice anymore. Like, can you imagine if we said that? Oh my god, he’s so good, we would, he doesn’t need to practice anymore. Simone Biles, she still practices. Okay, she’s the goat, she still practices, okay. And it would be wild for us to say that she doesn’t need to practice anymore. Now, Simone’s gymnastics gymnastics practice does not look the same as my six year old’s gymnastics practice. Okay, they are not the same, and your practice should not be the same either. But everybody needs to build muscle memory. Okay, everybody needs to build muscle memory. You are always having different types of conversations, you are always dealing with a different context, the world is in a different place, etc. etc. Okay, preparation is not about perfection. The my team knows I hate the sentence, practice makes perfect. No, it does not. There’s no such thing as perfect. It’s an illusion. That’s another TED talk. Practice repetition is about regulation. It is about what allows your body to stay present in the actual moment with the donor. It is what allows you to get over that action line and make the phone call. It is what allows you to stay in your body, and for your stress response to not take over and sabotage your fundraising. Okay, it is all about nervous system regulation and taking the microphone away from your amygdala, so that you can pick up the phone, make the call, ask that hard question, gather more insight, deepen the relationship, have that intentionality. Okay, that is what repetition and muscle memory is about. So, remember, if there is a gap between what you know you should be doing and what you are actually doing, that gap is the readiness gap. Say it with me in the chat, okay?
That gap is the readiness gap, and the only way to close the readiness gap, say it with me, is to build skills, confidence, and muscle memory at the same time. Okay, I know it’s so hard that I can’t be with you, and we’re like saying it back and forth, but I’m just kind of making it up. Okay, so I also just want to say that practice means we want to be clear, confident, and connected in our craft, and Cherry and Koshi always, always reminds me of this, but if you are not practicing ahead of time, you are practicing on your real donors. Okay, he always reminds me, “Hey, everybody’s practicing. It’s just whether or not they’re practicing on their real donors, and I don’t know about you all, but it is harder than ever to get meetings with donors, so we do not want to waste them. We do not want to be practicing in those actual donor conversations, okay? Because it is harder than ever to get that time, and we want to make sure that we are making the most of it, okay? So, again, role play around the moments that you dread the most, and this does not have to be a huge thing, okay? 10 focused minutes a day can change and completely rewire the neural pathways in your brain to allow you to be more connected, build more intentional relationships, talk about money, deepen these relationships, we see tremendous results, even between two different scenario practices. Okay. One last thing I want to say on the practice front, however you’re doing it, you need to make sure that you’re also getting immediate feedback, so if you’re doing it with a colleague, they need to give you feedback on that practice right away, because if you don’t get feedback right away, your nervous system starts to go a little bananas. Okay, and we’ve all experienced this in a donor meeting, right, we’re like, I think that meeting went so well, but now the donor’s not getting back to me, and now we’ve told ourselves 12,000 stories about the things that we did wrong in the meeting that aren’t allowing the donor to get back to me, right? Anybody, anybody else experience this? That’s because the gap in what we did, and actually getting that feedback. So, when you are role playing, you need to get immediate feedback. Here’s an example, and you want that feedback to be very specific, not just like you did a good job, or like that was great, very specific. Inside Proactivated, we score on 16 different indicators. I want you to hear the specificity. What could I have done differently here that would have improved my score?
Mallory, your conversation was warm and deeply relational. The only real gap was that Alex never got a clear sense of why you were calling beyond gratitude and curiosity. Adding a simple upfront orienting line would have grounded the whole exchange and prevented the slight wobble around next steps at the end. One small shift would have changed the dynamic, briefly naming your intent at the beginning, something like “I wanted to thank you personally and learn a bit more about what resonated for you, so I can make sure we’re supporting you in the right ways, keeps it donor-centric, while giving the conversation a clear container. That single sentence would have made it easier later to confirm a next step, because Alex would already understand the purpose of the call and what you’re inviting him into, as you look back, where do you think you could naturally have woven a simple purpose statement?
So this is so important. Let the feedback TV our coach inside practice gives me here is so important, because how often do we sort of like steamroll into the conversation, and we’re like, I just want to get to know you better, I just want to learn more about you, but like underneath what we really want to see is like, is there more alignment for deeper involvement, but we didn’t lay it out up front because maybe we’re scared or we’re nervous or we feel like that feels transactional when we should just be building a relationship, y’all, your donors want clarity, they want clarity, they want transparency, they want to understand what the, what the conversation is is doing. Okay, that feedback for me was incredibly helpful. It might sound unnatural because it is generative AI, and it’s an octopus giving me that feedback, and we are very intentional inside practiced at creating cognitive distance between human and AI, because it’s very important for us to know as humans when we are interacting with AI for a lot of different reasons, again a different TED talk, but what I really wanted you to see there was the intentionality of that feedback the specificity? I learned something so helpful that would have absolutely changed how I did the next conversation. Okay, and Aaron, I have to just say that Tivi is an octopus, because in my opinion, octopus are fundraiser spirit animals, they are so smart, they’re brilliant, they’re so protective and loving, and have eight arms, and so to me they really represent fundraisers. So, okay, okay, so habit number five that we’re going to go over really quickly is around tracking what you treasure, so you all we say we want to build relationships with our donors, but then we only track money. Okay, we only track money. Okay, so we talk about what we say we care about doesn’t matter if we are tracking different things, I will always say to organize, I will always say to organizations, don’t tell me what you care about, show me what you track. If you are not tracking quality donor touchpoints, follow-ups, thank you calls, responses to email outreach meetings, and then the strength of those meetings, all of those things, the leading indicators. Okay, then we are always going to revert back to the things we’re being tracked on. Okay, we’re always going to revert back to the things that we are being tracked on. So, how are you tracking the leading indicators in your organization that intentionally build the donor community that you want. Okay, this is so important. Okay, this is so important. And donor, if you have DonorPerfect, they also help with a lot of this tracking, in terms of segments and filters, reminders, etcetera, all the data that. You can get if you have the email integration, all of those things allow you also to be able to track and look at a number of different leading indicators. I love that, Dr. Cheryl. What you said, yes. So, a CRM and like DonorPerfect can really help with that tracking. Okay, last things, and then we’ll maybe have time for like two questions, but one, the quick recap: sort your people before you celebrate, if you can get it done before the event, whatever you can before the event to help you make it easier after the event. Lead with gratitude and curiosity, be aware of fear and the way that’s getting in the way of your real curiosity, make it specific and human, and again, go deeper, go deeper, and know what is holding you back from going deeper. Put reps in for the moments that scare you, and all of them actually people practice their thank you calls inside Practivated all the time, because those are still vulnerable and scary. Okay, and then track what you treasure. Okay, once again, once again, I don’t know what’s happening in the chat either, and I don’t think I have the ability to stop it. So, thanks for sticking with me. Maybe everybody can, like, just say give a y or something, and we can get it out of here or something, because we retake over the chat. I don’t know. Okay, thanks everyone for giving it a shot. I just want to remind you, you don’t have to do these things perfectly, you just have to do things intentionally.
Okay, and that intention, what is required is to understand the way that your stress response is often pulling you away from that intention. Okay, this is me, not a bot. If you want to connect with me on LinkedIn, I would love to connect with you. If you have questions as you start to try to implement some of these things, I would love to connect with you. If you want to book some time with me to talk about practice, we can always do that as well. I can drop a little like meeting link in here too. Lori, do we have one or two questions I can answer for everyone as well?
We actually have a few, and what I’m going to do is I’m going to, I’m going to sort it because people voted, so the one that has the most up votes. The question was, what advice would you give to someone who has started this work mid season and needs to introduce themselves to their organization’s donors while also raising money simultaneously,
while also simultaneously wait. Sorry. Okay, sorry, you broke up for one second. Well, I think so. It’s basically trying to raise money simultaneously while you’re introducing folks to the organization, and the event is sort of in the middle of that,
in the midst, yeah,
yeah. So, look, I think I think it’s really important that we aren’t just thinking about things as like that, we aren’t just thinking about things in terms of these like stagnated experiences that are really separate from each other, right? Like, there should be no conflict in the event, and, and building relationships with donors, and talking to them about other things. It’s an incredible touch point opportunity, right, to meet them in person. So, anybody you’re getting to know and cultivating a relationship with, you should be inviting them to that event, right? I would think about it as something that is like woven into your relationship building as just a great peak moment, touchpoint opportunity for folks to hear more stories about the organization, as opposed to feeling like you’re doing two different, fully different activities.
Okay. All right. Well, it seems like people were responding to that, so they may have been some upvotes. Okay, so do you want to do one more? Sure. Okay, I don’t know how much this is a question, but maybe you can respond. Christine said I can’t be in enough places and with enough people at the event to notice all of their behaviors, and so on. Do you understand what she’s saying?
Yeah, I mean, so on that, on that sheet, there were a bunch of different, in like ways that you could go into that conversation, so you wouldn’t say anything that you weren’t actually able to do, right? I was giving different examples based on things that you might have noticed at the event, but there were other examples in there, like, “Hey, we didn’t get to connect at the event, and I would love to. I saw your name on the list, and I’d love to connect with you, right? Because we didn’t get a chance to talk at the event, so I think the most. Important thing is around encouragement, right? The most are around authenticity and what you’re saying, being honest and related to your actual experience at the event. If you’re not at the event at all, you could also say, like, hey, unfortunately I couldn’t go to the event this year. I really wanted to, but I saw your name on the list and was hoping maybe we could find some time after I’d love like to get your feedback and debrief on the event, so I think it’s like recognizing the experience that you actually had, and then building on that into an entry point with your donors.
Okay, alright, they were actually the two top questions that were upvoted the most, so yeah, it’s nice to have that option, because then we know that there’s more than one person that is looking for that answer, but we are at 3o’clock and I just want to say that some of the stuff that you were mentioning, you could see in the chat, the aha moments as they were relating to everything you were saying. It was so very cool to see.
I’m so glad, and I think more than anything, I’m so grateful to DonorPerfect for being such a wonderful partner to the nonprofit community, and to all of your clients, and always putting you know really valuable resources in front of them, y’all. They went above and beyond with this fundraiser follow-up kit, so you should be giving DonorPerfect a lot of love in the chat right now, too, because they’re the ones that make all of this possible and allow me to create this unique content for all of you. And this is the first time I’ve ever done this session, this content, all of it completely unique for DonorPerfect, for all of you. And so I’m just.. I’m so grateful that you’re here. I know how hard this is. I know that you have layered on years and years of hard on top of other hard. I promise you that you can do this. I promise you that you can do this, but you need to acknowledge the role that your brain and body are playing to like slow down, bring intentionality into the fold, close that readiness gap, and then you’re going to start to feel the wheels come on to your fundraising engine. So, thank you so much for joining me today. Thank you so much for having me to DonorPerfect, and wishing you all a great rest of your day.
And thank you so much to you, Mallory, for joining us. This has been a great presentation.