Making the Ask: Turn Your Fundraising Conversations into Authentic Opportunities

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All right, so good afternoon or good morning to those of you in other time zones. Welcome to today’s webinar, making the ask, turning your fundraising conversations into authentic Read More

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All right, so good afternoon or good morning to those of you in other time zones. Welcome to today’s webinar, making the ask, turning your fundraising conversations into authentic opportunities. Presenting today is Mallory Erickson. Mallory is an executive coach fundraising consultant and the creator of the power partners formula through which she has trained more than 80,000 fundraisers. She’s also the host of what the fundraising podcast, and author of what the fundraising embracing and enabling the people behind the purpose, which explores how a shift away from 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, so you do not need your recorder logged into the session. So if you could remove it, that will be wonderful.
And we’ll be sending out the recording later this week, also with so many people in the webinar, questions added to a continually scrolling chat can easily be missed, so make sure you put it into the Q and A so that we can easily see it and have it answered. So welcome Mallory to today’s webinar. You are all set to get started. Awesome. Thank you so much, Lori, and I’m so excited to be here with all of you today, and so grateful for a DonorPerfect having me for this really, really important topic. I’m going to ask all of you to bear with me a little bit. I’m a little under the weather. Maybe you can hear it in my in my voice, so I’m going to need y’all in the chat and with me to keep each other pumped up and engaged. I love a fast moving Convos in the chat. I’m also really loving seeing people from like the same place, and always love people being able to connect with other nonprofit leaders from from the regions that they’re in on webinars like these. So for those of you that I haven’t been able to meet before, my name is Mallory Erickson. I’m the founder and CEO of practivated, a donor conversation simulator to help fundraisers practice for donor conversations and build confidence and clarity on how they talk to donors. So incredibly relevant for our subject today. And as Laurie mentioned, I’m also the creator of the power partners formula, host of what the fundraising. I would love to connect with you on LinkedIn. So if you use that QR code or you find me on LinkedIn, please connect with me. Don’t just follow along. I mean, you can if you want to, but I would love to connect with you and and to know that you’re here and actually be able to talk with you. So for those of you who don’t know anything about me or my story, I, like probably many of you, became an accidental fundraiser. So I need, I just want to see like a big wave of whys or NS if you are not an accidental fundraiser and you were born a fundraiser. But for those of you who also identify as an accidental fundraiser, go ahead and throw that, why inside the chat, because I know that I’m not alone here, and there we go. Whoo.
So I had a lot of kind of false beliefs of what I thought fundraising was going to be like when I first got into it, that I was going to be this empowered and confident leader, that I wasn’t going to work more than 40 hours a week that I was going to be having donors come to me, and the reality was quite different. 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 didn’t have a donor pipeline that I trusted. I was working 12 to 14 hour days, I ended up sacrificing a lot of my health and relationships and completely burnt out. And a lot of that actually had to do with how I did and really didn’t feel like I could, quote, unquote, ask for money. And so what we’re going to be talking about today, and how you make the ask, and how you build towards the ask, all of those things. Are things I wish somebody had told me at the very beginning of my journey, but I ended up hitting this, this burnout point, and then 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 fundamentally changed the way that I fundraised. And not only did they have big financial implications, I ended up moving an organization from a million to 3.8 really quickly, but I started to feel completely different as a fundraiser, particularly when it came to things like quote, unquote, making the ask. And so since then, I’ve been really.
Focused in my career in helping bring these different frameworks and tools together to help fundraisers become more emboldened and embodied and be able to fundraise in ways that are really aligned with them and feel good to the fundraiser and feel good to the donor. And that’s what really led me to creating practivated, our donor simulation tool and virtual AI coaching tool, because I wanted to be able to support fundraisers in the moments that mattered most. And I know that when we don’t practice before we have a donor conversation, we are practicing in that donor conversation. And you know, we know right now more than ever, it’s so challenging even just to get in front of our donors, right? We’re getting inundated on our on our end, too, with emails and text messages and all the things, and it’s harder to break through the noise. So we want to make sure when we do, when we have those moments of connection and those conversations, we’re really able to do it in a meaningful, connected way that moves our mission forward. A big part, as I was mentioning, of all of my work, is this idea, is this idea that a lot of what drives and doesn’t drive our behavior, our fears and discomfort, and so I don’t know if this graphic resonates with any of you, but this was totally true for me. As a fundraiser, I had this sort of robust fundraising strategy, or maybe a big list of donors that I was going to go and talk to, but there were a number of limiting beliefs or assumptions interpretations. We talked about this a little bit in webinar number one, there were holding me back from taking action on all of those, either individuals or strategy that I was that I was
planning to to do. And so my work has really focused on sort of understanding that donor behavior is a response behavior. Money is a lagging indicator, okay, the amount of money that we raise is a lagging indicator, and it is determined primarily by our behavior, which is the leading indicator. Okay, fundraiser behavior is the driver of donor behavior, either because we prompt or don’t prompt our donors, or how we prompt or don’t prompt our donors, and so it’s super important that we understand our behavior as fundraisers, and maybe even equally as important, if not more important, we understand what’s happening inside our brain and body that’s influencing our behavior as fundraisers. Because maybe you’re ready to tell me this or not, I know again, this. We’re early in the webinar. We’re eight minutes in. I’m asking you to be a little bit vulnerable, but if you’re willing to, I would love to know if anybody feels like they have something on their to do list that they know they should have we’re not going to. Should all over ourselves, but they that you feel like you should have already done, either reached out to a particular donor about a match, or send an email, follow up around something, but you’re feeling resistance around it. You’re not taking action around it. Oh, my God. Y’all, I told you to help me with energy in the chat, and you are delivering. Okay? Thank you very much. I love this chat, and I love how honest you’re being, and I love how vulnerable you’re being. Thank you so much for showing up to for me today and helping with the energy in this webinar. I really appreciate it. And yes, this is so normal, right? This is so normal. And we say, we say, Oh, I didn’t have time. And listen, I get it. Y’all, you have way too many things to do. You have too many things on your plate. I’m not arguing with that at all, but sometimes we say that we didn’t have time, when really what might be happening is that we have some fear around taking that action, okay, and that is totally normal, because what happens is a different part of our brain is online when we’re creating that strategy, when we’re creating that donor list, when we’re when we are getting ready to find our donors who are going to come in with our match for our end of year campaign. Okay, then we’re all up in our prefrontal cortex. We’re in strategy mode, okay, we are thinking, but then we go to take the action to make that phone call, to send that email, and our back brain comes online, our amygdala, that’s our fear and stress response, okay, fight flight and freeze. And so that’s when we start to, like, feel this resistance, right? We’re like, oh, well, maybe, maybe today is not a good time. Or maybe, and I’ll talk a little bit more about this in in later, but making the ask is particularly stressful, right? Sometimes that resistance comes in even setting up the meeting with the donor in the first place. Sometimes that resistance comes in the middle of the meeting itself, right? We sort of change course. I don’t know about you, but I had many of meetings where I was supposed to ask for money, and in the middle of the meeting, my brain gave me a reason that maybe now wasn’t the right time for that. Okay, so making the ask is particularly stressful, and I talk about these components of stress and chronic stress and burnout in my book, but they are very, very particularly true for making the ask right. Making the ask.
Involves uncertainty. We don’t know what the person is going to say, potential for rejection pressure, because we’re like, oh my gosh, if I don’t raise this money, what’s going to happen with blank, blank, blank, right? And power dynamics like interpersonal conflict that might be happening, but also just the power dynamics that exist around money and donors, even when we try to fundraise in community centric ways, just being a part of a society that values money, sometimes at all costs, there are these very like understandable power dynamics that take place. All of those things, uncertainty, rejection, pressure, overwork, power dynamics, all those things have been, have been scientifically proven to create stress, chronic stress, and even burnout, okay? And so I’m not saying that to say, Okay, well, you better never make an ask, because it’s going to activate your stress response. I’m saying it to say it is very normal that it activates your stress response, okay, but it’s so important that we understand this relationship, okay? Because when we are in a state of anxiety or stress or chronic stress or burnout, our brain turns off the parts of us that are that are wired for connection and compassion and closeness and empathy, and we don’t ask questions or, you know, maybe we’re trying to listen well in the meeting, which just means we’re like, being quiet while the other person talks. But are we really hearing what they’re saying? Those parts of us actually turn off when we’re in a stress state. So if you’ve ever been in a donor meeting and you feel like maybe you aren’t really hearing what the donor is saying, or your mind is wandering a little bit, or you’re thinking the whole time about, okay, when am I going to transition to make the ask? When am I going to transition to make the ask? Like that? Those are all stress responses. And if we want to be innovative, collaborative, flexible, and really build deep human connection in our relationships, we need to be super aware of the fact that our anxiety and our stress is turning off that capacity. Okay? And one thing, and one thing I just want to say, and don’t worry y’all, we are going to get into the mechanics of making the ask. I’m going to give you five tips today, and we’re going to go through the things you should be doing before, before you make the ask, what you should be doing in the meeting. I have a little choose your own adventure. Okay, around how that conversation actually goes. So we’re going to get super, super tactical today. But I do want to make sure before we do that, that we talk about some of these pieces, because otherwise I’m going to give you all the tactics your prefrontal brain, which is who I have with me right now. Okay, your prefrontal cortex is going to be like, okay, yeah, I got it, I got it, I got it. And then you’re going to go into the meeting, and our little friend, fear is going to be really tricky again, and I want you to be able to spot it okay, because that’s the only way you’re going to actually be able to implement what I’m teaching you today. So are you with me? Are you okay with me spending a little bit of time here, and then we’re going to get into the mechanics of all the things I need to see, some Whys in the chat, if you’re with me. Okay, alright, amazing. So let’s talk about how tricky our friend fear is. Okay? So there are certain times in our life where we know we’re afraid of something, right? But there are a lot of other times in our life where fear is super tricky. So in fundraising in particular, fear can sound like compassion. Oh, they have so much going on right now, this isn’t a good time to ask. Okay, we think that’s about compassion for the donor, but that’s actually a fear response. Okay, our fear can sound strategic. We should wait until the campaign is further along before making this ask. And I want to hear in the in the chat, if you have experienced these types of fears before, okay? Or and, and we think again that this is strategic. We should do this because of this. But actually maybe, if we’re being honest with ourselves, it’s related to some fear. Okay? Fear can sound protective. Everyone is treating them like an ATM so I shouldn’t bring up money, okay? Fear can sound protective. Fear can sound like loyalty, okay? They have already done so much. I shouldn’t ask for more. And I just want to say, if any of these things, if any of these sentences, have been true for you. You are totally not alone, as I hope you can see it in the chat. This is so incredibly normal, and what I want you to be able to do is to be able to spot fear when it’s showing up and not get sort of it is so tricky, you guys. It is so tricky, but I want to help you not get as tricked by it right because we think we’re doing the right thing. We’re like, Oh, I am being loyal and I’m being compassionate and I’m being strategic, but really what’s happening is fear is driving the show, okay? And when we when fear drives our beliefs, and when it drives the way that we talk about money, the way that we think we can or cannot ask.
For money, we forget to do the things that are the most important in actually being able to raise the money that we want to be able to raise, which is things like using storytelling, being direct with our asks. We like wind our way around it. We say it in the most passive way. We we downgrade our asks, we give a million caveats. We don’t actually want to save the number. So we spend the whole meeting alluding to something, and then we think we can say the number in the email follow up. I don’t know about you here, we’re all those were all my tricks, right? That was all my way of like, escaping fear, okay? But this is how fundraising becomes a self fulfilling prophecy. Because the the truth of the matter is we can only raise the amount of money that we believe is out there to be raised, and the amount of money that we ask for and we invite people to contribute to, and that we invite people to give to. And so today, we’re going to be talking about making the ask from all of these different and all of these different components that lead you to be being able to talk about money and invite people in and to give in a way that feels really good to them and feels really good to you in the process. Okay? And it just it wouldn’t be one of my webinars if I didn’t show this. For those of you who are new to my work, I just need to sort of give you this breakdown. A lot of what I’m talking about right now is related to this idea of the cognitive behavior loop, the the fact that our thoughts and our beliefs impact how we feel and then ultimately what we do, and that’s what impacts our results. A lot of times, we stay overly focused just on the action we see that thing on our to do list, and we’re like, well, I’ll just do it again. I’ll do it tomorrow. Okay, so that thing that’s been sitting on your to do list for a long time, if you haven’t gotten to that’s maybe a two to five minute task, like, how many times do we say, well, I’ll just do that tomorrow. And that’s because we’re just trying to change our action, and because we aren’t going to lay layer deeper to actually understand our emotion related to that action and the thoughts and the beliefs that are driving that emotion. And until we uncover those things, and until we start to shift those things, we’re going to keep that thing is going to stay on our to do list forever, because it’s actually not about the doing, it’s about the how we feel doing it okay. And so when I started to really understand this cognitive behavior loop, I started to see the reason why I was so uncomfortable fundraising, because I thought that my thoughts and beliefs were that fundraising was trying to get people to do something they didn’t really want to do, and that my job in making the ask was figuring out how to get them to do this thing that they didn’t really want to do, by figuring out the exact way to to ask for money, right or wait for a cue that was like hidden Somewhere in a haystack that would tell me that they were, at that point, interested maybe in giving me some of their money. Okay? But then I thought about the fact that I would have these donor meetings that actually did feel really good, and like three hours would go by and and they were really connected and meaningful. And I started to ask myself, Okay, well, what’s happening in those meetings, like these thoughts and beliefs about fundraising, they’re never going to feel good. Y’all, if you think that fundraising is hounding people for money, there is no way it’s ever going to feel good, right? Because that thought, that belief, that’s never going to feel good. And so when I started to look at that, and I started to say, Okay, well, what do I actually think that good fundraising is about? Like, do I really think that it’s about hounding people for money, like, what about those three hour meetings? And that’s where I really started to understand that, like, great fundraising is not an ask, it’s an offer. It’s about partnership. It’s about opportunity. It’s about inviting people in to make a change in their community, in the world, in an issue area that they care so deeply about, like, what a gift right to give people an opportunity to make change around something that they feel deeply about, what a gift. And so everything I’m about to start to go into the five, five tips, everything that we’re talking about today is really with this belief at its underpinning, that good fundraising, and the fundraising that you can do, and the fundraising that you are going to do this end of year is going to be rooted in this. It’s going to be rooted in how you make offers to people to do something really meaningful, to get them involved and to make a change. Okay, so are you with me? That was my whole big like little brain science Crash Course, but I want to help you understand what is happening inside your brain and body, so that when we talk about these tips, you can start to put them into action in the way that is the most meaningful for you and is going to keep you in action when you move into these conversations. Okay, so tip number one, I’m taking a quick little sip here. Actually,
tip number one. So in order to make the right ask okay of the right donor at the right time, there are some building blocks to get there. Okay, that this entire webinar is not about a sentence on how you say, would you you know? Would you be interested in blank? Right? Where?
We’re going to talk about the pieces around that moment. You know, a lot of times when we’re nervous about fundraising, when we’re scared about fundraising, we’re just imagining this one moment, this one conversation, this one sentence, and what the donor is going to say to that but there are a lot of things that need to happen before that sentence that actually really change the likelihood of what somebody says when you do make an ask like that, okay, so I want to make sure you understand the mechanics around the ask that are going to lead to a higher likelihood that the donor is going to say, yes. Okay, so the first piece here is around understanding what causes a donor to take action. This might be different than what you think it is. So we often say things like our donors like blank right? Like our donors like to give it end of year, or our donors don’t like text messages, right? Things that we we because of some feeling that we have around something, we make some blanket statements about what our donors like or don’t like based on that, or we know more, like general donor engagement best practices. And I know I already said one of them today, but like storytelling, demonstrating impact, right? So we’re like, okay, I know what, what gets a donor to take action, like, I just have to tell a good story, or I need to be able to demonstrate the impact, but, and those things are true, but I really also want you to understand the difference between driving affinity and driving action. Okay, so storytelling is an important part of of that, of motivation. I’ll talk about that in a in a moment. And talking about impact is also a really, really important part of this, too, but it’s one part of it. Okay, you need, I want you to understand the difference between driving affinity and driving action. Angie, you’re with me. You see where I’m going here. So I mentioned before that I am trained in habit and behavior design. I learned under Dr BJ Fogg, and this is his, this is his behavior model, okay? And what he helps us understand is that in order for anyone to take an action, three things need to come together in a given moment, enough motivation to take the action, the ability to take the action, and they need to be prompted to take the action. Okay? So those things need to be able to come together in a given moment. So, so storytelling is a great example of driving motivation up. I’m going to show you that graph again, right? Storytelling is a great example of driving motivation up. Okay, talking about the the difference that your donation can make, the impact of a donation that drives motivation up, okay, but that’s one piece here. That’s one piece of the puzzle. We need to make sure that all three things are really coming together in that given moment. Okay, so making the ask involves driving up motivation, ensuring ability, the ability for them to take the action that you’re asking them to take, and prompting and something I actually want to add in here, because BJ created this before we all got 47,000
text messages a day, okay, so I would say, like re prompting. Okay, because people need additional reminders. So when you’re thinking about how you are helping, helping get your get your sorry about that, how you are helping invite your folks to get involved, you want to make sure that in your conversations, in your engagement, in the meeting itself, you are using things that increase hope and decrease fear for the donor. You want to be making an ask that is within their ability level. Now I’m not saying don’t reach right, don’t don’t try to understand their appetite for a transformational gift. I’m not telling you to undersell your organization, but you probably don’t want to be meeting with somebody that you know the most they’ve ever given to an organization was $100,000
and ask them to give $10 million and say, that’s the only way that they could make a difference in your organization, right? Because at that point, what we’ve taken away there is ability, no matter how much you’ve motivated that donor, if you tell them the way that you can make this change is through a $10 million donation, and they do not have $10 million then we can’t get them over the action line on that ability line, okay? And then, once again, all of these things need to come together in a given moment. So when their motivation is high, and when you’ve given them the ability to take the action, or you’ve positioned the ask in their ability line. That’s when you’re prompting them, you’re inviting them to take an action. Okay? And I want you to understand a follow up component to this, because I think one of the things that we often get wrong is in the meeting itself, we are focused on increasing motivation. We are focused on making sure that we’ve tailored the Ask Amount to their ability level, and we’re inviting them in. Then when we fought, they’re like, Okay, I need to think about it. I’m going to take this back to my partner. We’re going to discuss then we send follow up emails. And the follow up emails are the RE prompting, which we should be doing, but we forget in those emails that we also.
Need to be incorporating motivation, and we also need to be making it easy for them to say yes. Okay, so ability is not just about the amount that they can give ability is also about how easy are we making it for them to say yes? This goes into getting the meeting in the first place, too, and I won’t go on too much of a tangent here, but this is really important. A lot of folks inside my program recently have been saying, I’ve been having trouble getting people to get back to me and have meetings with me. And I’m like, Well, what are you what are you sending them to invite them to get meetings with you? And they’re like, Oh, well, I’m sending them, like, an impact report or a big update about everything that’s going on with our organization, and then saying, you know, do you want to have a meeting to discuss this? You guys, that means that that donor feels like they have to read through all that material before they can respond to your email. That is not making the action very easy to do. So you want to make ability super, super easy. Okay, so increase hope, decrease fear. Make the action really easy to do that you’re inviting them to do, and then prompt them and re prompt them okay, and know that without those reminders and those things coming together in a given moment, they you are going to not be able to kind of drive their drive their behavior in the way that you’re trying to Okay. I know we have to get to number two, but I also want to share this with all of you so inside practice, where we do these practice donor conversations. We’ve done this incredible study on the state of donor conversations. We looked at 307
donor conversations across 106 fundraisers, and we can see what drives donor behavior, what fundraisers are doing that are that are making donors more likely to say yes, what fundraisers are doing that are making them more likely to say no. There’s no other data like this, because there’s no other tool like practivated. So we’ve been able to get insight into what moves missions forward through these conversations like nothing ever before. And I’m just super excited for to give you that research I think is going to really help sort of deepen your understanding. Okay, I put the the link doesn’t seem to work. Try, okay. I clicked on the link this morning. Oh my gosh.
Okay. That is very strange. Okay, y’all, I checked this right before
and
hold on one second.
Okay, I’m going to try to give that to you at a different time, because that is very, very weird. But also, if you, if you just go ahead and
find me on LinkedIn and connect with me. I’ll make sure to send this to you later. But
okay, here we go.
We’re going to figure that out later. Tip number
two, gather insight before the ask. Okay, joy, maybe too many of you tried the link at once. Okay, yeah, keep, keep trying at different times. Maybe we just, like overwhelmed my whole system. Gosh, I love a moment like that. Okay, my the website was just not ready for all of you to learn about the state of donor conversations. Okay, it’s working. It’s working. Alright, cool. So we just gotta, we gotta stagger it y’all okay. So tip number two is around gathering insight before the ask. Okay, so the Ask offer process that I’m going to kind of walk you through, in a few different in a few different ways, is you’re going to identify clear alignment. We’re not talking about that today because, because that’s a whole separate webinar, but the the first piece is really around like understanding, and that’s part of kind of what I’ll get to next, around insight gathering. But you want to identify clear alignment, okay? You want to have some level of strong engagement, right? If you haven’t talked to and some this person in a year, they haven’t engaged with any of your material, you haven’t had a meeting with them, sending somebody an email, asking them for $5,000 like might not go over so well. So right now, it’s October 15, we want to start having conversations moving towards these engagement touch points. Okay? So you want to start to be engaging with folks, other than the moment where you’re making the ask, and then I’m going to talk to you today about permission. How do you get permission to make the ask and and what permission does for you as the fundraiser, but also for the donor? Okay? Because it’s all about conscious choice. And when you get permission to make the ask, your nervous system actually regulates the donor is so much more open to hearing what you have to say. So we’re going to talk about all of those, all of those pieces, but we make a lot of assumptions, as I mentioned before, about the motivation and ability of our donors. Okay, we say what’s motivating them as a group, but also as an individual? And I hear this a lot from organizations. If you’ve had a donor who’s been around for 10 years, what motivated them to get involved in your.
Organization is likely not what’s keeping them involved today, right? Everything about the context of their life has changed, their passions, their interests, what their family structure might look like. And so we need to refresh all the time with our donors, and need to be understanding what’s motivating them today, and their ability level is also changing all the time, and we fall into a lot of assumptions based on past giving and past behavior. And actually what we need to do is we need to be curious. Okay, the most, I actually believe that the most important fundraising skill of all is curiosity, and curiosity does require regulation. Okay? It requires openness. It requires us actually being curious about something so we can have a list of questions. Okay, here’s like, kind of a basic list of questions for individual donors that we often talk about, right? How do you get involved in the organization in the first place? What is, you know, why is the mission important to them? What do they love most and least about the organization? These are, these are kind of like high level questions that you could ask on a listening tour if you’re just starting to build a relationship with a donor. But what you really want is to be genuinely curious about why and why they care about these things, what’s keeping them up at night? What has kept them around for 10 years? Like, gosh, you’ve had so many different things you could have supported in our local community, but you have been here for, you know, this many years. Like, tell me about that. Tell me about what it’s been like and why you know our work is so important to you and who you are and what you care about. And that type of communication, that type of curiosity that is only going to be able to happen if we’re in a state where we really are open and regulated towards it. Okay? So we have, like inside, inside proactivated, for example, we have inside gathering is one of the 16 indicators that we evaluate fundraisers on after they have these practice donor conversations, because it’s so important. And whether you’re practicing in something like practivated, or you’re practicing in your in role play with your team members or your board or however you do that, one of the things I would really highly recommend is at the end of that practice to ask the other folks in the room. This is what people do with TiVi after their practice scenario, ask people in the room, how do you think I could have gained additional insight? What’s another question that I could have asked that would have allowed me to go deeper and uncover something else about the donor. I have had a lot of conversations with donors recently. It and it’s been really interesting that this keeps coming up over and over again where the donors have have said to me, you know, if the fundraiser asked a little bit more about blank, they would have learned that what I really cared about was x
and so, yeah, like I, I keep giving my like, $1,000 to blank, because that’s what I’ve kind of always given for. But I actually could have been really interested in being a part of something related to x, y and z, if they had just asked more questions. And so I really like, this is such a and so as you think about what’s building towards the ask, the conversations you want to be having with your donors. Right now, this insight gathering, this curiosity, is so incredibly important. Okay, I don’t know if this is going to work. Can you Hello, Mallory, how can I support you in improving the Insight gathering? I’ve seen your feedback and conversation. Let’s explore how we can strengthen this area together.
How could I have improved my insight gathering here to learn more about this donor,
you did a strong job surfacing the donor’s concerns organically, especially around data and school readiness. Where you could push deeper is by using their insights as springboards for curiosity, rather than pivots to your own perspective or next point, for example, when the donor shared that they’re open to supporting data infrastructure, if there’s a clear plan, you would acknowledge that, but missed the chance to ask what kind of impact data would be most meaningful for you personally, or how have you seen this done? Well elsewhere that would have tapped into their lived experience as both a donor and board member. Next time, try lingering slightly longer in their point of view, one well placed follow up question like, Can you say more about what you mean by internal muscle? Could have uncovered values, expectations or fears you can shape future asks around what’s one belief or interest this donor shared that you’d like to understand more deeply next time you connect.
So sorry. I wasn’t sure at the screen share way that I’m doing it. I couldn’t tell if that was going to actually work, so I cut myself off there. But what I wanted you to see is, like, how important it is to go a layer deeper here. Okay, so however you’re role playing, if you’re role playing, I think John.
Carlos here he can he can drop a link if you want to learn more about practivated in particular. But if you’re role playing with your team members, or however you’re doing it, I really want to encourage you to be able to go a layer deeper around insight gathering and to think about what’s next, what are you missing? And to have your teammates and team members really be inspiring you around more around more curiosity and Giancarlo, we can, we can even give them, if we want the free trial link, which, if he’s still here, he can do it, even though we don’t normally give it to this many people at once, but, but, but I love these folks. So okay, so we’ll give you a free trial link for two weeks inside practivated, and you can actually go jump in and start to practice, get feedback on insight, gathering in particular, I think, given the time of year that this is, this is like, particularly important right now. Okay, so let’s talk about tip number three. Okay, so clear goals and transparency create clarity and confidence. Okay, so I don’t know about you all, but I was taught to just go build relationships with donors and get them to like me enough that one day they wanted to give me some of their money, and I was supposed to go and have these meetings where I was just building a relationship, but then the whole time, I was looking, looking for signs that maybe they would want to give me some of their money one day, and I felt like a car sales person, and no shade to car sales people, because I’m sure that there are so many amazing car sales people out there, but I had another fundraiser once say this to me, like I feel like a car salesperson. And I thought about that, I was like, What? What about car sales people make us uncomfortable, and how does that relate to the way that we’re taught to fundraise, in the way that we’re taught to sort of ask for money. And I realized it’s that, you know, we go into the car dealership focused on, you know, the car and that we want doing all the research ahead of time we walk into that dealership, we’re like, don’t take the water, because we are so nervous that the car salesperson is going to try to sell us the car, whether or not it’s the right car for us. Okay? And so we don’t feel like we can have a really open, organic conversation with that person, because we think they have this intention that is going to kind of leave us out, and so that we are taught to do many of the same things. In fundraising, we’re told to, like, go on these listening tours, where the whole time we’re just trying to pay attention to a Segway where we could say, well, since you said that, let me tell you about blank. And then we have this meeting that feels cringy and uncomfortable, and we try to follow up after the meeting, and we’re like, Wait, why will you get back to me like I thought we had a connection, but did we really? Because there were very different sort of ideas of what that meeting was about. My gosh, y’all the the
links, y’all are crashing my site, and I love it. I could not be more happy. What a wonderful problem to have. Okay, so I’m sure Giancarlo will will figure out some magic there behind the scenes, but I’m going to keep going. So we need to be clear about our intentions. And something I also really want to say, so that is in the emails. In the emails y’all to have these meetings. I don’t know about you, but if I get a DM on LinkedIn, that’s like, Hey, how are you like, immediately I’m like, What do you want, right? Like, just tell me. Just tell me, because our nervous systems don’t like that uncertainty. Remember, I told you, uncertainty creates stress in our nervous system. The same thing is true for your donors. Okay, the the absolute same thing is true for your donors. So we need to be clear about our intentions. Why do we want to meet? Why do we want it? Why do we want to talk to them. Why? Why them? Why? Now, okay, and I also really want to clarify for you that relate just building a relationship can’t be a goal of the meeting, okay, building a relationship cannot be a goal of the meeting. Because how will you know if that is your overarching umbrella, how will you know if you’ve achieved the goal of the meeting. Okay? So transparency inspires action, being transparent with the donor before the meeting. And this is not this is the same, even if it isn’t an Ask meeting, right? Giving people a sense of, why do you want to talk to them again? Why them? Why now? And that process, this is part of the permission process, okay? Because this then, once we have that permission to have the meeting, we are nervous system also regulates okay, because everybody knows what’s happening. Everybody knows what’s going on, and that allows us to walk into the meeting a lot more confident and a lot more clear. If you are walking into a meeting and the donor thinks you are just getting to know each other, and you think that your whole job is to listen for a cue for when you can ask for money. How? How good do you think you’re going to feel walking into that meeting like that is not that is not good. Okay, Sarah, I see your comment.
There, this is sounding more and more like dating. 100%
I feel very hesitant often to relate fundraising to dating, but there is one very clear, clear parallel here, right, which is like I’m not saying in a meeting when you have a first introduction with a donor, that you are going to ask them to marry you, but you should probably be clear that you are in the market for marriage, right? Like with dating you. You don’t need to say, will you marry me on date one, but you might want to say, hey, yeah. Like, I do want to get married one day, instead of, Oh, I’m just looking for something casual. And then you wait five years, slowly trying to convince the person that they want to marry you. And let me tell you, I did this in my 20s. It does not work very well. Okay, so we want to be really clear about our intentions. At the very beginning, we can say, I want to figure out if there’s enough alignment here for us to do something meaningful. I don’t think we’re going to have that figured out by the end of this conversation, but I’m hoping this is the first of many opportunities for us to really get to know each other, for me to tell you a little bit more about what we’re doing over here, to learn more about what you’re the most passionate about, and then as we start to build that relationship, to see if there are ways that we might want to work together in the future, if we both feel really aligned with that okay, so that is, that is like, how you can frame that up if you’re not ready for that, ask. Okay, so we are asking for permission to have the meeting. I’m going to talk about the other layers of permission a little bit later. But permission creates clarity, and for you as the fundraiser, permission creates confidence, and also it cements something very important, which is that you have nothing to hide. The only reason we feel like we have to bury the fact that we want to talk about investment, we want to talk about doing something together, is because we feel like it’s bad. Because we feel like it’s bad to talk about money. It’s not bad to talk about money. Moving money towards what matters most is one of the most like sacred and honorable things that we could do, again, giving people the opportunity to do something so meaningful, where they get to make change in the areas that they care the most deeply about, that impact their lives and their community like that, is an incredible thing, and we need to stand proud in that. And the moment we bury the lead, we are acting as if we have something to hide, and that is going to not that is going to dysregulate us in our body. Okay, Are y’all with me? I see that you’re still here. I’m seeing the chat still go off. I want to make sure you’re, you’re with me. So we have talked about, okay, amazing. Okay, so we’re talking about kind of the mechanics of what drives donor behavior, what drives donor action. We’re understanding the importance of gathering insight to really figure out where alignment exists. We are curious. We are asking good questions. We are learning more about the donor. We are figuring out where they are or are not aligned with our organization. Okay, that’s one of the things I want to make sure you know insight gathering might result in a donor not being aligned with your organization, that is okay, okay. Some money is very expensive to accept, okay, some money is very expensive to accept, and the only way to find donors who are really aligned with your organization is to also understand where they when donors are not aligned with your organization. Okay, that’s the only way to really focus on alignment. Okay, so now I want to make sure you understand the Ask flow. Okay, so again, I this is always so hard because it’s a little bit of a choose your own adventure. So I don’t want you to get too too worked up about this slide. I’m just going to like talk you through this little bit. Okay, so oftentimes our meetings with donors, I’m not saying listening tours are bad, as long as you are clear about what you’re doing and what you’re not doing in that meeting. Now, sometimes you might go on a listening tour and that donor is saying a lot of things that make you feel like they want to hear more about a program, or they want to hear more about an investment opportunity. They’re asking questions that make you feel like maybe, maybe they are ready to be asked around this. And I wasn’t anticipating that. So being really curious and and being present in the meeting, and being in the body in our meeting allows us then to get curious with them in a moment like that. Okay, because if you have a donor who’s leaning in, who’s asking questions, who’s wanting to hear more about a program, you have the opportunity to say, Hey, I came into this meeting today really just wanting to build a relationship, to learn more about your passion around X, Y and Z. I did not come with any intention about talking about investment or specific program investments or program ideas, because I really want to stay focused high level, I’m feeling like you are really interested to hear more about X, Y and Z, and I don’t want to overstep. I don’t want to throw a curve ball in this meeting. But if you want to.
But I also don’t want to miss a cue from you or or I don’t want to miss an opportunity to talk to you about something that I feel like you might be asking me to talk about. So I just want to, like, get you know clarity there. Like, would you like to hear more about X, Y and Z, okay? And that is an example of permission, right? You’re not just, like, taking something and saying, Well, since you said that, let me tell you about blah, blah, blah, right? You’re like, I’m trying to make sure I’m reading this right. Like, do you do you want to hear more about blank? And then they might say, yes. They might say, not right now. But like, let’s talk about that another time. Thanks so much for checking Right. Like, you’re really giving them that option. Okay, so that’s the only case where, like, if you go into a meeting you have not said that you’re talking about investment. That is the one case, the one transition and type of permission that I would ask in a meeting like that. Okay. Then if you are going into a meeting where you have said in that email, you are being transparent, that this is to talk about, you know, their involvement for the year, their investment what’s happening with a certain program, and if they have an appetite for being involved, then as you’re going through that meeting, you are asking for permission along the way, until you get to the moment where you are saying a number and an investment level, okay? Because the reason why this is so important is, again, it creates buy in for them, and it creates nervous system regulation for you, okay, so you are asking for permission to have that meeting in the first place, okay? And then I had a great mentor, a great fundraising mentor once, who told me his tip was make the ask over soup. Okay, that was like his tagline, make the hour, not tagline. But he would always say that to me, make the ask over soup, because if you’re going to lunch, or maybe you’re not going to a meal, but just hypothetically, okay, you don’t want to spend the whole meeting thinking about in the back of your head, oh my God, when am I going to talk about what am I going to talk about? This, right? Like, when am I going to talk about money? You’re going to miss all of the deep relationship building of that meeting, because it’s worrying you in the back of your mind, and it’s dysregulating you. So what, what he would have me do, and what I have my clients do is, you know, you’re sitting down at the meeting, you’re chit chatting a little bit, you’re catching up a little bit, and then you can say something like, Hey, I actually want to spend a lot more time hearing about your daughter’s first year of college and what you said about your trip to Nepal, and I want to make sure we have plenty of time to talk about all of that. I also know that I’m feeling a little bit nervous to put this program and opportunity in front of you that I mentioned in the email, and so I’m wondering, like, if we could spend just a little bit of time at the top of this to talk through that a little bit and hear about your potential interest or appetite, any questions you might have. How do you feel about that? Are you okay with us? Kind of like, kicking off there. Okay? So that allows you to, like, really start off that way. Also, you’ll notice something that I did there, I expressed that I was nervous. Okay, this is a tip around how you build real connected relationships. Part of building connected relationship is is being able to let yourself be more fully known and create space for the other person to be more fully known. So when you say something like, I’m nervous, you are opening up a space for more connection. Okay, so I really, I really encourage my clients to do that all the time. Sometimes I’ll say something like, you know, this next part of my, of my work, is always the part that makes me the most, you know, the most nervous, because I never want you to feel like what you’ve done for our organization hasn’t been enough, and because we’re so incredibly grateful for everything you’ve enabled with X, Y and Z. And I also know that giving opportunities like this is some of the most sacred work that I do, and bringing folks like you in to be able to blank, blank, blank. So I just want to be sort of honest about, you know, where I’m at as we go into this, and just know that, like, my core goal here is like that our relationship and our connection is like at the center of this conversation, okay, and and all of that, it just opens up this really, real conversation about what’s happening. Yes, vulnerability does have its place. Look, talking about money is inherently vulnerable. Risking rejection is inherently vulnerable. So the reality is is like vulnerability was already a part of this. It’s just about whether or not we acknowledge that vulnerability in a way that builds a more connected relationship. Okay? So you can ask for that permission out of the get go to start talking about whatever it is you’re making the ask around, then you are transitioning, as you know, you go over that kind of like, you know, bucket, that high, high level bucket. You’re asking them some questions, and then you are going to transition into asking for something more specific. So does this sound like something you’d be interested in getting involved in? You’re asking for permission to go a layer deeper.
Burr, okay, and you’re maybe you’re asking some more questions there. They’re pushing back on certain things, or maybe getting curious about certain things. You’re having a real conversation there. And then, if it seems like, okay, yeah, this is something that they want to get involved in. Maybe they don’t know exactly what that looks like yet. Okay, can I tell you a little bit more about what that would look like what it would look like to get involved with this, what we’re sort of looking for in terms of, you know, our core donors who are going to help us pilot this project, or who are going to help us sustain X, Y and Z, right? And at each phase of this, you are asking for their buy in. And so at each phase, your connection is deepening, okay, as you move through this. Okay, I’m looking at time. I know I have one more tip,
and so I’m going to go to that quickly, and then hopefully we’ll still have a few questions at the end. Also, if we don’t get to questions, hit me up on LinkedIn. Send me a question. I’m happy to send you a little voice note back answering it. So please don’t, please don’t please don’t hesitate to reach out. Okay, so tip number five, prepare and practice. So I want to be really clear about some things this is super interesting with practice, and sort of why people think maybe I would have created it. So preparation is not about perfection. The purpose of doing run throughs and role play and practice is not about making the words that come out of your mouth perfect. It’s about regulation. Okay? Practice are because our nervous system impacts our ability to connect authentically. Practice allows for us to build muscle memory that creates a more regulated environment for us to have a real conversation in. Okay, so part of, part of practice, and I should have gotten the link for this. I’m sorry, this a QR code, but I have a briefing sheet to help you with preparation before donor meetings. This is actually taken from inside the power partners formula. So now you’re going to go crash my other website where I’ve no I don’t have Giancarlo to support me, but, but I can also make sure this gets shared with you after. But this is about get helping to put all the information in a document that helps you walk in feeling like, Okay, you reviewed everything about this donor. You’re ready to really go in and make the ask. But the practice piece is about muscle memory for to have that regulated that regulated flexibility. And I honestly think it’s a little bit funny you guys that we don’t think we should have to practice in fundraising. We’re like, oh, well, like, I should be able to just go in and have that conversation. We would never say that about Lebron James. We’d never be like, Oh, he’s a good enough basketball player that he just doesn’t need to practice anymore. We would never say that, right? We would never say that Simone Biles doesn’t need to practice anymore. Be like, I mean, she’s the greatest of all time gymnast, and she still needs to practice. And we think that that is totally normal, but for some reason, we don’t feel like that’s normal for us, practice just means that you want to be confident, clear, connected in your craft. And like I said at the very beginning, if you aren’t practicing ahead of time, you are practicing in the moments that matter most. Okay, and so I already shared the free trial with you, but I’ll have John Carlo drop that again in the in the chat, we also have something super, super, super special for all of you guys that I want to make sure to give you. So I’ll come back to that in a second. So I have partnered with DonorPerfect, who are just so amazing to, first of all, put on this webinar at this time of year when, when making the ask is like, top of mind for everybody. And we really need you to start like, you know, a few steps back, which is why I focused on all the things that go into that conversation. But we also wanted to take this moment at end of year to put together a little challenge for all y’all to do with me over the next seven days. It is called the lapsed donor re engagement challenge, which is not my favorite name on the planet, but this is how we because I don’t really like the term lapse donors, but that is how we know them. And I want you to recognize that a lot of these folks still really want to be involved in your organization. Okay, and so we have put together, it’s a seven day challenge. It’s based on this incredible challenge that I have inside the power partners formula and and I hope you’ll join me for it. You’re going to get an incredible download that’s going to walk you through it. We’re going to give you baby steps to get over the action line, to start to re engage your lapsed donors, to start to build momentum for end of year, to build some muscle memory. And so I’m so thrilled to be able to offer this to all of you. And the last thing I really want to, really want to leave you with before I’m happy to answer a few questions, is, you know, good fundraising is the work for so long, part of what was in my cognitive behavior loop was the idea that the fundraising was this like necessary evil, or a means to an end, or the thing I had to do in order.
Power the good work. Good fundraising is the good work y’all. It is about bringing people in. It is about creating advocates and community members and activists, and it is the work like and so the more that we can build towards the ask and make the ask in ways that deepen human connection, that deepen our relationships with our donors that prioritize trust and transparency and urgency for the right reasons, not cringy clickbait urgency, but urgency that’s rooted in relevance. And why them and why now? That is how we build movements. That is how we change things. That is how you do your work, okay? And so I do not I want you to own that, and I want you to step into your power there, because there absolutely is a way for you to feel better, do better and raise more. And when fundraising feels better to you as the fundraiser, it feels better to your donors, too. So if fundraising isn’t feeling good to you, the the likelihood that it’s feeling good to your donors is low. You can make fundraising feel better to you, and when you do that, is going to feel better to your donors, and you are going to raise more money, and more money is going to move towards the things that matter most. So I’m just, I’m I’ll get off my soapbox now, Lori, so that we can at least ask one of the one of the questions. But I guess I pulled out my the last bits of my sick energy, because I care so much about this, and I just want y’all walking into end of year, you know, with the confidence you deserve to have.
No I think it’s fine. A lot of them have really been picking up on even just the last bits that you have been saying. They have had they have loved this. So if we missed some questions, I think it’s okay. I do have one that I wanted to ask, and it was more about it was along the lines of rejection, because when asked, how would you treat or react to rejection, how do you follow up to that?
Okay, well, first of all, I definitely want you to do the free trial inside practivated, and I want you to go to the practice scenario getting rejected, and I want you to practice it. I want you to practice hearing no and practice what you say after that. But because it can come, you know, somebody says no for a lot of different reasons, and I think it’s so important to like, reflect back to the person like, I really hear you around X, Y and Z, and depending on how that no is like, is the no an ability No? Is it a no because they can’t do what you’re asking them to do? Is there no a motivation? No meaning they that they aren’t prioritizing that, giving over something else that’s really important to them? Part of the importance of understanding where the no is coming from changes the response, right? Because the response, like, I think you can reflect back to them, you know, and really appreciating where they’re at and that they took the time to say no. Like, no is loving. No is clarity. No is respectful of your time. We love No. Like, what we don’t love is ghosting. We love No. Okay, so, so I think to, like, really honor that. Like, thank you so much for being so clear about your priorities. Thank you so much for being so clear about your giving. For this year, I’m so grateful for it. I would love to keep you involved in our organization. There are non monetary ways to stay involved. And like, Would you be interested in talking about some of those you know, or and then maybe part of what you’re asking is, would it be better for me to loop back at another time about some of this? Or do you want me to keep you in touch about how this program is is evolving? Right? It really depends on where the no is coming from, but I think the short answer is, acknowledge and validate where they’re coming from, and then figure out what engagement looks like moving forward. What options do you need to give them? Because if you got to the point where you were putting something in front of a donor, you have a level of engagement and relationship there that you don’t want to lose, right? And so you want to make sure that in the way that you’re giving them other opportunities, you’re really, you’re really, like, kind of honoring this the the relationship stage that it’s at,
okay, all right, I actually like that answer, but although practicing impractiva that I think will help people quite a bit, yes, so I appreciate you giving them this free trial, especially with so many of them. Yeah, yeah. I mean, look, I think you guys like the part of part of the practicing is also just to remove the fear around hearing it and know that you can handle hearing it like, I think one of the most important things is like you can handle Hearing no like.
Actually, the fear of no is so much worse than actually hearing it like. What wonderful information. So I think it’s more part of the practice inside provated for that. One in particular is just knowing that you can handle it, that you know that you can you’ll know what to say, and you can practice saying it a few different ways. And if you want feedback on it and try it again, you can, but you can do this.
Yep. Okay, all right, they’re still going in the chat here, but we are after time, so I am going to get ready to close out the session.
Thank you, Mallory, for being here again. That’s two months in a row.
So thank you for sharing your expertise and your frameworks, and to all of you for joining us today. Your commitment to building authentic relationships and driving your mission forward makes all the difference. So we hope you’ll carry these insights into your next fundraising conversation and continue transforming every ask into an opportunity for impact.
All right,
so I hope you have a great afternoon all of you, and we’ll see you in some future webinars and that challenge.
All right.
Bye, everyone. Bye.