The fundraising forward bend

June 9, 2009June 8, 2009 ~ Sasha ~ Leave a comment

I’ve been wondering about why “the ask” for philanthropic funding can be the hardest, most awkward point in the meeting. Here are some thoughts from somewhere else entirely…

Try this experiment: bend at your waist and, in a relaxed fashion, try to touch your toes (or however close you happen to get, it doesn’t matter). Then, with no extra effort at all, take four deep breaths, focusing on exhaling. I promise you by your fourth breath you’ll be a lot closer to your toes than you were when you started.

What’s going on here? Our nervous systems are well-adapted to protection, so any time the body is in a position that is new or unfamiliar, our sympathetic nervous system tightens muscles to protect us from going into positions that might hurt us. It’s your body saying “this seems risky…I’m going to tighten up to stay safe.”

The deep breaths tell our minds and our bodies that everything is OK and that we’re not going to get hurt, and the protection reflex passes, which is why it just takes a few breaths to get closer to our toes.

“The ask” can make your body’s protective/panic response kick in. When you’re new to it, it feels like a standing-at-the-side-of-a-freezing-cold-pool-about-to-jump-in moment that causes so much anticipation that you freeze up – and in so doing make the person you’re talking to freeze up as well. “Here we go!” your subconscious screams. “This is probably going to be terrible!”

How do you develop the confidence not to panic? How do you find ease in this uncomfortable situation?

The only answer I see comes from recognizing the response, and putting yourself in the situation that makes you feel that way as MUCH as possible (tough, I know), and then find what it takes for you not to panic (better yet, shine). You don’t get there by starting at the deepest end of the pool with the coldest water. You start small and build up, and then keep on pushing yourself into situations that ARE hard, but you teach yourself to act easy. You teach yourself that everything is going to be OK. You learn to take the thing that you once feared, that once was difficult, and to breathe into it and be your best, most confident self even then. (Sure, there’s plenty of technique and tactics too, but recognizing and addressing the panic response is part of the answer).

Two closing observations: you won’t get better at this without putting yourself in that situation more and more often. And you’ll definitely bungle some things along that way.

(That’s OK too. How else are you going to learn?)

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Run — a rare book review

June 4, 2009June 4, 2009 ~ Sasha ~ Leave a comment

A little out of left field on this one, but last night I kept myself up WAAAY too late finishing Run by Ann Patchett, and it is such a beautiful, perfectly constructed book, that I want to share my joy in having read it. Run

Run is a follow-up to Bel Canto, an equally arresting and worthwhile read. And since I don’t quite have the literary analytic chops to do the book justice, let me just say that, to me, Anne Patchett embodies the difference between people who write things defensibly well (I’ll include myself in that group) and writers. She is a writer in the truest sense of the word, exhibiting such complete mastery of her craft that all her hard work seems effortless.

While I was reading the book over the past few weeks, at various points in my day I’d think about some of the characters, forgetting momentarily that they lived in a work of fiction. And there is one scene ,late in the book, of the young girl Kenya running that is simply transcendent – I’ll leave it to you to discover it for yourself.

Fair warning: the book is restrained and it’s not plot-driven, so if you’re looking for lots of motion you’ll be disappointed. It’s a narrative arc about family, love, loss, kinship and humanity, told with seeming simplicity but with profound richness, many layers, and with such a solid foundation and execution that I gave myself over completely to the author. I cannot imagine asking for much more from a work of fiction.

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Your voice

June 3, 2009June 2, 2009 ~ Sasha ~ 4 Comments

Seth recently shared a great response to all the people who say they’re going to be the next Seth, rightly exhorting folks to get busy being their best selves instead.

But how do you find your own voice?

We all stand on the shoulders of giants – people whose ideas we are building on, whose lessons we are working to learn, whose path has inspired us.

For a while, I think, we have no choice but to internalize, and at times mimic, the voice of those we admire, trying on constructs or phrases or ideas for size. If done honestly, without claims of being the next anything, it can be constructive, a process through which we play, we practice, we experiment…and in so doing we discover the ground we would like to stake out for ourselves. It’s the intersection of where we know the most, care the most, and have something to say that adds to the conversation.

It can be an awkward process. We see people who are great at what they do – especially great communicators – and can’t help but fault ourselves for not being as great as they are (never mind they’ve usually been at this a lot longer – you’re seeing the fully formed version of them, and you’re just starting out). Why don’t we do it the way they do?

It’s because their voice is theirs. You’re not ever going to do it the way they do because you’re not them. This is why you will never BE the next them; you can only be the best you.

Learn from them, walk in their shoes and down their path for some time. And in so doing discover your own gait and your own way forward. Someday, all that will be left of their voice in yours will be lines that start, “A mentor of mine used to say….” These are the crisp encapsulations of your own guideposts, how you navigate and explain your own orientation in the world.

Take the time to discover your own voice. And be patient with yourself. It takes a while.

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Raising investment capital…that ought’a be easy

June 2, 2009June 1, 2009 ~ Sasha ~ Leave a comment

I was speaking today to the executive director of a small and growing NGO that’s in the grant-giving business – they’re interested in getting into the loan-giving business.

I asked him why they wanted to make the shift, and he explained: to create a sustainable revenue stream; to create more accountability on the part of the grant recipients; to create a capital base that will allow the organization (and its impact) to grow over time; and because it would be easier to raise below-market debt than it is to raise grants.

I agreed on 3 out of 4 points. The last one is tricky.

There’s a rational argument that says, if someone has to choose between giving money away with no prospect of financial return (a grant) and giving money away with the prospect of some return (a loan), the latter will be more appealing. So it stands to reason that if you have a more (financially) attractive product, it will be easier to “sell” that product.

But that’s not necessarily how it plays out in practice. What I think this misses is the different hats we all wear, and how much easier it is to walk well-worn paths than to blaze new ones.

Seasoned philanthropists are familiar with giving. While each philanthropist makes decisions differently – and solicits advice and ideas from different people – a donor gives based on an (explicit or implicit) set of criteria that motivate her giving. These criteria could be strategic, analytical, cerebral or intuitive, but giving philanthropically is a known and well-understood endeavor for this person.

At the same time, anyone who has amassed a certain amount of wealth no doubt has experience with and criteria for making investment decisions: the risks she’s willing to take, the amount of diversification she feels comfortable with, the people from whom she gets advice and with whom she pressure-tests investment ideas.

So long as you’re raising funds that fall in either of these two buckets, the rules of the game are known. These are the well-worn paths. But something that’s “the best of both” (not quite philanthropic, but not quite an investment) is in a murky middle, where criteria are not well-established, the stakeholders are ill-defined and not used to weighing this particular opportunity. Suffices to say it’s not a layup.

I think this is important to recognize because there’s a lot of talk in our space about how investors / donors “will” behave, but these discussions often are framed analytically rather than building up from actual experience talking to donors about their own preferences.

How people “should” behave is one thing. How they will behave is something else entirely.

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