Category: fundraising

Put the gloves down

~ Sasha ~ 1 Comment

What does it mean to say that real fundraising is about building long-term partnership?

It means that some of the most important meetings you have with long-term funders are the ones that cover topics that don’t require their funding support:

The amazing, fully funded project that you’re just kicking off with a few other partners.

The great piece of work that you both know is outside of their formal strategy that you’re really excited about.

The new initiative where you’d value their experience and input.

Some funders are so used to – and so tired of – being pitched constantly that they end up behaving protectively, as if the only thought running through their head is, “how many times will I have to say ‘no’ in this meeting?”  I’ve had funders start sentence after sentence with, “we’re not doing any new funding this cycle” long before I’ve asked for anything. There’s no hope of building a relationship if someone has their gloves up protecting themselves from an onslaught of asks.

Fundraisers can be part of the problem, acting as if that every meeting should include a financial ask, and fearing that they’ve made a mistake if they don’t ask for money each time.

Every meeting should help deepen the relationship and, even better, should give everyone around the table the chance to contribute meaningfully to making positive change happen. Often that’s not about money.

Taking a stance that you’re not constantly, desperately on the lookout for funding is one of the best ways to allow the partners you hope to work with to put down their gloves and actually listen.

How philanthropists really decide where to give

~ Sasha ~ 6 Comments

The natural place to start, as a fundraiser, is at your desk. You judiciously read every webpage, article and report about a potential funder’s strategy in search of the best fit between a donor and the work you are doing.

And then, research completed and grant application submitted, you’re surprised to figure out that the fit isn’t there after all. The pieces don’t snap together cleanly, your proposal has been turned down. Then what?

Perplexed, you may head back to your desk to do a little more research.

Please don’t, because the answer you’re looking for is not somewhere on the screen or hidden away in a Google cache.

Philanthropy – whether a $25 donation to an Indiegogo campaign or a multimillion dollar grant from a huge foundation – is always personal. The published philanthropy strategies you are researching are a sensible narrative that pulls together a bunch of threads, but they are not the whole truth. Far from it.

Think of it from the other side: there simply is no such thing as the best place to give a donation (heck, there’s no such thing as a best car) so there’s no analysis that gives the philanthropist the right answer no matter how much they spent trying to figure out the problem.

All the best philanthropists I know have a healthy dash of angel investor in them. Angels invest in people above all else, because they know that when you can find that rare combination of grit, belief, tenacity, vision, people skills, humility, audacity, courage, and, and, and….

You see, that’s the point.

The list is too long, the unicorn-like combination of attributes so rare, that it’s always, fundamentally, about someone’s belief in you.

(and, for those keeping track, ‘you’ is not just the founder or the CEO.  Not by a long shot).

Getting through the troughs

~ Sasha ~ 1 Comment

I was talking to a nonprofit Executive Director last week about fundraising. We spent most of our time unpacking the heart of every fundraising meeting: the energy you bring into the room.

It’s not just important, it is everything. No matter the words you say, if you say them without the other person being able to feel them then the meeting has already failed.

But what do you do if you’ve had a bad run and you’re not feeling the mojo? Maybe it’s been a tough month or quarter and you can’t seem to put a smile on your face and “stay positive?”

My take is: don’t try to fake it.

Of course you have to be professional, and fundamentally you have to retain your long-term optimism and your deep belief that you’ll get big things done—if you don’t believe in you, no one will. But overly polishing and buffing your delivery will fail most of the time.

Inauthenticity is like a single poisonous drop that contaminates the entire cup of water. Rather than slap on a can-do attitude, bring your truth in that moment into the room. Be willing to lay it bare.

If things are hard, if you are feeling frustrated, if you don’t know how you’re going to storm the next hill, don’t complain, but don’t hide that away. Show faith and trust in the person you’re speaking with; have the confidence to share the real.

Sharing this truth might help you discover what’s really going on, and it will certainly communicate that you need actual help and that this meeting isn’t just another meeting. That’s an honest ask for support that, at a minimum, will be met with humanity and, in most cases, action.

People are craving this sort of connection, and they are more likely to help if they understand that they can, actually, help. Seeing your willingness to be authentic lets them understand the kind of partner you’ll be to them in the long haul—especially when the chips are down.

A philanthropy problem

~ Sasha ~ 2 Comments

The easiest thing to forget when you are raising funds is this:

Philanthropists have a philanthropy problem

By “philanthropists” I mean people who consistently engage in philanthropy–people for whom philanthropy an important part of what they do and who they are.

Someone who has the means, the values and the practice of being active philanthropically has, by definition, a philanthropy problem. She has a set of things she is trying to make happen in the world through her philanthropy. Her problem is that it is hard to do great philanthropy, it is hard to find great people and great organizations, and it is hard to make change in the world.

Fundraisers and nonprofit professionals forget this. Maybe we find it hard to relate because we don’t feel like we have a philanthropy problem (though that’s an easy issue to address: the more we give philanthropically the more we will get in touch with this feeling.)

But mostly I think it’s a comingling two things: an overall sense of fear and intimidation (of the philanthropist—which neither she nor we want) and our lack of empathy.

The fear is connected to our misplaced sense of worth–that somehow this thing we are doing might not really be “worth it” (in every sense) and, by association, worthy of support–and, as a result, a sense that we’re intruding on the philanthropists life and time.

The lack of empathy is connected to that fear–this time our fear that we will fail in this meeting, which causes us to be centered on our selves and our worries. This chatter overwhelms our clear thinking and our open hearts. So we close our eyes to the experience of the person with whom we are trying to connect, and we lose sight of the fact that we are showing up with a solution to her problem.

Since colorful stories and images are the best way to cement memories in our brains, here’s a too-loud version of this situation from This American Life Episode 319: Cars. It’s not a perfect analogy by any stretch–there’s not a lot of heart opening and genuine connection in the car-buying business–but it shines a light on how easy it is to forget that the person in the “showroom” is there because she is has a problem she’s come there to solve.

The speaker is Sal Lanzilotta, a manager at the Chrysler Town & Country dealership in Long Island. He’s giving his salespeople a pep talk:

Sal Lanzilotta

Customer says they’re not ready to buy a car. They’re all not ready to buy a car. Let’s go over it again. They’re in a car dealership.

They got in their car, drove through hell to get here, looked for a parking spot for 10 minutes, parked, got out of the car, and walked into a car dealer, not because the coffee’s good. We went over this, because the coffee here is not good. They came here because we sell cars, and they want to buy one.

The philanthropist is sitting across from us with a philanthropy problem to solve. We are sitting across from the philanthropist with a solution that makes difference. Why do we act like we have to start with an apology?

When we boil it all down, I wonder if where we keep tripping up is in forgetting that what we have on offer is way more valuable than a car.

INSTEAD or AND philanthropy

~ Sasha ~ Leave a comment

This is the age-old cannibalization question, the sleeping giant we are terrified to wake. It’s the specific story, the individual program that connects with a donor in a deeper way BUT might pull them away from precious, scarce, unrestricted support.

Do we, in telling that story, lose the donor forever to the cause as a whole?

I don’t think so. Not most donors, not most of the time. But it is a risk.

It boils down to a question of share of philanthropic pocket and share of philanthropic mind.

Most of the time, for most of our funders, we are a small portion of their philanthropic mindshare and their philanthropic pocket. This is because most of our donors are under-engaged, because they are busy and because, for most of them, we show up when it’s time to ask for something and then we disappear. Shame on us.

The more specific story – or more specific program – is powerful because it’s usually more visceral and it feels more real. In telling that story in the right way, we have the opportunity to create a deeper connection. And, when we do it right, we will tell the specific story as an illustration of the whole, and ask for funding for the whole. This is the best way to fundraise, and it requires passion, discipline and practice to get it right.

But that won’t work for everyone. Some funders – either because that’s their mindset or because that’s where they are in their philanthropic journey with your organization – want the more specific. That’s OK too if the more specific will ignite their passion, will enable their deeper connection to their work, and will transform them from passive to active supporters. Even if the dollar amount of their support remains unchanged, a wildly passionate supporter is worth ten times (a hundred?) an unengaged but consistent supporter.

If you succeed (yes, succeed, because it’s a win) in generating this sort of shift, your job is to recognize it and invite that person fully over to your side of the table, to take their newfound passion and energy, along with your much-clearer understanding of how you can truly partner with them, and enlist them in the countless ways they can help: to improve your thinking, bring other resources to the table, help spread your story…whatever else they can do beyond writing a check that will really help the cause.

While all this is true, it’s also true that sometimes this is a tradeoff – an INSTEAD rather than an AND.

Some funders are engaged and care already and are giving significantly, and then they hear a particular new story and they will choose to trade between the broad (or unrestricted) and the narrow – at least for now. That’s OK too. In this case, the only thing to do is to have a clear conversation about what’s going on, and, if there’s space for it, to ask whether they would consider an AND rather than an INSTEAD donation for that new program. Even when you do this all perfectly, don’t forget that sometimes resources (time and money) are finite, which means that sometimes one thing gets traded for another.

I believe that this last case is the rarest, and that even when it happens it’s not necessarily a bad thing. Because this is a long-term game, and ultimately our job is to build an army of supporters who care deeply and are with us for the long haul, not an army of check writers who care a little.

All of this is to say that there’s a lot of nuance here, and a huge amount of space between “support the whole cause” (which is wonderful, powerful, and is the way we hope all philanthropy will happen, but is hard to sustain) and “we have 18 programs you can support and if you support just that we’ll run out of operating money in 6 months.”

It’s up to us to manage this gray area with grace, clarity, and love.

(Oh, and in case you haven’t yet been a passionate, engaged, connected reader of this blog, you can still spread the word to your NYC friends about the Catalyst for Change event this Thursday at 7pm where I’ll be speaking.)

Pricing you

~ Sasha ~ Leave a comment

Classical economic theory tells us that the market-clearing price for a product is the one at which the last customer, the one with the lowest willingness to pay, gets exactly the value from the product that she pays for it. Her “consumer surplus” is zero: for a product that will give her $50 worth of value, she pays $50.

But what about pricing for a unique product, one that is the opposite of a commodity – things like tree-house building, editorial services, or the work your social enterprise is doing to change the world? In the broadest sense, there’s a market out there, but only if you let that happen. Really your whole job is to be un-comparable to everyone else, to make people understand that there’s only one you in the world and that you are uniquely worth paying for.

So how do you price you?

A friend once told me that that if I’d never gotten kicked out of a fundraising meeting then I wasn’t asking for enough money. It’s true. We undersell ourselves for two reasons: we don’t have enough market feedback to know what we’re really worth; and we let our fear of not making a sale overcome our desire to sell at the right price.

We can overcome this. The trick is to use each subsequent sale to build out the demand curve for our work. Each time we sell, we push a little further to find out where that ceiling is. By going beyond what feels comfortable, we discover the gap between what we’re asking for and the price the customers we want are willing to pay.

We can be told this time and again, but it often only hits home when we feel the frustration from delivering work we’ve undersold. The pattern is familiar: we make a sale for too little and then set out to do our best work. This best is harder and takes longer and requires more sweat and tears than we ever imagine – because what we do is special and we always do it with love and passion, even when today’s economics would suggest otherwise. We end up proud of the work but exhausted, because we did the work with too few resources and we know that we can’t do it this way forever.

If we can hang on to that sense of frustration, we can use it to discover our own value. This is the key step. It’s only when we truly believe in what we are worth that we can look someone in the eye and says, “Yes, this is the price for this. And what you’ll get in return will blow you away.”

I remember the first time I looked someone in the eye and asked them for a million dollars. I could barely choke out the word and my palms started sweating. I didn’t believe it the first time, but I did believe it eventually.

This happens in fundraising, and this happens whenever it’s up to us to tell the world the value of the work we do. First we must believe ourselves, and then they will too.

Because what we’re saying about what our work is worth is true.

 

The $30 million question

~ Sasha ~ 1 Comment

I’ve just heard a story of a major nonprofit organization that receives tens of millions of dollars annually from a single donor – around half of its operating budget – but is laying off staff because they don’t have enough unrestricted operating cash.

Again, Dan Pallotta’s awesome TED talk notwithstanding, we find ourselves having the same conversation, one that boils down to: is it a wasteful to pay nonprofit professionals to do their jobs well?

I wonder if it is we in the nonprofit space who need more guts when we take on this question. Maybe it’s time to say something along the lines of, “if you want your money to go directly into the hands of very poor people who need it, you should do just that and give to Give Directly.” GiveDirectly is optimized for this, they are efficient and transparent in their operations, they rigorously study their results, and they’ve shown the effectiveness of direct cash transfers for creating both short- and long-term improvements in people’s lives. It’s a completely legitimate way to help others, and it’s a great benchmark against which to measure our work.

“Or,” we should have the courage to continue, “you can have the point of view that the programmatic work that we’re doing is better than giving cash.” “Better” can be because it does different things (fights corruption); “better” can be because the impact of giving a dollar is more than $1 (investing in a scalable social business); “better” can be because of long-term return on investing that’s higher than the social return on giving cash (supporting a child’s education).

“But,” we should be sure to say, “if you believe that the IT that we do matters, if you believe that there is something real that we are bringing to the table that goes above and beyond your money ending up in the hands of someone who will benefit from it, then you’re saying that our judgment, our relationships, our expertise, our capacity for oversight, and our ability to create leverage for each dollar you give is real. This means that you trust this judgement and our expertise. So please give in a way that respects that judgment and expertise, or don’t give at all.”

Our homework is to really look in the mirror and evaluate why what we’re doing is, in fact, better than the money going directly to our beneficiaries. And, once we’ve sorted that out, we must have the courage to make that case and the willingness to look someone in the eye and say, “if you don’t believe this, then you shouldn’t give to us in the first place.”

4AM Calls

~ Sasha ~ 1 Comment

Yesterday, I had the chance to catch up with the inimitable Sidra Qasim and Waqas Ali, Acumen Pakistan Fellows and co-founders of Markhor. For those of you who don’t know, Markhor is startup that is crafting some of the world’s most beautiful men’s shoes, reviving a waning craft in Pakistan and making a major splash globally.

Markhor ran by far the most successful Kickstarter campaign out of Pakistan, raising more than $107,000, and Sidra and Waqas are now part of the select few high-potential startups in Y-Combinator – an unlikely turn for a shoe company in the midst of a bunch of tech startups.

Markhor_craftsmen

So, what do we have to learn from a pair that has their sights set on building a $1 billion-plus company selling luxury, made-in-Pakistan shoes to the world? A lot about a lot of things, but I was struck in particular by some lessons about tenacity and humility.

I asked them what they’ve learned at Y-Combinator so far, and Sidra shared, “one of the great things about the program are the mentors. How it works is that, if you set up time with a mentor, you get 20 minutes, no more. And when you meet with a mentor, they ask you three questions: ‘What did you do last week?’ ‘What are you doing next week?’ and ‘How can I help?’ You have to be ready! And what I like about that is that it communicates that their time is valuable, and that your time is valuable.”

Waqas took the point further as we started to talk about how to teach people how to use networks well. “You know, when I reach out to someone, whether a mentor or someone else I’m trying to connect with, you have to know how to write that email in a way that is clear and respectful and gets to the point. And you have to know how to handle that communication. Especially if I’m in Pakistan, I know that I might have to be available at 4AM to take a phone call. And I am.  Sidra and I will be taking 4AM phone calls for years to come. That’s OK.”

For me this connected back to Tuesday’s post about the power of humility. What I hear Waqas and Sidra saying is that, as they are reaching out to the far edges of their networks, they have to do that with a certain posture. If someone is willing to take a bet by giving  their time to help, it’s Waqas and Sidra’s job as to mirror that respect back – in this case by accommodating that person’s schedule at crazy hours. Their power in this moment comes from putting their ego aside, choosing not to frame that interaction as one with lots of power dynamics, and simply doing what it takes to make the connection they are trying to make – in this case by being ready to jump calls at 4AM, again and again.

The equation is flipped because, in taking this stance, Sidra and Waqas are essentially unstoppable. No behavior, whether a rejection or a slow reply or someone asking them to twist themselves into knots to meet their timing, can stop their forward trajectory.

Whether you’re an entrepreneur running a startup, a leader of a nonprofit, or a fundraiser of any stripe, the biggest trap is to allow each interaction to become a measurement of your worth, to take it all far too personally. What Waqas and Sidra model is the power of an unshakable commitment to mission: when the goal becomes our purpose, when we exist to achieve that goal, then we do what we have to in service of that mission – no questions asked.

Every great company has a story, and Markhor’s is a beautiful one that’s still being written. It is a different story coming out of Pakistan, it is the craftsmanship of Pakistani artisans, and it is some really beautiful shoes. It’s also an unfolding story of two amazing entrepreneurs who dream big and back up every dream with a willingness to show up and work harder and smarter every day.

In reflecting on where they are in their journey, Waqas shared, with a twinkle in his eye: “In our first month, we sold seven pairs of shoes. And we lost money on each pair we sold! Now we are selling thirteen pairs a day. And that number keeps going up.”

That’s what overnight success really look like.

[bonus: the best riff ever about 4AM]

Getting Fundraising Right

~ Sasha ~ 4 Comments

It’s so easy to end up telling this story:

This is who we are.

This is what we do.

This is why we do it well.

This is what we need.

Can you help?

When we should be telling this one:

This is how the world looks today.

This is how it could look tomorrow.

This is why this matters.

This is proof that we have what it takes to get from here to there.

Let’s make this happen together.

In the first approach, full of good intentions, we make the classic mistake of focusing on, and talking about, ourselves. Good students to the end, we promise you that we’ll do a good job if you’ll just (please!) trust us with your support. It is, literally, self-centered.

Instead, our opportunity is to pull ourselves out of the center of the story, to paint a bigger picture of the world as it could be, and describe how we can partner to make a change.

As good and as important as our work is, we are not the protagonists in this story.  We are the enablers of the change.

(Bonus: Pixar’s 22 Rules for Storytelling, visualized, via Swissmiss. It includes #7, “Come up with your ending before your figure out your middle.  Seriously.  Endings are hard, get yours working up front.”  For our purposes, let’s remember that the ending cannot just be “So, can you fund us?”)

Subway Portrait

~ Sasha ~ Leave a comment

“Excuse me, m’am, may I draw your picture?” he says, white pad on his lap, fingers stained with charcoal.

“Pardon me?” says the woman sitting across from him on the subway, looking confused and a bit taken aback.

“Your picture…is it alright with you if I draw your picture?” he reiterates.

“Uh…sure.”

And then, as his hands glide across the page, his patter begins, not interrupting the drawing, which has to be complete in the two minutes before the last stop.

“This is what I do,” he says, “I draw pictures of people. Portraits. Been doing this for years, I’ve drawn 800 portraits of New Yorkers so far.”

She takes the bait: “All in one day?” she asks. Her guard is dropping just a little bit.

“No m’am, that would be impossible. Anyone who tells you they’ve drawn 800 portraits in one day, they’re lying to you. No, I’ve drawn 800 portraits since I started, and that’s why I can draw them so fast, because I’ve done it so many times. I’m an artist, you see, an artist. Don’t you like how that looks?” (he holds up the already – amazingly – half-finished sketch, which has gone from a few lines to, instantly, a pair of eyes, an outline of a mouth, a bit of expression, in about one minute).

She smiles, recognizing her likeness, the shape of her face, the crinkles around the outside of her almond-shaped eyes.

“See I knew that would make you smile! Now I can get that smile in the picture… Now I’m gonna give this portrait to you, that’s what I do, I’m gonna give it to you either way….Lots of people like these portraits, they hang them up, in their offices usually…And a lot of them pay me for them, even though I give them to ‘em either way, a lot of people pay me $10, or sometimes even $20…

(almost to himself) “Yeah, I try to get 10 people in a day to pay me $10 each, that’s what I try to do. Last guy I did this for he handed me a $10 bill, yes he did. And don’t tell me I’m not an artist, see? Artists make people smile and that’s what I’m doing here, I’m making something that will make people smile.”

Just a few more seconds for the finishing touches, and:

“So here you go, beautiful, here’s your portrait I hope you like it.” he says, handing it to her.

And she does.

And she pays $10.

 

In review: to create a situation where someone gives or buys, you must first create joy, a story, connection, a thing of beauty.

And in situations, like philanthropy, or busking, where it’s not clear what something is worth, it’s your job to tell them, to frame it for them, to say: this is what people who are happy and feeling a sense of connection in this moment typically pay. This is what the last 10 people did.

“I’m going to give this to you either way, but you gotta know that everyone else before you who liked their portrait gave $10 or $20 and hung the portrait in their office.”

Sure, she could decide not to pay, but if she does pay, you can bet it’s not going to be $1, which is what most people on the subway get when they ask for money.

His starting point was a $1 portrait. The story about the portrait, and the story about what people who like portraits pay, that’s what’s worth the other $9.