Tag: connection

So, you looking?

~ Sasha ~ 2 Comments

Not long ago I bumped into a headhunter at a cocktail party, a woman I hadn’t seen in nearly a decade.  Her second sentence (second!), after, “How are you?” was, “So, are you looking for a job?”

Wow.

The easy questions in fundraising are around tactics, as in, “when is the right time to make an ask?”  There’s nothing wrong with “three-meeting before making an ask” and other rules of thumb, but questions like this one essentially miss the point.

(By the way, my take on this particular rule of thumb is that it is better to ask sooner than you’d like and better to and ask for more than you feel comfortable asking for.  This is primarily about getting through our own fears about asking – we usually take too long – and about recognizing that we are giving the person across the table an opportunity to do something important, and we should help them do something big, not small.)

No matter what approach you take, you’re never going to get out of the starting blocks until you’ve done the internal, personal work of getting out of that space where you see the person across from you as a transaction, as simple dollar signs.  No matter how you dress up your language, if you see your “prospect” as a means to and end then she’ll feel that way.  Whereas if you treat her as a person with whom you are building a real and substantive relationship, you can (counter-intuitively) talk comfortably, early on and directly about money.

It starts with you and how you see the world.  Are you building something, or just taking?

Better than nothing?

~ Sasha ~ 2 Comments

After not being let into Yankee Stadium with a bike helmet three weeks ago, and having to abandon my bike helmet outside of the stadium (it was stolen), I wrote to Mayor Bloomberg’s office extolling the virtues of Citibike and suggesting that, as bikes get more popular in New York City, the Mayor’s Office should consider looking at rules to allow bike helmets in major city establishments (museums, stadiums, libraries, etc.).

I just got a reply:

From: Customer_Service-KG, <Customer_Service_KB@dot.nyc.gov>
Date: Thu, Sep 19, 2013 at 1:23 PM
Subject: 13-9288 re: General Information/bike helmet

Dear Mr. Dichter:

Your email message to Mayor Bloomberg of September 4, 2013 concerning the Yankees’ refusal to allow you to bring your bike helmet into Yankee Stadium was referred to the Department of Transportation.

DOT encourages all cyclists to wear helmets. Commuter cycling increased 262% in New York City from 2000 to 2010. With more bikes on the road, smart cycling is even more crucial to making New York City’s streets safer for everyone using them.

However, we have no control over policies established by Yankee Stadium in prohibiting certain items that the Yankees consider security risks. If you wish to contact the Yankees to discuss this issue you can use the contact form on the Yankees web site at https://secure.mlb.com/help/email.jsp?c_id=nyy&primarySubject=Other&secondarySubject=None&dest=fanfeedback@yankees.mlb.com.

Thank you for your concern in this matter.

Customer Service Division

New York City Department of Transportation

So I get that it’s a big bureaucracy and someone has written a rule that says that replying to all the letters that come in is a good thing. Let’s quickly agree, in hindsight, that this letter is worse than nothing, and let’s use this as an opportunity to remember that every time anyone in our organization speaks they speak for the whole organization, whether we like it or not. This means that our most important people are the ones who talk to our customers, and it’s high time we train and empower them to use their brains.

What baffles me with this particular letter is, if they’re going to write this sort of response, why didn’t they just take it all the way? Something like:

From: Customer_Service-KG, <Customer_Service_KB@dot.nyc.gov>
Date: Thu, Sep 19, 2013 at 1:23 PM
Subject: 13-9288 re: General Information/bike helmet

Dear Mr. Dichter,

Thank you for riding bikes. You wrote to Mayor Bloomberg about your bike-riding and helmet-using, and we at the New York City Department of Transportation are responsible for transportation. Bike-riding therefore falls under our jurisdiction.

We, like you, love bikes, and we are glad that you are riding a bike. You’re not the only one. More people are riding bikes than ever before – lots more! As you can imagine, the more bikers there are, the more chance there is that a bike runs into a bike, or into a car, or even into a person. Sometimes, even, people on bikes just crash for no good reason. It’s terrible when that happens, so it’s good to wear a bike helmet. We are glad that you are wearing a bike helmet and we hope you will continue to do so.

As you can imagine, no matter how much we love biking, and regardless of the fact that biking falls under our jurisdiction at the Department of Transportation, it’s not baseball and it never will be. We’re actually surprised that you don’t know this. Baseball is played in stadiums, and the Yankees in particular play in Yankee Stadium. That stadium is owned by the Yankees, and they make the rules for Yankee Stadium. These rules include the kinds of items, including bike helmets, that can and cannot be brought into Yankee Stadium. They are also responsible for anything that has to do with security, or baseball, in Yankee Stadium. In fact, every single thing that goes at Yankee Stadium is their responsibility, not ours, and they make the rules. So it’s best to talk to them about this issue or about any other issue that concerns doing things in Yankee Stadium, bringing things into Yankee Stadium, or the Yankees. We hope that’s clear to you now.

The good news is that the Yankees have a website, and we even looked it up for you by using Google. The website address is https://secure.mlb.com/help/email.jsp?c_id=nyy&primarySubject=Other&secondarySubject=None&dest=fanfeedback@yankees.mlb.com.

(If that website address is wrong, however, please do not contact us, or the Yankees. In that case you should contact Google. Unfortunately we don’t know how to get in touch with them.)

We wish you the best of luck in contacting the Yankees, and we encourage you to purchase a new bike helmet since bike use is up and bike safety is important to us at the Department of Transportation! However, just to be clear, what you do at Yankee Stadium is your own damn business.

If you have any additional questions involving bikes or anything else involving transportation of any kind in New York City, feel free to contact us.

Thank you for your concern in this matter.

Customer Service Division

New York City Department of Transportation

Joking aside, getting this sort of correspondence right isn’t difficult.

For example, on Friday I had trouble getting a bike out of a dock at Citibike and was worried that my key was blocked for some reason. Here’s the reply I got from NYC Bike Share (which runs Citibike):

Thank you for contacting NYC Bike Share we have reviewed your account and od onto show any open trips or your key being deactivated. Please try your key again at a different station and on multiple bikes, any bike with a steady red light before inserting your key is out of service. If it still does not work for you such as not getting any lights, or never getting the green light please contact us and we will replace your key.

For additional comments or inquiries, please respond to this email. Please sign up for our e-mail list and visit our website regularly for updates.

Regards,

April

Customer Service

I received this email three hours after I emailed them (three hours!), and I was so happy with the response that I wrote back:

thanks I really appreciate this note – I’ll try again on Monday when I’m back in the city.

Sasha

Get this, they’re not stopping there – they replied to that note too!

Dear Sasha,

Thank you for conatcting NYC Bike Share.

We will be awating your call to let us know weather or not your key is working so that we can have a new key sent out to you if need be.

Regards,

Chris E.

So here’s the big question for the folks at the DoT: do I care that April has a typo in her email and Chris E. didn’t spell “contacting” “awaiting” or “whether” right? Of course not. What I care about is a timely and substantive response that sounds like it was written by a human being, and if anything the fact that there are errors means each note isn’t going through four reviews before being sent out. The extra note saying “we’re awaiting your call”…can you imagine such a sentence feeling real in the DoT note? Not only did they not write that, they couldn’t have because I would have never believed that they want to hear from me ever again, nor would I ever want to write to them again.

Keep it human, every time, or don’t bother writing back.

(end of rant)

Don’t take it personally

~ Sasha ~ 5 Comments

Jonathan Lewis’ recent blog post and accompanying video on fundraising hits the nail on the head: “The best fundraisers don’t fundraise.  Instead, they teach people to take realistic – and unrealistic!  – risks in the service of a better world. “

“Teaching” and “risk-taking” in service of a better world.

Maybe if we used that language more often we would have more great people getting into fundraising, more people in fundraising with the right mindset and orientation, and more funders taking risk.

I’m with Jonathan all the way until the closing paragraph, where he says, “Infuriating indeed is the patronizing ‘don’t take it personally’…If you believe in your mission and if you are giving it your all, then it’s always personal.  Every committed social entrepreneur takes organizational rejection personally!”

As I told Jonathan, I don’t think this is quite right.  Of course I feel it personally when I am rejected, when someone doesn’t share my passion or, worse, when my explanation of what we are trying to do at Acumen fails to capture the imagination of someone who I know is aligned with my passion and vision (in which case, shame on me).  I don’t think I would be human if I didn’t feel it; indeed, if the day comes when I stop feeling it I’d have to question my own passion and sense of commitment.

But when I let the rejection feel personal, and when I see other fundraisers do the same thing, I think that’s a big mistake.

The person I’m meeting with came into the meeting with a worldview, with ideas, with momentum in a certain direction…and so did I.  I feel like my job is to listen, explore, connect, tease out alignment, and then to inspire action (aside: the “inspire action” bit is really important and not easy to get right.)

But when that alignment isn’t there and I end up feeling personally rejected then I believe I’m misdiagnosing what just went on in that meeting.

When someone says no, it could be an execution error on my part: maybe I handled the meeting poorly, didn’t listen enough, was off my game, didn’t have a real and compelling ask, didn’t tell compelling stories, or didn’t articulate how Acumen could help the funder realize their vision.  Hopefully, after fundraising for nearly seven years I make fewer and fewer of those mistakes, but I’m sure I do make them plenty.  When this is what’s gone wrong,  I need to use a rejection to figure out how I can get better, how I can hone my craft, how I can turn “no’s” into “not now’s.”  Taking these sorts of rejections personally places blame in the wrong place: I didn’t do my job well, plain and simple.

And when what I’m fundraising for doesn’t inspire a funder or align with their vision, then something entirely different is at play.  That’s a question of worldview, a question of where they are in their journey.  It’s about lack of alignment of vision and values and aspiration.  What they’re looking for is not what I’m selling.

(Note that it’s easy to see, when I’m selling database software or consumer copiers, the difference between being turned down because the person isn’t buying anything right now, buys from my competitor, or decides to buy productivity software and a high-end color printers instead.  In philanthropy what we mostly see is the person giving or not giving to us, so everything gets much more muddled).

Almost always, it’s not personal.  I have not been rejected.  The moment I take rejection too personally is the moment I lose forward momentum, the moment I begin to question myself at a more fundamental level, the moment I forget that real long-term partnerships happen because of a deep sense of alignment, not because someone chose to buy what I’m selling.

Everyone a fundraiser

~ Sasha ~ 3 Comments

A colleague of mine – someone who has never been a formal part of Acumen’s fundraising team but who has done a good deal of fundraising  – said that a series of recent meetings with new donors reminded her of what it means to raise money.  She said:

The act of fundraising changes you, it changes your perspective.  When you sit there and look someone in the eye, it forces you to do two things.  First, you have to have your story straight: what are we doing and why, what are the details, how do all of the pieces hold together?  More important, though, is the sense of accountability you have to that donor when you’ve had that conversation.  You’ve made a promise to them, and knowing that changes you and makes you want to work harder than ever to deliver for them.

Exactly.

There’s something real about face-to-face, personal fundraising that I don’t experience anywhere else – not online or with social media or crowdfunding platforms, not in institutional fundraising or grant-writing (even in situations where you have strong personal relationships).  When someone gives their personal money, when someone sits down and writes a personal check to your organization, it creates a deep connection.  If you choose to see it and experience it, that sense of accountability can be internalized – first for you and, over time, into your organization.  In that personal connection and experience, you have the chance, long after that meeting, to transform yourself into an agent for that donor – not literally to do everything they would do (because they’ve given to you because of what you do and know, because of the perspective and professional judgment you bring to the table) but to give them a seat at the table, an important spot in your mind and in your heart.

Our opportunity is to have everyone who does this work be a fundraiser.  Not their full-time job. But why would we pass up the opportunity to get at least a glimpse of the sense of ownership, discipline, and, yes, obligation it creates?

How generosity touched you

~ Sasha ~ 5 Comments

Not long ago, a group of senior executives asked me to speak to them about generosity.  So I started the conversation by asking each of them to share what generosity meant to them.

Perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised, but what I heard back were examples of niceties – I volunteered a bit here, I helped someone with something there.  It was probably my mistake to open a conversation with a new group and expect that folks would take the opportunity to be vulnerable.  I should have laid the groundwork first.  Nevertheless, it was telling.

At times I’ve been surprised with negative reactions to talk of generosity and Generosity Day.  That day – hearing example after example of nice, kind, but mostly peripheral acts of generosity from a group that I knew had much deeper stories to tell – helped me understand what was going on in a new light.

I’ve been purposely exploring generosity for nearly five years now, and while I humbly admit that my own practice of generosity is still very much a work in process, my points of reference when hearing the word “generosity” are profound, textured, nuanced, and potentially very deep.  Generosity and giving are cornerstones of cultural practices dating back thousands of years; they are bedrocks of all the major religions; generosity is one of the five yamas in the eight-limbed path of yoga!

That’s the opposite of small, the antithesis of trite.

Nevertheless, just because that is my experience of generosity does not mean that is what others hear.  If someone’s conscious engagement with generosity is limited, when they hear talk of “generosity” their minds can naturally avoid things that are deep, grounded, or profound.

If I could restart the conversation I had with that group of executives, I would ask a different question.  Not “what does generosity mean to you?” which somehow got people to talk about when they had been generous, but “when has someone else’s generosity made a difference in your life?”  I’ve been amazed with how consistently I hear poignant stories of generosity when people are freed to answer this question.  People see others’ better angels.  Small, fleeting acts from decades ago are revealed to be seminal milestones in peoples’ lives.

I just heard about an effort to raise $60,000 on Indigogo to produce a movie called The Perfection of Giving.  I thought the trailer looked good and that you might want to check it out.

If I have one wish for the project, it would be that it move beyond the more obvious focus – how a practice of generosity transforms the giver – and delve deeper into how acts of generosity changed the lives of recipients (and, equally interesting, to uncover the countless acts of generosity practiced daily by people who do not, by external appearance, seem to have a lot to give).  I know all good stories need a protagonist, I just think the message is most powerful when we can share others’ stories, rather than describe our own experience of transformation.

So: when has generosity touched you?

Perfection of Giving

No Ask?

~ Sasha ~ 1 Comment

The fundraiser typically sweats about when the perfect moment is to make “the ask.”  It’s a Goldilocks mentality: not too soon, not too late.

Broadly speaking that is right.  But not if it means there’s no a sense of purpose.

Meaning: imagine for a moment that you’re the philanthropist.  You get emails and calls and invitations from the fundraiser (who could easily be the CEO or the Exec Director) pushing for a meeting.  The notes get increasingly urgent.  You sense something is in the air, and you take the meeting.

And then the meeting is just chit-chat.  It’s the sound of one hand clapping.

You, the philanthropist, discover that their urgency and your urgency don’t meet the same standard.  You suspect that there’s a punchline somewhere out there, but you’re feeling less patient about waiting to hear it.  You don’t take the next meeting.

This doesn’t mean that you, the fundraiser, greet someone and say, “Nice to meet you Analise, I’m hoping you’ll give us a million dollars.”  It does mean being clear about purpose every step of the way.

How you execute on that is up to you.

Saving lunchtime

~ Sasha ~ 3 Comments

The other day I got lunch at Bowery Eats, a cooking supply store in Chelsea Market that also happens to have a sandwich bar.  My timing was terrible and when I got there at 1:20pm, there was a long line plus a stack of phoned-in orders.

Bowery EatsMore than 10 minutes passed and I still hadn’t gotten my Peter Parker wrap (avocado, warm portabella mushroom, lettuce, a bit of mozzarella, and vinaigrette on a spinach wrap).

10 minutes isn’t long, but it’s more than a couple of standard deviations away from the mean in terms of how long you expect to wait for a sandwich.  Plus, five people with higher order numbers than I had gotten their sandwiches, so I started to get antsy.  I asked the woman at the counter how things were coming, and if they’d lost track of my order.

That’s when things got interesting.  She smiled.  She went to the back to check on my order.  She explained that it was taking longer because they heat up the mushrooms in the oven.  She checked again a few minutes later.  And then, 15 minutes in (five minutes after I’d first asked how things were coming), she actually said to the staff, in Spanish, “I’m not going to put any more sandwiches out until we finish up Order 31.”

And, I swear, I hadn’t made a big fuss at all.

Because of her, not only was I not annoyed, I was impressed.  Her job description might appear to be taking orders, getting customers’ money, and giving them sandwiches, but she was a natural at knowing just what to say and how to say it, with a smile, to make me feel attended to.

This knack is something I look for in hiring fundraisers.  Sure they need storytelling skills and passion and empathy, they need a thick skin and a dogged determination and the ability to build relationships.  But all the truly great fundraisers I know are also….something that this woman had.   “Polite” is the word that comes to mind but that doesn’t capture it, though people who naturally have good manners have some of the trait I’m looking for.  It’s more an unspoken knack to let someone know that you see them, that you’re paying attention, that you are a concierge for them within your organization.

It’s not the easiest thing to test for, but after you conduct your interviews of your top candidates, you can take a step back and ask everyone who interacted with the interviewees: how did they make you feel?

 

 

(p.s. thanks to DC Foodrag for the picture)

Rock out

~ Sasha ~ Leave a comment

My morning commute to work is punctuated by the Music Under New York performers.  Each day of the week a different musician with a different sound and a different vibe.

Luke Ryan has been at this for 30 years.  His shtick is to be clever and snarky, to put in your face that you’re walking by him, head down: there’s nearly as much commentary about “putting a little money in the case” as there is music, and a fixture of his guitar case is a sign that reads: “I’M A STREET MUSICIAN…TOO WEIRD TO LIVE TOO MEAN TO DIE.  GIVE ME MONEY OR I’LL PLAY MUSIC.”  Luke’s “show” is build around that gag and about making you aware that you’re walking by with your head down and your hands in your pockets.  My experience, when I put money in Luke’s case, is a bit of guilt, some awareness of separation, a sense of obligation.

On Friday mornings in that same spot, the Ebony Hillbillies rock out with their mean, jumping bluegrass music.  It is soulful.  It is uplifting.   It is joyful and ebullient and raucous.  It’s a jolt, it puts a spring in your step.  I see the performers smile, not for me, but for themselves.  My experience, when I put money in the case, is gratitude that they’ve shared their joy with me, connection, humanity, and perspective.

Yes, the Ebony Hillbillies’ case is always fuller than Luke’s.

And no, this post isn’t about street musicians.

The wrong public speaking mistakes

~ Sasha ~ 4 Comments

Public speaking is neck-and-neck with fundraising on the list of things people consistently fear.

To avoid that fear we often choose to read to people rather than speak to them.  That is, we write down and recite prepared remarks.  If our goal is to get our words across, this approach is guaranteed to succeed.  Visually represented, if we read typed-up remarks we’re likely to say nearly 100% of the words we have written down.

Reading your speech

Of course people didn’t show up just to hear your words, they showed up to hear you.

Yes they want you to have done the heavy lifting of thinking about and synthesizing your remarks.  Yes they expect that you’ll practice what you’re going to say with trusted colleagues and friends before you speak to get it right.  So yes, prepare.

But also remember that you are so much more than the words you put on that page.  You are a human being and people are desperate for human connection.  They want to feel and experience what makes you tick and how your mind words.  They want to interact with you, even if you are up on stage and they are part of an audience.  And most of all, and easiest to forget, they want you to succeed.  They are good people and they want good things for you.  Also, if you succeed then they do to – they learn more, they have more fun, they get a glimpse of you.

The speech read head down, in a monotone, is nearly always devoid of human connection.  Air flows back into the room when the speech-reader looks up, smiles, and says even one extemporaneous remark – the smiles from the audience aren’t just because the remark was funny, it’s because they’re breathing a collective sigh of relief when they glimpse your humanity.

And that glimpse is missing when your attention turns from them to the piece of paper you’re holding in your hands.  That connection is lost.

The reason error avoidance (aka “reading what you wrote down”) feels like a reasonable tactic is because it masquerades as a way to ensure that we avoid failure.  But what do we mean by success?  Because we know that, when we all start out, it’s nearly impossible to overcome the terror of standing up on a stage and ALSO get our point across without some help from our notes.  But the decision we can make is to recognize that someday we want to break free, someday we want to speak to people not read to them, someday we want to feel comfortable and maybe even a little bit happy up in front of people telling them our story.

Conceptually, we can break free a bit by asking ourselves whether quadrant 3 really is better than quadrant 2: that is, is standing up reading something we could have handed out actually better than saying a small fraction of what we thought we meant to say but making a real human connection?

Four quadrants of public speaking

Before you answer, you might remind yourself that the audience is at the edge of their seats, wanting you to succeed.

I’d trade error avoidance for human connection any day. Especially since I know that when you speak from the heart, you’ll speak your truth.

 

The bubbles

~ Sasha ~ 9 Comments

Not long ago, I spent an entire day going around New York City without my iPhone.

Really.

There’s nothing like being device- and newspaper-free on the NYC subway to realize how our devices are creating bubbles of separation in every public space we occupy.  And I think something’s getting lost there, something that has to do with the very fabric of society.  Yes, we’re all squeezed in to that subway car together, but we’re separate, and we certainly don’t have to look each other in the eye and recognize each other, see who each person is and think just a bit about their story and how it relates to ours.

Try this: take two trips on the subway or bus (or even an elevator) today without looking at or touching your device.  Just look around and notice the bubbles everyone has around them.