How many prospective funders agree to meet as a simple courtesy only to pass up the opportunity that has been presented to them? What if a better understanding of how corporations go about their decision-making processes could reduce the fundraiser’s workload and increase the likelihood of winning a corporation’s support? These are the kind of questions that today’s conversation with Lori raises. Lori reminds nonprofit leaders that, while they certainly see their cause as a top priority, unless they have caught the attention of their prospective funders in a meaningful way, they’re simply one of many items on a to-do list that never stops growing.

Lori is the author of The Boardroom Playbook: The Not So Ordinary Guide to Corporate Funding for Your Purpose Driven Organization. Lori’s book is an effort to ensure that nonprofit leaders don’t knock on the doors of corporate funders without first making sense of the dynamics that play out among those on other side of the table. Lori is the founder and CEO of Growth Owl, LLC, a consultancy aimed at empowering nonprofits, startups, and associations with the tools needed to achieve their fundraising goals. Before bombarding our prospective corporate funders with exhausting proposals, Lori wants nonprofit leaders to avoid the drama, design brevity in their communications, and understand the nuances of corporate giving.

The Fundraising Talent Podcast is underwritten by Responsive Fundraising, a professional learning community committed to helping clients create places where fundraising can thrive. For more information, message our managing partner, Michael J. Dixon.

Angie’s journey as a writer has always been about making sense of leadership, taking risks, and helping people realize their potential. Her latest book, Bet On You, is about demystifying what it means to take risks and seeing risk as the path to opportunity rather than getting anxious and worried about what might come of our decisions. Today’s conversation with Angie reminds me of what we just heard from our previous guests: those who dare to make the boldest asks are those who achieve the most extraordinary results.

Our conversation has us grappling with the question of whether nonprofits are reliant on too much play-it-safe fundraising. Angie wants us to remember that there comes a time when playing it safe no longer works. How many of our organizations have been checking all the right boxes and playing by the rules only to realize that we’re not achieving our goals and would really enjoy more fun and excitement in our work. Angie suggests that, when we get to this point, we have to look at risk as an opportunity to lean into rather than an impediment to fear and avoid.

The Fundraising Talent Podcast is underwritten by Responsive Fundraising, a professional learning community committed to helping clients create places where fundraising can thrive. For more information, message our managing partner, Michael J. Dixon.

Lauren wants to remind us that “regrets don’t really solve problems, but taking action will”; and that “it’s never too late to try.” She wants to encourage us to start being more intentional about who and where we want to be in the world and to confidently take the necessary steps towards moving in that direction. Dissatisfied with where they found themselves, Lauren and her family recently made the decision to relocate to Charlotte, NC, a place that aligned with particular interests and hobbies, afforded a more progressive political scene, and was more responsive to the priorities of young Black professionals.

Coincidentally, today’s podcast conversation with Lauren is in many ways a continuation of the one we enjoyed with Nancy last week. These two conversations, both centered on intentionality, beg the question of just how many of us are finding ways to be more deliberate about the decisions we make. Perhaps The Great Recession and experiences like the pandemic, the murder of George Floyd, and recent elections have shaken us up, compelling us to evaluate what matters most to us and where we want to prioritize our time, energy, and resources.

That said, to make these observations about our own experiences while failing to consider the experiences of those on the other side of a charitable gift exchange is to have a bad read on the moment in time in which we are collectively living. Today’s conversation with Lauren challenges us to ask ourselves what we are doing to ensure that our donors, who are being more intentional, selective, and discerning about the choices they make, are making the decision to support our organizations over all the others that are packed into their mailboxes and inboxes.

As always, we are grateful to our friends at CueBack for sponsoring The Fundraising Talent Podcast.

ARCHITECT Brand + Design Collective is a strategy development firm focused on community-centered and diverse philanthropy, leveraging the best practices in storytelling, strategic marketing and inclusive fundraising strategies. To learn more, visit www.architectyourambition.com to learn more

The first stop for 2023 on the Responsive Fundraising Roadshow will be in Omaha, Nebraska on Friday, March 3rd in partnership with the Nonprofit Association of the Midlands. If you’d like to register for this event, just visit their website at here.

We’re trying something new. The Butterfly Effect, our new publication on Substack, is where we make sense of the ideas and opinions that inform our consulting practices at Responsive Fundraising. Every week we will guarantee for our subscribers a thoughtful, long form article that will challenge how we think about contemporary fundraising practices. We would be delighted if you would subscribe. 

Our recent conversation with Sandi Bliss caught Tammy’s attention. Our discussion reminded Tammy of some of the observations she made earlier in her career while supervising a team of fundraisers. Tammy observed that once her team no longer had something tangible to “sell,” they began to feel like impostors and didn’t quite know how to negotiate more complex and long-term giving opportunities.

Tammy’s team found themselves at the place where transactional fundraising plateaus and where every attempt at selling the same “warm glow” becomes increasingly more difficult. Being stuck here means donor attrition sky rockets, fundraisers quit, and acquisition costs go out the roof. At Responsive, we call this transition point the messy middle lane, the place where a more meaningful gift reflects one’s genuine commitment to and confidence in the mission rather than the naive and impulsive assumption that they’re single-handedly changing the world.

Tammy wanted her team to experience fundraising as meaningful work. And she wanted her team to experience a different kind of conversation with their donors, the sort that only some fundraisers ever learn how to have. These aren’t conversations about “what’s in it for me”; it’s not about selling a tote bag or a tee sponsorship, or putting a name on the side of building. It’s about being a citizen rather than a consumer.

As always, we are grateful to our friends at CueBack for sponsoring the Fundraising Talent Podcast. And, if you’d like to learn more about hosting the Responsive Fundraising Roadshow in your community, email me at jason@responsivefundraising.com  

Reminder, you can download Responsive’s latest edition of Carefully & Critically here. 

When meeting with a client, Sherry doesn’t go straight to fundraising tactics. Instead, in order to understand whether an organization is up to the task of achieving its goals, she begins by asking some probing questions. This often starts with knowing how much money needs to be raised, as opposed to some vague and arbitrary numbers, and whether there is a willingness to dedicate the resources necessary. As Sherry points out, a lot of us are signing on for jobs where the expectation is nothing more than to tell stories and ask for money. That’s not how it works. 

In the midst of all this talk about “the great resignation,” my conversation today with Sherry raises the question of why some fundraisers are signing on to work for bosses who don’t really get fundraising and perhaps have no intention of ever trying to. Before we accept an offer, perhaps we should discern whether the boss is committed to investing in fundraising. Sherry insists, and I concur, that fundraisers need to be confident saying, “No. We can’t raise more money on less, we can’t do it without spending, we can’t do it with half as many staff, and we can’t have such high expectations of our donors without also having higher expectations of ourselves; that’s just not feasible.”

As always, we are grateful to our friends at CueBack for sponsoring the Fundraising Talent Podcast. And, if you’d like to learn more about hosting Responsive’s Roadshow in your community, email me at jason@responsivefundraising.com  

Reminder, you can download Responsive’s latest edition of Carefully & Critically here. 

As a Latinx fundraiser for thirty-five years, Armando has earned the right to have an opinion or two about the challenges we’re facing in today’s nonprofit sector and he believes that, in many ways, we’re missing the point in some of our most heated debates. Armando insists that if decolonizing philanthropy is our goal, it’s not going to happen by focusing on large foundations. We’ve got to remind ourselves what we’re all told in fundraising 101: foundations have never been where the real sustainable opportunities are and never will be. What’s worse, convincing ourselves that in some way the powers that be behind these large foundations will just hand over their power, influence, and assets is simply naive.

Armando wants to remind us that these supposed powerhouses of philanthropy only account for a small fraction of what’s actually contributing to our sector and that they don’t hold nearly as much clout as some would like us to think. While their size, stature, and political influence may be intimidating, their financial impact is considerably less when compared to what individuals are capable of giving. Foundations account for just 18 percent of the money going to charity whereas individuals give upwards of 70 percent every year. To decolonize philanthropy by any definition, we’re going to have to recognize that the real opportunities exist at the lunch table interacting with individuals, not applying for grants from institutions. And to make the types of changes that the loudest voices in our space are calling for, Armando insists that fundraising professionals are going to have to recognize the power that they already have rather than asking someone else to give it to them.  

As always, we are grateful to our friends at CueBack for sponsoring The Fundraising Talent Podcast. And, if you’d like to learn more about hosting Responsive’s Roadshow in your community, email me at jason@responsivefundraising.com

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Today’s conversation with Jeff at EAB was fascinating to say the least. Our conversation, informed significantly by the research that Jeff and his team have either conducted or been a part of, centered around the question of how much of fundraising’s pre-pandemic playbook we are going to throw out and what are we going to keep. Jeff shared with me that the traditional advancement models we see in higher education, largely predicated on alums willingness to show up and agreeing to participate, hasn’t been showing signs of improvement for quite some time. He explains that these aspects of fundraising has been on an unsustainable path for quite some time and that the pandemic simply forced many of us to confront this reality.

Jeff explained that many of our challenges on the road ahead will surface simply because our inability to work out the economics. I suppose what was most encouraging to hear was how much opportunity is actually out there if we are willing to adapt, evolve and experiment with different ways of doing things. For example, Jeff noted that the number of major gift donors who, at many institutions, never receive any meaningful engagement reaches into the thousands simply because of their geographical dispersement and the immediacy with which we expect our efforts to pay off. In between the lines of what I hear in a conversation like this is an opportunity for fundraising to experience a real growth spurt and to perhaps become more exploratory work.

As always, we are grateful to our friends at CueBack for sponsoring the Fundraising Talent Podcast. And, if you’d like to learn more about hosting the Responsive Fundraising Roadshow in your community, email me at jason@responsivefundraising.com  

Reminder, you can download Responsive’s latest edition of Carefully & Critically here. 

As is customary on the podcast, we have thought provoking conversations that give us hope of one day arriving at more enlightened fundraising practices. Well, today’s conversation really had us moving in that direction; and I am really grateful to Cathy for being our provocateur today. Cathy helps organizations raise money in difficult places, for causes that don’t always make for the easiest of stories to tell, and I appreciate her for challenging our thinking about where storytelling makes sense and where it doesn’t.

The questions Cathy had us contemplating were whether fundraising professionals are necessarily entitled to tell the stories of those we serve and in what cases our expectations might cause unintentional harm. With all the Storytelling going on, it’s a fair question. When should someone’s story, perhaps one that involves unresolved trauma and abuse, be off limits even when told with the best of intentions?

As always, we are grateful to our friends at CueBack for sponsoring the Fundraising Talent Podcast. And, if you’d like to learn more about hosting the Responsive Fundraising Roadshow in your community, email me at jason@responsivefundraising.com  

Reminder, you can download Responsive’s latest edition of Carefully & Critically here. 

My conversation with Karl immediately reminded me of the brilliant little book, Obliquity, by LSE and Oxford professor John Kay, who makes the argument that our goals are best achieved indirectly. While counterintuitive, Kay explains that the most successful, most profitable enterprises don’t focus on profits or shareholder value. Arguably, this is a lesson fundraising hasn’t learned. Far too much of contemporary fundraising adheres to a direct approach, and I would venture to say that our fundraisers suffer the brunt of this truth. The direct approach convinces us that our attention should be narrowly focused on donors and dollars.

Karl has developed an appreciation for the indirect route in real time, discovering that being embedded in his community in a variety of ways makes for opportunities that he wouldn’t otherwise encounter. The oblique approach has taught him to trust the process and to not to become overly anxious when things diverge from where he thought they were headed. Karl has learned that fundraising at best is exploratory work; that it rarely goes according to our plans; and that, like everything that involves living, breathing human beings, it’s going to be messy and unpredictable.

As always, we are grateful to our friends at Cueback for their support of The Fundraising Talent Podcast. And, if you’d like to learn more about hosting Responsive Fundraising’s roadshow in your community, let’s coordinate a call.

#unpredictable #responsivefundraising

It sounds as if donor-centered fundraising might have a bit of a PR problem, and Scott’s got the data to explain why. A couple of months ago, Scott launched a poll which asked, is "donor-centric" fundraising on its way out? While the poll results may not be all that surprising, a close look at the participants behind the responses tell an interesting story. Among those participating in Scott’s poll, the guardians of donor-centered fundraising tend to be older, white men working for large institutions.

As I listened to Scott’s reflections on his findings, it is apparent that the comments that followed challenged him to think more critically about what these various ideologies mean and how they inform his work. While desiring to remain true to his values, he’s evidently teachable and pays attention to what those on the other side are saying. Scott strikes me as similar to a lot of the fundraisers that I talk to: not at all about the buzzwords that experts notoriously conjure up for scoring keynotes and contracts, they are after an opportunity to be recognized and admired for meaningful work by their boards, bosses and colleagues down the hall.

As always, we are grateful to our friends at CueBack for sponsoring the Fundraising Talent Podcast. If you’d like to learn more about hosting the Responsive Fundraising Roadshow in your community, email me at jason@responsivefundraising.com  

Reminder, you can download Responsive’s latest edition of Carefully & Critically here. 

My conversation with Alex today raises the question of whether the pandemic was a jumping off opportunity for those who have for stuck on a burning platform for far too long. Throughout the pandemic I have heard several of my guests similarly insist that the pandemic forced critically important changes that were easy to avoid until a crisis of this magnitude came along. Alex explained that for some organizations, the pandemic was an opportunity to demonstrate bravery, increase their tolerance for risk, and persuade key decision makers to do the same.

These are the types of insights that Alex and the research team found in between the lines of the latest Charity Benchmark’s report. The findings are essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the effects of the pandemic on the charitable sector and in particularly for those who are in the UK. As Alex shared with me, the pandemic has had a significant impact on long-term thinking and will no doubt accelerate change that was for some organizations long overdue.

As always, we are grateful to our friends at CueBack for sponsoring The Fundraising Talent Podcast. And if you’d like to learn more about hosting the Responsive Fundraising Roadshow in your community, let’s schedule a call.

#responsivefundraising #unpredictable

Imagine being brand new on a job just days before the pandemic put nearly the entire world on lock down. What would that experience be like? That’s the question I started with today in my conversation with Gail Carter who has managed to successfully navigate her first year as the Vice President of the University Development at the College of Charleston. I was most intrigued to learn that the lock down didn’t necessarily impede Gail’s acclimating to the new role, and it seems she is well prepared for the road ahead. 

I appreciated hearing how Gail and her team have successfully adapted to the uncertainty that the pandemic has thrown at us and taken it in stride. I suspect that what we will hear from many fundraisers in the months to come is that the pandemic provided us all an opportunity to rely on tools that we have long had at our disposal but had perhaps not fully embraced. And perhaps we have discovered that, despite geographical limitations, we can create what researchers refer to as perceived proximity.

As always, we are grateful to our friends at CueBack for sponsoring The Fundraising Talent Podcast. And, if your organization is interested in being a host location for the Responsive Fundraising Roadshow this fall please reach out to talk.

When fundraising is compared to sales, when we insist on pre-determined solicitation amounts, and when everything is all about the ask I’m inclined to ask where is the conversation? Where are we demonstrating our ability to have a meaningful conversation with another human being? As Sandy and I discussed today on the podcast, it concerns me that so few fundraisers have embraced the notion that, as poet and Oxford professor David Whyte says, the conversation is the work. As Sandy evidently has, how about we talk about multi-million dollar conversations rather than multi-million dollar asks?

Are we so naive as to think that if everything about the donor can be efficient, predictable and controlled that our boards and bosses won’t expect the same from our side of the table as well? How many of us know how to have genuine, open-ended conversations with a donor that don’t adhere to a script we’ve already memorized in our head? How many of our employers recognize the conversation as an essential aspect of what that their paying us for? Knowing how to have meaningful conversations with a donor ensures that we are recognized and admired for meaningful work.

As always, we are grateful to our friends at CueBack for sponsoring the Fundraising Talent Podcast. If you’d like to learn more about hosting the Responsive Fundraising Roadshow in your community, email me at jason@responsivefundraising.com   

As we have resumed our roadshows, we have found that shining a spotlight on local leaders greatly enhances the learning experiences for our participants. My guest today on The Fundraising Talent Podcast is Nancy Williams, Founder and CEO of No Empty Pots, and a member of the line-up for our Roadshow stop in Omaha next month. In partnership with The Nonprofit Association of the Midlands, Nancy, Brandi Holys, Kenley Sturdivant-Wilson, and Kevin Mahler have partnered with Responsive to ensure a high-energy, thought-provoking series of conversations about what it means to build and sustain meaningful relationships with donors in the twenty-first century.

The mission of No More Empty Pots is to connect individuals and groups to improve self-sufficiency, regional food security, and economic resilience in urban and rural communities through advocacy and action. What I most appreciated about today’s conversation was that Nancy was so clearly able to translate the Indigenous circular wisdom that informs their efforts at No More Empty Pots to our work as fundraising professionals. Nancy challenged us to see the interdependency that exists within all human systems and to appreciate the level of intentionality that we all want to bring to our most important decisions.

As always, we are grateful to our friends at CueBack for sponsoring The Fundraising Talent Podcast.

The first stop for 2023 will be in Omaha, Nebraska on Friday, March 3rd in partnership with the Nonprofit Association of the Midlands. If you’d like to register for this event, just visit their website at here.

We’re trying something new. The Butterfly Effect, our new publication on Substack, is where we make sense of the ideas and opinions that inform our consulting practices at Responsive Fundraising. Every week we will guarantee for our subscribers a thoughtful, long form article that will challenge how we think about contemporary fundraising practices. We would be delighted if you would subscribe. 

Someone early in my career explained that nonprofits are notorious for operating at least two years behind the rest of the working world when it comes to innovation. This individual insisted that rather than being the early adopters, we’re more inclined to the be the laggards due to our aversion to risk. Contrary to what this person had observed, I have always believed nonprofits should be the innovators rather than the last to adapt to someone else’s bold, new idea; slow to change means missing the chance to change the world. 

I think we are getting better at this, and perhaps people like Pat are helping us along in our adoption of new ideas. We seem to be leaning into the messy reality that multiple generations are using a multiplicity of channels to give. What Pat wants us to add to that complex mix is the understanding that we’re on the verge of adding a multiplicity of currencies and that, while we generally assume our asset-based donor to have at least paid off their mortgage, now they may have just graduated from college. As some of us hoard millennials and younger generations into our CRM’s, Pat wants us to ask ourselves is what happens when these donors opt to be a crypto-based.

As always, we are grateful to our friends at CueBack for sponsoring The Fundraising Talent Podcast. 

#responsivefundraising #unpredictable

How often do we ask ourselves whether half as much effort might yield the same results? Perhaps these are the types of questions that the pandemic has afforded us the opportunity to ask; and I suspect that a few of us, like Mike Hoffman at the US Naval Academy, have been taking good notes. Today, Theresa and I had the pleasure of talking with Mike who shared with us some of the lessons he and his team have learned in the last year. The first among them, when it comes to fundraising, perhaps less can really mean more.

I believe a lot of fundraisers like Mike have paid close attention to what actually worked in their favor and what didn’t matter in the slightest in the midst of the recent pandemic. This experience has allowed us an opportunity to take notice of what actually contributes to our success and, perhaps more importantly, what is really just getting in our way. Enjoying genuine conversations with the half of our donors who actually want to talk with us, developing expertise in-house with our colleagues, and securing significant gifts without traveling across the country are just a few of the things that Mike has taken note of for us to contemplate for the road ahead.

As always, we are grateful to our friends at CueBack for sponsoring The Fundraising Talent Podcast. And, if you’d like to download your free copy of Responsive’s latest edition of Carefully & Critically, just click here. 

For over a year and a half, David O’Brien and Matthew Craig conducted 60 interviews with nonprofit leaders around the country; and in their new book, Building Smart Nonprofits, they share their thoughts on a range of subjects from sources of capital, the infamous overhead myth, evaluation of program effectiveness, and the telling our story. David explained to me that many of the leaders they interviewed are re-examining what has and has not worked in their favor and how their boards partner with them to overhaul their funding models. 

David is the quintessential board member; after a successful forty year career, he found himself with a desire to give back. This motivation landed him on lots of boards; and, despite all his experience and education, he admits that he didn’t know what the hell he was doing. David explained to me that his motivation for the book was two-fold. First, an awareness that the efficacy of funding models based on galas and golf tournaments has peaked, and, much like his own understanding, this awareness happened in real-time. Second, David knew that!nonprofit boards be bridges to smarter organizations if they understood that there were better ways.

As always, we are grateful to our friends at CueBack for sponsoring The Fundraising Talent Podcast. If you’d like to buy a copy of David and Matthew’s new book, click here. If you’d like to download the first edition of Responsive’s Carefully & Critically, click here.

Fundraising as an interdisciplinary endeavor was where Fraser and I wrapped up our conversation however that was only after tossing around a myriad of topics ranging from US politics to the effects that Walt Disney and Don Draper have in our worldviews. I was grateful to hear Fraser suggest that we bring behavioral economics to the forefront of our thinking and allow it along with a few other disciplines to enhance our thinking in the field. The team at Good Works strikes me as one that can be counted on to think carefully and critically about what their client’s are trying to achieve.

This was my second conversation with the team at Good Works and I’m delighted to a part of the line up with both Holly and Fraser this week at Fundraising Day in Ottawa. I’m excited to hear what Fraser will have to say about story telling and, perhaps afterwards, the two of us will begin working on our case for more interdisciplinary thinking in fundraising. This has long been an aspiration of mine and I’m encouraged to hear that Fraser shares this aspiration as well.

As always, we are grateful to our friends at CueBack for their support of The Fundraising Talent Podcast.

About Our Guest 

Fraser Green is one of Canada's most well-respected fundraisers. His two passions are listening very carefully to what donors have to say - and telling donors and prospects superb stories. Fraser has authored or co-authored three fundraising books and has been speaking at fundraising conferences in Canada, the United States and Europe for over 20 years. In his spare time, Fraser loves to bend his tired old body into yoga postures, ski too fast, play his guitars and talk way too much for his own good.

For those of us who want to overhaul charitable giving and reengineer the status quo, Sara’s TedTalk offers a glimpse of what we need to do. Sara wants us all to make sense of the power of collective giving. Sara is the founding CEO of Philanthropy Together, a growing movement of people-powered philanthropy aimed at resourcing grassroots nonprofits, shifting power dynamics, and promoting widespread philanthropy. In her Ted Talk, Sara describes the four components of a thriving giving circle: belonging, discourse, trust, and to act.

Sara wants us to see that collective giving affords us an opportunity to practice democracy in a way that our individual giving habits can’t. The decision-making process allows us to get outside of our own heads and to hear another person’s perspective, perhaps someone with whom we don’t have much in common. As we emerge from the recent pandemic, Sara wants us all to realize that we are hungry to find meaning in groups and understand that there is nothing better than coming together to deliberate and choose to support causes that we collectively believe in.

As always, we are grateful to our friends at CueBack for sponsoring The Fundraising Talent Podcast.

We’re trying something new. The Butterfly Effect, our new publication on Substack, is where we make sense of the ideas and opinions that inform our consulting practices at Responsive Fundraising. Every week we will guarantee for our subscribers a thoughtful, long form article that will challenge how we think about contemporary fundraising practices. We would be delighted if you would subscribe. 

Some of us are having a hard time making sense of why, in the last two decades, nonprofits have lost the support of twenty-million donors; and we don’t understand the appeal of donor advised funds, giving circles, and direct giving as alternatives to the traditional pathways that our charities create. I would insist that these and other trends are the effects of a mischaracterization of the donor and their growing intolerance for a role that they never agreed to play. 

Where did the idea that our donors should behave like passive, predictable consumers come from?

In making sense of how this mischaracterization of the donor evolved, I have found Jon Alexander’s, Citizens: Why the Key to Fixing Everything is All of Us, especially helpful. Jon’s book gives us a critical lens through which to understand why our organizations have become what Robert Putnam called, “mailing list organizations” and, as one of my guests has described, why our sector has become so CRM-centric. 

Jon’s book affords us a useful framework for what I believe will need to change in order for our professional community to actually achieve many of the higher aspirations that have been called for recently. Calling for change, without demonstrating a willingness to change the nature of our relationships, is just blowing smoke.

Jon’s book challenges us to recognize that our identities as consumers have been failing us for quite some time, and the fundraising community is no exception to these disappointments. Jon explains, “…the Consumer Story is collapsing under the weight of its own contradictions, and the Citizen Story is emerging. People are dissatisfied with being mere Consumers, yearn for deeper agency even though we lack the words to express it, and have an innate if imprecise sense that authentic participation holds the key to a brighter future.”

For those who want to make sense of the mischaracterization that we have assigned our donors and how its effects have become so pervasive and detrimental to our efforts, today’s podcast conversation is a great place to start. In our conversation, Jon helps us see how the allure of Effective Altruism, the use of the hero story, and the inclination to create menus are all indicators that we’re collectively stuck in the consumer story. 

As always, we are grateful to our friends at CueBack for sponsoring The Fundraising Talent Podcast.

We’re trying something new. The Butterfly Effect, our new publication on Substack, is where we make sense of the ideas and opinions that inform our consulting practices at Responsive Fundraising. Every week we will guarantee for our subscribers a thoughtful, long form article that will challenge how we think about contemporary fundraising practices. We would be delighted if you would subscribe. 

David and Sam are both members of The Chartered Institute of Fundraising’s Supporter Experience Committee. This network of fundraisers is dedicated to identifying best practices and providing thought leadership aimed at ensuring quality supporter experiences. In today’s podcast conversation, David and Sam challenge us to ask whether less homogenous and less industrialist fundraising practices might improve the fundraising experience for those on both sides of the exchange. Many of David and Sam’s observations beg the question of why so many charities remain content to squeeze enormous populations of donors into a system that assumes that everyone shares the same motivations for giving.   

Throughout our conversation, David and Sam repeatedly brought us back to the opportunity they see for sector leaders willing to make changes that might turn around some of the troubling trends and remedy some of the mistakes we make over and over again. We explored some of the insights that these leaders might glean from organizations like BLM and Extinction Rebellion as well as the response to the conflict in Ukraine and the University of Tennessee’s crowdfunding campaign for new goalposts.

As always, we are grateful to our friends at CueBack for sponsoring The Fundraising Talent Podcast.

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We’re trying something new. The Butterfly Effect, our new publication on Substack, is where we make sense of the ideas and opinions that inform our consulting practices at Responsive Fundraising. Every week we will guarantee for our subscribers a thoughtful, long form article that will challenge how we think about contemporary fundraising practices. We would be delighted if you would subscribe. 

Alex isn’t kidding when he says it seems like The Chronicle of Philanthropy has been retelling the same story about disillusioned fundraisers for a long time. Those of us who have been around for a while are well aware of the fact that, at any given time, at least half of the fundraisers out there are looking for another job and that very few boards and bosses have come to a consensus about how fundraising really works. As of late this familiar story has zeroed in on how poorly prepared some employers are with making hiring decisions and how often they miss opportunities by relying on an arduous interview process.

Alex believes hiring managers need a wake up call; and, on the flip side, he insists that candidates need to know how to see the red flags that distinguish between an job where you’re being set up to fail rather than given an opportunity to thrive. For example, Alex wants fundraisers to listen more closely to whether an employer characterizes the work as exchanging gifts with those who share a genuine and meaningful relationship with our organization; or does the employer believe that the donor is merely a passive consumer and an opportunity to close a quick deal. 

I was grateful to hear that Alex had taken my recent recommendation to read Benjamin Barber’s Consumed which likens our consumer society to that of a child whose impulsive behavior prevents them from achieving their full potential. As I have said many times before, this is where I believe fundraising finds itself today: in the midst of its messy adolescence and unable to discern between what’s really working in its favor versus getting in its way. I am confident that as we develop a collective willingness to wrestle with tough questions of the sort that Alex and I did today, and as donors are afforded opportunities to play active, citizen-like roles with the organizations they support, our sector and society as a whole will reap the benefits that accompany mature, sustainable relationships.

As always, we are grateful to our friends at CueBack for sponsoring The Fundraising Talent Podcast.

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We’re trying something new. The Butterfly Effect, our new publication on Substack, is where we make sense of the ideas and opinions that inform our consulting practices at Responsive Fundraising. Every week we will guarantee for our subscribers a thoughtful, long form article that will challenge how we think about contemporary fundraising practices. We would be delighted if you would subscribe. 

Stuart wants us to carefully think about whether we’re designing resilience into our organizations and, if not, ask ourselves if difficult and uncertain times are really to blame for some of our financial misfortunes. I have been an admirer of Stuart’s work for quite some time. His research begs the question of whether our scholars have done more harm than good by borrowing as many theories as they have from the marketplace. Stuart’s “Nonprofit First” thinking insists that we should construct theory from what has emerged within our sector rather than from somewhere else. 

During today’s conversation, Stuart and I unraveled how nonprofit organizations often come about with the help of government subsidies only to later become increasingly dependent on charitable giving. As the government fades, many nonprofit leaders implicitly assume the donor will step up to the plate and play their role similar to how the government did. What these leaders miss is that these are fundamentally different types of relationships, distinct types of exchanges, all functioning in accordance with completely different playbooks. Stuart would insist that designing for resilience starts with knowing how to make these kinds of distinctions.

Looking ahead, we have quite a line-up of conversations set for January centered around the notion of citizenship and what it looks like when our donors insist on something more than the passive, consumer-like role to which our organizations have grown accustomed. If you would like to be a guest on The Fundraising Talent Podcast in 2023, email me anytime; our listeners would be delighted to hear your big ideas and bold opinions.

As always, we are especially grateful to our friends at CueBack for sponsoring The Fundraising Talent Podcast.

I was grateful to Alex, co-founder of The Giving Block, for ensuring that we add a timely conversation about the FTX-Bankman Fried collapse to The Fundraising Talent Podcast’s library of conversations. Shortly after this story started making headlines, I appreciated seeing that Alex and Pat offered their take on the situation and assured nonprofit leaders that the effect of this fiasco would be minimal for most charities and their crypto-minded donors. This was perhaps welcome news for those who, like myself, are only beginners at making sense of how cryptocurrency fits in our fundraising efforts. What effect all this will have on effective altruism, Bankman-Fried’s ideological framework of choice, is yet to be seen. 

Alex wants us to remind ourselves that the failure of an individual or an entity is not the failure of entire industry. Alex explained that FTX played a very small role in Crypto Philanthropy and he insisted that this will not slow down the growth of this industry. Alex explained that twice as many nonprofit organizations are accepting cryptocurrency donations through their platform than were a year ago, and every month the team at The Giving Block help hundreds of charities design and launch their crypto-philanthropy programs.

Listeners, please forgive the echo for about the first 7 minutes. We were able to clean that up so as to ensure a painless listen thereafter. 

As always, we are especially grateful to our friends at CueBack for sponsoring The Fundraising Talent Podcast.

As a leader in Seattle’s arts community and a college professor, Jackson is just getting started. Southern Theatre magazine has recently named Jackson among a group of rising leaders who are paving the way for the future of fundraising. What I most appreciated about today’s conversation was that, while Jackson is explicit in his desire to do away with fundraising’s narrow focus on the top three percent, he’s evidently chosen not to be envious and make wealth-bashing part of his repertoire. Jackson isn’t typecasting anyone.

In today’s conversation, Jackson challenges fundraisers to check themselves before they set out to raise money. He wants fundraisers to think carefully about their own relationship with money and wealth and to examine how they go about engaging with and soliciting the support of their donors. Jackson wants us to ask ourselves whether we’re creating opportunities for our donors to be better people and whether we’re creating experiences aimed at creating more than mere transactions. Like so many of my guests in the last couple of years, Jackson has high aspirations and wants to see qualitative improvements in how we carry out our work.

Much of our conversation was about how fundraisers can best steward relationships with their donors. For example, Jackson described the opportunity that nonprofits have to curate meaningful experiences for those who began their life with very little and then, late in life, found themselves with more than they could have ever imagined. Jackson wants us to envision our organizations not only as places for raising awareness and providing services but also as places for demonstrating solidarity and expressing gratitude.

As always, we are especially grateful to our friends at CueBack for sponsoring The Fundraising Talent Podcast.

Today’s podcast conversation offers a tough pill that I suspect some of us aren’t willing to swallow. Jim wants us to wrestle with the question of why today’s nonprofits are afraid of their own obsolescence. Instead of planning to eventually close, Jim wants to know why, for all intents and purposes, our organizations collectively make up what has become a growth industry. Are we willing to admit to ourselves that raising money for problems that never get solved is big business? 

Jim’s tough pill reminds me of the “Shirky Principle” which says that institutions will preserve a problem to which they are the solution. When we think about our fundraising efforts, have our donors become co-conspirators in ignoring root problems and not telling the truth? Are we placating our donors with easy-to-fund problems with which we believe they will be more comfortable and of which they can easily make sense? Jim wants to us to find the courage to solicit support for real solutions that are complex, difficult to understand, and might even make us all feel uncomfortable.

As always, we are especially grateful to our friends at CueBack for sponsoring The Fundraising Talent Podcast.

I confess, I don’t read a lot of books about fundraising; I have always found them to be either too tactical or little more than chatter about manipulative gimmicks aimed at getting us into Mrs Smith’s pocketbook. However, Amy and Josh’s BeneFactors: Why Some Fundraising Professionals Always Succeed is neither of these. Rather, it’s a refreshing and enjoyable read written by two fundraisers who are both committed to their craft and understand the complexity of what it means to raise extraordinary dollars in the twenty-first century.

Josh and Amy set out to create a book that not only inspires a new generation of fundraising leaders, but also provides a practical guide for nonprofit executives to raise up new development professionals for the field.

In our conversation today, we cover a lot of territory, reflecting on Amy and Josh’s thoughts about how we relate to donors, what sets a good fundraiser apart from a great one, and what role mentors play in our professional journeys. I especially enjoyed hearing Amy and Josh talk about what it means to achieve “relentless alignment” with our donors and what impact their faith traditions have had in their pursuits as fundraisers.

As always, we are grateful to our friends at CueBack for sponsoring The Fundraising Talent Podcast.

If your organization wants to make sense of raising extraordinary levels of support by way of meaningful relationships and higher expectations, our team at Responsive would welcome the opportunity to help you do that. If you’re interested in learning more, email me and/or our managing partner, Michael Dixon. We will be happy to volunteer an hour to get to know you and to explore with you what a partnership with our team might look like.

My conversation today with Jillian was a great reminder to me of what I have always believed to be one of the most meaningful aspects of nonprofit work: the opportunity to create community around common struggles. For most of our lives, Jillian and I have shared a common obstacle that can interrupt our daily lives in life-threatening ways. 99% of the time, our seizure disorders are completely manageable, and we can exist in the world just like other able-bodied citizens. Unfortunately, in a matter of seconds and without warning, our lives and the lives of anyone in our care can be at great risk. Discovering that we shared this common thread in our stories is what initiated today’s podcast conversation.

Jillian insists that the best fundraisers are always curious, authentic, and able to bring their whole selves to their work. This is what Jillian demonstrated today; she showed up, shared a part of her story that no one would be able to make sense of without the benefit of a conversation like this one, and she came to be curious and share an interest in learning about the stories of other colleagues who share similar experiences. The question Jillian raised was how unseen diversity impacts a fundraisers journey. And furthermore, how can our professional community demonstrate a commitment to listening to and understanding the aspects of each other’s story that exist below the surface?

As always, we are especially grateful to our friends at CueBack for sponsoring The Fundraising Talent Podcast.

My conversation today with Adam was both timely and inspiring. Adam wants us to see how the logic of the gift affords a more holistic, long-term, and collaborative perspective where the focus can be on the quality of relationships rather than making comparisons of one’s contribution to another. Adam explained how he has produced programming at Jewish Studio Project that, rather than using the traditional fee-for-service approach, relies on the gift economy. He explained that everyone contributes what they can and recognizes that they are there to give just as much as they are there to receive.

With this logic in mind, Adam shared how it has informed their approach to Giving Tuesday. Rather than just ensuring that as many gifts as possible flow in their direction, they have sought out opportunities to model gratitude and extend generosity to other organizations. For this year’s Giving Tuesday campaign, the Jewish Studio Project is encouraging their community to give to Queer Asterisk, a Colorado-based organization that is providing counseling services to those who have been effected by the Club Q shooting in Colorado Springs.

As always, we are especially grateful to our friends at CueBack for sponsoring The Fundraising Talent Podcast.

Stephanie Schwartz is the Founder and CEO of Little Bean Group, a fundraising consultancy in Washington, DC. Stephanie loves to work with leaders who want to dream big and who recognize that fundraising is often the path by which their dreams come to fruition. Stephanie affords her clients the benefit of extensive experience in both education and advocacy. In today’s conversation, Stephanie challenges us to change our expectations of board members and not necessarily, as I often say, “letting them off the hook” but thinking strategically about where they can most effectively contribute to the overall fundraising effort.

Stephanie and I agreed that today’s nonprofit leaders are wise to distinguish between the ways and means that a fundraiser can shine versus where board members have similar opportunities. Stephanie wants us to grasp that, for the majority of our board members, this means finding ways to be engaged in fundraising that don’t necessitate an ask. It also means abandoning the myriad of overly prescriptive responsibilities that we often assign them. Experience has taught many of us that these formulas often translate into less than desirable experiences for our board members and a lot of frustration and disappointment for ourselves.

As always, we are especially grateful to our friends at CueBack for sponsoring The Fundraising Talent Podcast.

This is the second in a two-part conversation with the editors of Collecting Courage: Joy, Pain, Freedom, Love which has been described as “an honest, raw account” of the experiences of 14 Black charity leaders and fundraisers in North America. In response to the project’s success, the editors are convening readers who want to continue on the journey towards racial reconciliation and collective healing in our sector.

Nneka, Nicole, and Camila recently joined me to discuss both their book and The Path to Action Conference later this month. In this segment, Camila helps us understand the myriad of obstacles that she encountered early in her career despite having readied herself as well as she did. Camila explains how what she accomplished was “diminished, disregarded or discarded” by a sector that she genuinely wanted to be believe in and to which she wanted to remain committed.

If these conversations stirred you as they have me, I would encourage you to accept the invitation that has been extended to us; for those who want to be co-conspirators in the fight for racial justice in our sector, for those who want to be equipped with the knowledge and tools that are required, and for those who want to make sense of their roles and responsibilities in ensuring greater freedom for everyone, register here. 

As always, we are especially grateful to our friends at CueBack for sponsoring The Fundraising Talent Podcast.

This is the first in a two-part conversation with the editors of Collecting Courage: Joy, Pain, Freedom, Love which has been described as “an honest, raw account” of the experiences of 14 Black charity leaders and fundraisers in North America. In response to the project’s success, the editors are convening readers who want to continue on the journey towards racial reconciliation and collective healing in our sector.

Nneka, Nicole, and Camila joined me to discuss both their book and The Path to Action Conference later this month. Nicole begins by helping us see in between the lines of her poetry and then challenges us to see the “jacket” - a metaphor for what our brown and black colleagues are expected to conform to in our sector. I can recall previous guests who have similarly described this jacket that many of us either remain unaware of or simply refuse to see. 

If this conversation stirs you, I would encourage you to accept the invitation that has been extended to us; for those who want to be co-conspirators in the fight for racial justice in our sector, for those who want to be equipped with the knowledge and tools that are required, and for those who want to make sense of their roles and responsibilities in ensuring greater freedom for everyone, register for the conference here. 

As always, we are especially grateful to our friends at CueBack for sponsoring The Fundraising Talent Podcast.

Heather wants charities to recognize that they may be vastly underestimating the value they bring to their corporate sponsors and that, in doing so, they may prohibit themselves from building mutually beneficial relationships that can bring far more value than simply financial support. Heather explains that we’re beyond the era of old-school corporate giving where the charity delivers on the good and the corporate sponsor just delivers on a check. Heather is the founder and president of The boutique fundraising consultancy, BridgeRaise, which helps nonprofits take their corporate giving efforts to a new level starting with aligning everyone’s values. 

Heather wants nonprofit leaders to see that they are bringing more to the table and have the opportunity to welcome their corporate sponsors into an active, co-creative type of relationship. The type of relationship Heather describes allows leaders to do away with the deficit-thinking that always postures the charity with their hands out, looking for a hero to rescue them. Rather than partnering with corporations who select their partners like members of a “flavor of the month club,” Heather wants charity leaders to seek out purpose-led corporations that can be counted on for sustainable, meaningful relationships that translate into the most signicant levels of support.

As always, we are especially grateful to our friends at CueBack for sponsoring The Fundraising Talent Podcast.

Greg kicked off today’s conversation with the suggestion that there is going to be an increasing divide between those shops whose fundraising efforts can thrive and those whose cannot. Greg believes a lot of this will be evident in the success or lack thereof in organizations’ planned giving efforts. While Greg insists these efforts don’t have to be especially complicated, our organizations will have to match our desire for these more significant gifts with the wherewithal to most effectively and appropriately negotiate, receive, and acknowledge them. Our team at Responsive appreciates that Greg is among our consulting colleagues who are allowing our Three Lanes Theory to inform some of his thinking on this.

During the second half of today’s conversation, it took an especially thought provoking turn when we posed the question of whether having higher expectations of the relationship rather than of the individuals involved in the exchange translates into greater success in planned giving. I was looking to connect Greg’s thoughts with that of author Aaron Dignan who insists that in the future we’re all going to have to be increasingly “complexity conscious”. This way of thinking recognizes that the most meaningful outcomes in a complex adaptive system, whatever they may be, emerge from the interactions in between us rather than from the behavior of any individual actor. 

As always, we are especially grateful to our friends at CueBack for sponsoring The Fundraising Talent Podcast.

How does the assumption that our donors are intentionally hoarding wealth in a donor-advised fund help any of us accomplish our goals? And, perhaps more importantly, how does such negative spin help anyone make sense of why these tools have become so popular in the last several decades? While the critics want us to focus on changing legislation and trying to coerce generosity with additional rules and regulations, I say we ought to learn how to have more meaningful relationships with our donors. Will changing the rules necessarily improve our bottom-line or just make our jobs even harder than they already are?

My conversation today with Lisa and Stephen centered around what Princeton sociologist Viviana Zelizer in her book, The Social Meaning of Money, refers to as earmarking. Zelizer explains that human beings have always made a habit of earmarking monies that align with particular types of relationships. I asked Lisa and Stephen to wrestle with whether giving our donors the benefit of the doubt and applying Zelizer’s logic might help some of us see the use of donor-advised funds through a more optimistic lens. What Lisa and Stephen see is not an affluent donor who wants to hoard money. Rather, they see a donor who is increasingly deliberate and purposeful and whose giving is directed towards organizations that take the donor’s decision-making process as seriously as they do.

As always, we are grateful to our friends at CueBack for their continued support of The Fundraising Talent Podcast. 

Cathy is the development lead at Bloomberg Philanthropies. Bloomberg Philanthropies works to ensure better, longer lives for the greatest number of people by focusing on five key areas: the arts, education, the environment, government innovation, and public health. Encompassing all of Mike Bloomberg’s giving, Bloomberg Philanthropies includes his foundation and corporate and personal philanthropy as well as Bloomberg Associates, a pro bono consultancy that works with mayors in cities around the world.

During our conversation today, Cathy encourages us to embrace the obvious and, as a mentor once told her, “be open to people who sees things that you don’t, but should.” Cathy wants to encourage us to approach things with a conversational, exploratory, “how could we make sense of this differently” attitude. She encourages us to stop looking for moonshots and begin to embrace the obvious - what’s in arms-reach, accessible, and available to us. To this point, Cathy concludes with an example from a friend at the Harlem Children’s Zone who, during the pandemic, came to a realization of just how obvious the solutions really were.

As always, we are grateful to our friends at CueBack for their continued support of The Fundraising Talent Podcast. 

Conversations of this sort have me convinced that the next generation of non-profiteers will think very carefully about whether to embrace the twentieth-century, consumer-oriented approach to fundraising to which many of us still remain very loyal. Dion has only been at this for a couple of years and has quickly figured out that contemporary fundraising has a tendency to focus on the short term, commodify the stories of those being served, and elevate the donors like kings and queens rather than as fellow citizens who share in a commitment to the same cause. 

Dion is the founder of Dion's Chicago Dream, a non-profit feeding those in neighborhoods without access to fresh food and produce. Food deserts, areas in which it is difficult to find affordable and healthy foods, especially fresh fruits and vegetables, affect every part of the city, with a larger presence in the South and West sides of Chicago. Dion’s initiative has expanded to assist residents in need in every Chicago neighborhood through the power of fresh, healthy food.

Before we wrapped up our conversation today, Dion shared his thoughts about how leaders should be interacting with funders. Dion explained that we shouldn’t be afraid to correct flawed assumptions nor should we allow inherent power dynamics to corrupt the relationship. Dion’s explanation reminded me of Jane Addam’s work at Hull House just over a century ago. In the same struggling Chicago neighborhoods, I suspect Addams would have characterized her work in much the same way that Dion did today - “We’re doing philanthropy differently.”

As always, we are especially grateful to our friends at CueBack for sponsoring The Fundraising Talent Podcast.

Several years ago I began paying close attention to the places where expectations of the nonprofit leader were evolving from an internally-focused leader whose expertise closely aligned with the organization’s program and services, to an externally-focused leader whose expertise aligned with leading a complex organization reliant on the support of a diverse constituency. I’ve had the greatest opportunities to make the most sense of this while consulting with boards that expected their senior leaders to assume the posture of what I routinely refer to as the Fundraising CEO.

Much of my conversation today with Bradley on The Fundraising Talent Podcast is reminiscent of conversations that I’ve had with board members, CEO’s, and their teams about what it means to have a Fundraising CEO at the helm. It’s not a role for everyone, and not every organization is ready for it. Leveraging the strengths of a Fundraising CEO isn’t about fundraising, per se. It has a lot more to do with organizational design, professional development, and distributed leadership.

As a serial entrepreneur and the CEO of a growing nonprofit organization, Bradley has had to think a lot about the role he plays and the expectations he has for those with whom he surrounds himself. In this role, he has thought a lot about how to design the organization in a way that allows him to develop meaningful relationships with donors who can be counted on for sustainable support. Bradley explained that much of it comes down to knowing what everyone’s superpowers are and then confidently delegating responsibilities accordingly.

As always, we are grateful to our friends at CueBack for sponsoring The Fundraising Talent Podcast.

If your organization wants to make sense of raising extraordinary levels of support by way of meaningful relationships and higher expectations, our team at Responsive would welcome the opportunity to help you do that. If you’re interested in learning more, email me and/or our managing partner, Michael Dixon. We will be happy to volunteer an hour to get to know you and to explore with you what a partnership with our team might look like.

Today’s podcast conversation with Ray Gary was fantastic. Why? Because Ray evidently doesn’t relate to the world like a technocrat who is convinced tech will save the planet. Ray certainly understands the role technology can and should play; however, he also understands that technology can’t be expected to do all the heavy lifting. Ray wants to see generosity become a habit and lifestyle rather than a one-off transactional experience that we’re often counting on technology to ensure happens. As the founder and CEO of IDonate, Ray believes that if applied correctly technology can amplify the good that the sector is already doing.

Our conversation today went in all sorts of directions - everywhere from why the nonprofit sector is so CRM centric to what Peloton can teach us about being a part of a dynamic community. Ray describes Peloton as an example of how an organization can transform a product or service into way of life. Ray explains that what makes Peloton such a remarkable concept is much less about the exercise bike and a lot about the community of Peloton users. Our conversation about the popularity of Peloton begs the question of how charitable organizations might create more community-centered experiences that allow their donors to form meaningful relationships with others who share a commitment to the same cause.

As always, we are especially grateful to our friends at CueBack for sponsoring The Fundraising Talent Podcast.

My guest today on The Fundraising Talent Podcast is Paulina Artieda, executive director for The New Philanthropists, an organization that works to create more racially diverse and inclusive nonprofit boards in Austin. Their mission is to build a pipeline to leadership for people of color; cultivate diversity, equity, and inclusion among mainstream nonprofit boards; and enable nonprofits to be more effective stewards of public trust and to produce better outcomes for the people they serve. My conversation today with Paulina begs the question of whether our board recruitment strategies align with our DEI aspirations.

As Paulina and I got warmed up, we started wrestling with some of the questions boards should be asking themselves. Is it time to abandon any semblance of “give, get or get off,” the privilege of board members “buying” their way into their seats, or the habit of recruiting individuals who sit on boards everywhere else? What Paulina and her team want us to make sense of is that a board member is more than their financial gift, that boards have to ready themselves for cultural shifts, and that it all begins with cultivating genuine relationships. What I most appreciated about this conversation was how often we reminded ourselves that recruitment to any role, be it board members, major donors, or volunteers, needs to begin with our genuine desire to be in relationship those who are different from ourselves.

As always, we are especially grateful to our friends at CueBack for sponsoring The Fundraising Talent Podcast.

Madge challenged us this morning by asking what would it look like if more nonprofits accurately reflected the communities their organizations served. This is one of the conversations I have with my students every spring, and my career has afforded me opportunities to see where we’re getting this right and wrong. How do we ensure that our boards and bosses have a grasp of who they are serving and why? As Madge explained, studies have shown that less than 20% of nonprofits are led by people of color while the vast majority of our nonprofits serve communities of color. Much of our conversation today was about making sense of how to change this reality. 

Madge is the CEO at Mission Capital, a capacity building organization in Austin, that has been serving the region’s nonprofits for over 20 years. As Madge shared with me, Mission Capital’s explicit goals are three-fold: to close the racial leadership gap, to increase organizational resilience and sustainability, and to expand collaborative networks. What I most appreciated about our conversation today was how Madge described the organization as a place where the diversity of our sector can show up, where messiness is expected to happen, and where everyone leaves stronger by having participated in the conversation. 

The team at Mission Capital are individuals who are passionate about serving their community. They envision a Central Texas where leaders feel empowered to elevate their voices and where organizations are equipped to fulfill their missions. Our team at Responsive is delighted to be partnered with Madge and her team at Mission Capital as they host the first stop on our roadshow next week in Austin. If you’re interested in attending, sign up via our website here.

As always, we are especially grateful to our friends at CueBack for sponsoring The Fundraising Talent Podcast.

One of our goals with our roadshow is to shine a spotlight on highly capable individuals who are helping their local nonprofit community to thrive. One such individual is Cat, founder of the Giant Squid Group, who I’m delighted will be a part of the lineup for our upcoming roadshow stop in Austin on September 16th. 

In our conversation today, Cat and I connected the dots between fundraising’s bad case of shiny new toy syndrome and the realization that a lot of these new toys aren’t actually delivering on their promises. What concerns Cat is the effect that these shiny new toys have on the professional development of young fundraisers and whether these new toys get in the way of learning how fundraising really works. Cat’s critique is similar to that of Lucy Bernholz who describes the effect of the “givingscape” as commodifying giving rather than democratizing it.

Today’s conversation has us asking whether making charitable giving fast, easy, and painless is really what we’re after or whether removing all the friction has the unintended consequence of making renewing donor’s support more challenging. As I often say, how we go about soliciting the initial gift will have a bearing on whether we can successfully secure the subsequent gift. 

If you would like to join Cat, Michelle, and myself in Austin for the first stop on the Resonsive Fudnraisinb Roadshow, we would be delighted to have you join us. To register, visit our website here. 

As always, we are especially grateful to our friends at CueBack for sponsoring The Fundraising Talent Podcast.

Earlier this year, Evan wrote an article for Candid’s Philanthropy News Digest entitled “We need a ‘Nonprofit Development Bill of Rights’” wherein he insisted that the time for “us” has arrived. If the past two years have taught us anything, it’s that self-care and psychological safety have moved front and center; and we owe it to ourselves — and our donors — to make sure we take care of ourselves. Evan’s proposed “bill of rights” is not anything most of us would expect for our ourselves and our employers no matter the role in which we happen to be. 

Since this publication, Evan has had many opportunities to discuss and explore his ideas with friends an colleagues. Unfortunately, what concerns Evan today, less than six months since his article’s publication, is that the window of opportunity for getting some of these things right for our professional community seems to be closing too quickly. While Evan is positive about the progress we have made, he’s concerned that perhaps we’re already evolving back to our pre-2020 organizational behavior. Evan is asking whether we have made as much progress as we think we have.

As always, we are especially grateful to our friends at CueBack for sponsoring The Fundraising Talent Podcast.

To read Evan’s article, “We need a ‘Nonprofit Development Bill of Rights”, visit this website here.    

If you’d like to register for one of Responsive Fundraising’s upcoming roadshows, visit their website here. 

If there is anything that my twenty-plus years in this space has revealed, it’s that professional associations have a way of getting themselves into a mess of trouble. While I’m sure the reasons for this can simmer up from just about anywhere, I suspect most of the trouble is emerges in between the inclination to create rulebooks for how to most ethically get the job done and the need to ensure that their sponsors are happy enough to underwrite next year’s conference. Recently, after watching yet another group of members unravel their disappointments with conference organizers in the Twitterverse, I began to wonder how long these associations will be able to maintain their role as fundraising’s gate-keepers to professional development and networking.

I had a hunch that our friends at FundraisingEverywhere might have some ideas about how traditional associations might keep themselves out of trouble. In 2019, Nikki and Simon founded FundraisingEverywhere in order to answer a similar question; how do we make professional development and networking opportunities more accessible to more fundraisers? Their timing couldn’t have been better; with prohibitive fees increasingly scaring fundraisers away from association membership and insiders increasingly dominating the conversation, Nikki and Simon launched a platform that is now hosting some of fundraising’s most important conversations.

As always, we are especially grateful to our friends at CueBack for sponsoring The Fundraising Talent Podcast.

To learn more about upcoming events at FundraisingEverywhere, visit their website here.    

If you’d like to register for one of Responsive Fundraising’s upcoming roadshows, visit their website here. 

I have often advised employers to bet on time rather than money. More often than not, the opportunities for fundraisers to raise serious money are there; the question is whether we can keep our fundraisers around long enough to prove it. My conversation today with Stephanie echoes this point; in order to get this right we have to think more holistically about the jobs we are creating for fundraisers to fill. As Stephanie explained, it’s going to come down to meaningful work and competitive compensation. In my mind, meaningful work is largely a matter of how long they stay in the role rather than how much money they raise. We have to create environments where fundraisers can thrive. 

I would insist that too much of the conversation about professional turnover has always been about addressing one side of the time/pay equation while ignoring the other; we’ll pay fundraisers well, but who gives a damn whether they want to stick around. Stephanie and I wrapped up today where I hoped we would, asking whether we can persuade employers to incentivize sticking around rather than raising a lots of cash. The more we make sense of how fundraising really works, the more we discover that money raised is an outcome of longevity in the position. If organizations are stuck in lane one, they’re not experiencing fundraising as meaningful work and there isn’t enough margin for meeting everyone’s expectations.

As always, we are especially grateful to our friends at CueBack for sponsoring The Fundraising Talent Podcast.

If you’d like to register for one of Responsive Fundraising’s upcoming roadshows, visit their website here. 

As I shared with Andy today, I recall one of his books being among the first that I read early in my career. Now, more than two decades later, it was a pleasure to find so much common ground in how we think about fundraising. Perhaps what I most appreciated about our conversation was that Andy wants fundraisers to enjoy space where the metrics aren’t the focus and where collecting a check isn’t the only goal. As I have said many times myself, we have to afford the relationship the opportunity to do at least some of the job for us. 

Andy wants fundraisers and their employers to be more comfortable with ambiguity because our world seems to get more complex and unpredictable by the day; Andy insists that developing a tolerance for ambiguity is a good trait to have. As studies demonstrated decades ago, Andy wants boards and nonprofit leaders to appreciate the fact that muddling through can sometimes be as good an approach as a well-structured and highly detailed strategy.

As always, we are especially grateful to our friends at CueBack for sponsoring The Fundraising Talent. 

If you’d like to learn more about Responsive Fundraising’s sense-making retreats, email me for more information. 

If you’d like to learn more about the messy middle, download our free white paper entitled, Making sense of the messy middle.

For more information about the upcoming Nonprofit Consulting Conference, visit their website here. 

Early in my career, I figured out pretty quickly that the fundraising wizards want nothing to do with the messy middle. Instead, half of them decide to become overly-invested in new donor acquisition while the other half try to one-up each other in the billionaire campaign club. In this kind of environment, it’s no wonder everything feels so transactional, donor attrition is what it is, and our fundraisers are fed up. Blame the wizards.

Today, I sat down with Laurel and Noah, two members of Responsive’s team who, like myself, have made a lot of sense of why the fundraising community, consultancies in particular, won’t talk about the messy middle. What Laurel and Noah have discovered is that the messy middle is where fundraisers have the opportunity to shine, where their employers make sense of how it all actually works, and where the wizards start to feel like they’re getting in the way.

As Laurel and Noah discuss in todays podcast conversation, the messy middle isn’t about the timing of, size of, or who gets credit for a donor’s contribution. The messy middle is where the organization makes an intentional decision to prioritize their relationships ahead of the gift - where the donor becomes a citizen rather than a mere consumer. The messy middle is where, as Laurel describes, the job becomes more than that of being a master technician who runs a “fundraising machine.” As Noah describes it, the messy middle is where those on both sides of the exchange can be known, understood, and listened to as human beings.

As always, we are especially grateful to our friends at CueBack for sponsoring The Fundraising Talent Podcast. If you’d like to learn more about Responsive Fundraising’s sense-making retreats, email me for more information. If you’d like to learn more about the messy middle, reach out to either Laurel or Noah for a conversation, and/or download our free white paper entitled, Making sense of the messy middle.

What I have found enlightening about my conversations with Michelle is her studies in anthropology and her active involvement in several well-organized discussions aimed at addressing some of our sector’s enduring challenges. What I also find noteworthy is that, while some might like to accuse such discussion groups of over-thinking, the colleagues who are seated at the table with Michelle certainly don’t see it this way. Today’s conversations with Michelle confirms that our sector will never reach higher aspirations without asking some tough questions. 

When I asked what Michelle believed was the common thread among the conversations she is a part of, she described a heightened awareness that what got us here isn’t going to be adaquate for the road ahead. While fundraisers may have tolerated being part of an intervening subculture in the past, they are now insisting on more active and influential roles. Michelle explains that her peers are well aware of the fact that the status quo is flawed and that the boards and bosses who want to hire them are highly resistant to change. All this means that fundraisers need to be savvier about their job descriptions and a bit more selective about whom they sign on with.

As always, we are especially grateful to our friends at CueBack for sponsoring The Fundraising Talent Podcast. If you’d like to learn more about Responsive Fundraising’s sense-making retreats, email me for more information. If you’d like to learn more about the conversations that Michelle and her colleagues are a part of, visit these websites for more information. 

Community-Centric Fundraising 

The Donor Participation Project

Association of Fundraising Professionals - Austin Chapter

A couple of weeks ago my friend Jim Langley managed to stir up a lot of conversation with his suggestion that the traditional approach to a capital campaign was ill-suited to the times. Jim likened the approach to the 1970 Oldsmobile 442, the legacy of which I discovered, after conferring with my dad, can be a rather controversial topic. Some suggest that the 442 is one of the worst cars on the planet; while others insist that it’s always gotten a bad rap and that, by comparison to other muscle cars, it deserves more credit.

According to Jim’s argument, the 442 was a beautiful thing in its day; however, he insists that any rational person today would consider it overbuilt, highly inefficient, and clunky looking. My dad concurred that the 442 was high maintenance, but remarked that, despite that, it was certainly a fun ride - perhaps all that would be needed to “seal the deal” with particular major donors. He then managed to find a commercial which asked, “Wouldn’t it be nice if you had a 442?”

Jim joins us on the podcast today along with our friend Bruce Flessner to further explore the comparison. Jim and Bruce, go head to head on whether the traditional campaign approach is out of date and in need of a replacement or, as some have said about the 442, is actually under-appreciated and worthy of more credit than its generally given. Both of my guests today have plenty of history with the traditional campaign: before launching his firm, Jim spent several decades carrying out capital campaigns in Higher Ed; and Bruce, who founded and led BWF, has spent most of his career assisting clients in Higher Ed and Healthcare to build successful advancement programs.

Before we began our discussion, I shared with Bruce and Jim, I have been especially grateful for their willingness to engage with me, hearing out my criticisms of contemporary practices and never allowing our differences of opinion to get in the way of our professional camaraderie. What I have discovered about both of them is that, like myself, fundraising has always been more than a job; it’s a vocation and calling that warrants the sort of thoughtful and reflective debate that we enjoyed today.

As always, we are grateful to our friends at CueBack for sponsoring The Fundraising Talent Podcast.

If your organization wants to make sense of raising extraordinary levels of support by way of meaningful relationships and higher expectations, our team at Responsive would welcome the opportunity to help you do that. If you’re interested in learning more, email me and/or our managing partner, Michael Dixon. We will be happy to volunteer an hour to get to know you and to explore with you what a partnership with our team might look like.

As a privileged white guy, these are the types of conversations that keep me on my toes. Today we’re happy to have Noah, a member of our consulting team, co-hosting; which means I have one obligation which fellas like me don’t do very easily - today, my job is to just shut up and listen. Today’s conversation is just a taste of what Noah and Martha will be talking about at #BAMEOnline later this month. Martha and Noah want us to ask ourselves whether our existing tools, those we’re comfortable and familiar with, will allow us to dismantle the injustices many of us are trying to address. In other words, can fundraising professionals let go of their favorite toys?

Martha is the founder of #BAMEOnline - the first conference of it’s kind. Martha describes #BAMEOnline as advancing liberation for all people rather than just those of power and privilege. It is a space where Black and POC who have done incredible fundraising can share the keys to their success. Martha also explains that, in addition to creating and strengthening the community, conference organizers don’t shy away from difficult questions that have easily been overlooked and ignored in our sector. Martha insists that if we don’t do the deep work of asking how and for what purposes our existing tools were designed, we’re doomed to commit the same sins we accuse others of.

The #BAMEOnline conference is July 28th in partnership with our friends at FundraisingEverywhere. This online event isn’t just for POC; it’s for anyone who wants to better understand how to navigate racism, fundraising and philanthropy. Tickets are pay what you can, which means that it is open to all, regardless of your training budget. All profits will be split between organizations led by POC in the UK.

As always, we are especially grateful to our friends at CueBack for sponsoring The Fundraising Talent Podcast. If you’d like to learn more about Responsive Fundraising’s sense-making retreats, email me for more information. If you’d like to learn more about the  conference, visit the #BAMEOnline website here.