How to Shift Your Mindset for Better Fundraising Results

Fostering an Abundant Mindset

As we begin a new year it’s as important a time as ever to evaluate our current mindset. Because fundraising depends on relationships, it is essential that we are aware of ourselves. Over the years, I’ve found the more I understand about myself, the more I can show up across the table from a donor or a Board member, and pay close attention and listen clearly and openly to them.

So, in addition to tactics and strategies, goals and measures of impact, your ability to do your job as a fundraiser requires that you believe you deserve funding, you are worthy of receiving, and anything that gets in the way of believing in the possibility of funding needs to be set aside.

Mindsets and Behavior

In 1988, Dr. Carol Dweck first presented a research-based model to show the impact of mindsets. She showed how different mindsets lead to different patterns of behavior:

• Fixed Mindset 

• Assumes our intelligence and ability are static givens

• Assumes success is the affirmation of our inherent intelligence

• Avoids failure at all costs as a way of maintaining the sense of being smart or skilled

• Growth Mindset 

• Focuses on development and learning

• Thrives on challenge

• Sees failure as a springboard for growth and stretching existing abilities

In the same way, it is important that we as fundraisers understand scarcity and abundance mindsets:

• Scarcity Mindset

• Zero-sum paradigm of life = if someone gets a big piece of the pie, it means less for everyone else

• Sense of worth comes from being compared to others. Someone else’s success, to some degree, means their failure.

• Abundance Mindset

• Deep inner sense of personal worth or security

• Results in the sharing of prestige, recognition, profits and decision-making. It opens possibilities, options, alternatives and creativity.

Your Mindset’s Impact on Fundraising

There are several ways your mindset or unconscious beliefs about money might be affecting your fundraising efforts:

1. Not confident: You approach solicitations without confidence — and therefore overlook asking for a specific amount from a donor — letting the donor determine how much they can or want to give.

2. Get just enough: You have a “just enough” mentality which hinders your organization’s ability to grow, scale and expand.

3. Undervalued: You undervalue the impact you and your organization are making and make lower asks that you need.

4. Inadequate: You feel inadequate around people with a lot of money and undermine your confidence to make an ask.

Shifting Your Mindset

If any of the above sound familiar, you need to work towards shifting your mindset to achieve different results. So, how can you transition from a scarcity mindset to an abundance mindset?

1. Be aware: Become aware of your mindsets, or unconscious beliefs about money, and explore how they might be undermining your efforts.

2. Question: Question your beliefs around money — especially if they are defeating or undermining you.

3. Envision: Intentionally envision or revise your philosophy around money/fundraising towards one of sufficiency and abundance.

4. Plan: Create a Fundraising Plan with these things in mind.

Getting Started

Once you’ve assessed your mindset and made some adjustments toward abundance, it’s time to start planning. A Fundraising Plan is an opportunity to design and co-create with your Team, your Board, your senior Leadership, and even sometimes your Donors. This is a path to get you from where you are to where you want to be.

As you start your plan — or if you are in the midst of planning and feeling stuck or overwhelmed — take some time to assess your inner resources, and find colleagues around you who can help!

If you think I can be helpful, please consider setting up a free consultation call with me.

Time to reassess your fundraising goals?

Identify Your Arc

As a fundraiser, one of the keys to not just surviving — but thriving — each year is to identify an arc to your year’s activity. Once you recognize general patterns in your fundraising activity, you can begin to layer in critical, seasonal rituals (or checkpoints) for assessment, goal-setting, planning, and reflection.

Without these checkpoints, chances are high that you will get swallowed up into your organization’s yearly grind of activity, and eventually experience burnout, a topic well-documented in UnderDeveloped: A National Study of Challenges Facing Nonprofit Fundraising.

Avoid the Endless Cycle of Overwork

1. Implement plentiful self-care rituals

2. Build in seasonal checkpoints for reassessing and resetting fundraising goals

Remember, what feels like an endless chain of fundraising activity is actually more cyclical and seasonal. Build in natural resting points for yourself and your team that align with the seasonal activity.

For instance, October-December feels like an onslaught of fundraising activities — annual appeals, donor events, Board meetings, Annual Reports, social media pushes, etc. But come the middle of January to early February, things feel calmer. This is a great time of year to do personal and organizational intention-setting.

Reflect and Reassess

Tomorrow, June 21, is the Summer Solstice. With it, we are reminded of the longest day of the year. For many of you, it might feel like a never-ending climb to the end of the fiscal year, and a mad dash to hit year-end fundraising targets.

The solstice also represents the moment when the sun literally stops and reverses direction. In the coming weeks, schedule some time to do the same for yourself — stop and reflect.

Take your team out for a celebration of their hard work, honor the effort you made to accomplish your goals, and take a minute to send an “appreciation intention” to yourself, your team, your donors, and your Board. Then, begin to think about some of the ways you need to reverse direction, course correct, or reassess your strategies for the next six months.

Ask the Hard Questions

• What were some of the strategies we put in place over the last year that really worked and why?

• What were some of the activities that produced strong results? Which ones didn’t?

• Where did we miss the mark?

• How can we streamline this coming year’s plans so that our time yields better results?

• Which areas of our fundraising make us feel stuck and ineffective?

Once you have some rough answers, you will be in a much better position to reassess your Annual Fundraising Plan, and how you want to spend your time in the next year.

Find Guidance

As you reassess, and if you are in need of some guidance or planning, please reach out. Consider taking advantage of my speed coaching offer while you have some time to do so…before the hustle of the fall carries you with it.

Simple Tweaks to Improve Fundraising Momentum

Those of us in fundraising know the potentially devastating impact of investing our valuable time in activity that doesn’t yield the desired results. We find ourselves second-guessing decisions and wondering:

Why did I take this meeting?
Why did we host the dinner party?
Why did I attend that networking function?

Focusing on Activity
It’s easy to correlate the volume of activity — the sheer number of meetings we take and asks we make — with building momentum that will generate positive returns. And activity does generate a kind of momentum because we are, in fact, doing something. But when we place too much focus on activity, it’s easy to feel let down when our efforts don’t pan out and we’re left empty-handed.

When we begin to feel disappointed and frustrated that our time is not well spent, we lose critical momentum. This loss can have a negative effect on your fundraising. You might begin to procrastinate or, conversely, launch into hurried activity. Without any meaningful direction, you are setting yourself up for an endless cycle of worry and stress that generally doesn’t produce results.

Generating Positive Momentum
While volume can create momentum, you want to be sure it’s positive momentum, not a negative spiral.

So how can we orient our fundraising efforts and resources so we create momentum that is:

1. Positive

2. Forward-moving

3. Results-driven

We need to combine our volume of activity with another important factor — velocity.

Momentum = Mass x Velocity
If you increase either mass (i.e. volume of activity) or velocity (i.e. speed), the momentum increases. If you increase both mass and velocity, momentum goes up even more.

Momentum = Mass x Velocity
If you increase either mass (i.e. volume of activity) or velocity (i.e. speed), the momentum increases. If you increase both mass and velocity, momentum goes up even more.

The key to generating productive, positive momentum is to maintain a consistent rate of activity while adding velocity.

And velocity is not just speed. It’s speed with direction.

Setting Your Direction
In my work with clients, I have witnessed teams move from stuck and despairing to fast-paced and purposeful within weeks. Much of it has to do with taking your foot off the gas pedal long enough to refocus and set direction, and get everyone aligned on a few key strategies.

It doesn’t take long, and it fundamentally changes the way you approach your fundraising efforts.

Let me know if you think my coaching can be helpful to you, or someone you know. I look forward to hearing from you!

How to Find Your Flow this New Year

This time of year is ideal for reflection and grounding, and for setting intentions for the year ahead.

Finding Clarity
Much of the work around intention-setting is about getting clear on what really matters to you. When we set personal and professional goals that miss the mark, are unrealistic, or are not aligned with our authentic purpose, we struggle to follow through.

One way to get clear on your personal and professional goals, and to set intentions around them, is to identify when you are most “in flow.” Flow means you are in a state of deep immersion in a task where “your whole being is involved and you’re using your skills to the utmost” (Csíkszentmihályi,1990) — a type of intrinsic motivation.

Flow Factors
Positive psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi identifies 10 factors that accompany flow; though not all of these factors need to be present:

1. Clear goals that, while challenging, are still attainable

2. Strong concentration and focused attention

3. The activity is intrinsically rewarding

4. Feelings of serenity; a loss of feelings of self-consciousness

5. Timelessness; a distorted sense of time; feeling so focused on the present that you lose track of time passing

6. Immediate feedback

7. Knowing that the task is doable; a balance between skill level and the challenge presented

8. Feelings of personal control over the situation and the outcome

9. Lack of awareness of physical needs

10. Complete focus on the activity itself

Discovering My Flow
One of the reasons I ventured into consulting and coaching after over a decade of full-time fundraising is that I was able to identify when I felt most in flow. It was when I was sharing best practices with colleagues and in service to people who needed support. And while it took me a while to make a career move in the direction of my “flow” state, the stark realization of when I was in flow and when I wasn’t became harder and harder to ignore.

Why Flow Matters in Fundraising
To be successful at fundraising, you need to:

1. Have a goal

2. Be passionate about your cause

3. Be challenged (all the time)

4. Be asked to stretch beyond your current skill level

It turns out that achieving a flow state involves these four things as well.

And yet, because there are so many daily demands in non-profit fundraising, my guess is that many Directors of Development or CEOs raising money are not able to identify when they are in flow, if they ever feel in flow at all (UnderDeveloped: A National Study of Challenges Facing Nonprofit Fundraising).

It’s critical to identify your flow not only because it will make you more successful at fundraising, but also because it will be the fuel that gets you from here to the finish line and be more efficient with your time.

Find Your Flow
Now is the time to make sure your annual plan is on track with your goals, and identify when you feel in your most “flow” state at work, and where you can adjust the plan accordingly.

My professional intention for 2019 is to help people achieve what they want, with as much ease and flow as possible.

I’d love to hear from you and see if I can help you achieve your goals and spend more time in flow.

Wishing you a very wonderful 2019!

Special Offer: Prepare for your fall fundraising

Happy Fall! I hope you had a rejuvenating summer and were able to pull back a bit from the hectic day to day to reconnect with what feels true, authentic, and purposeful for you.

SETTING YOUR TEAM UP FOR SUCCESS

Fall is the most critical time of year for raising money, and — perhaps even more importantly — sets you and your team up for success for the rest of the year. Positive outcomes are based largely on how effectively you communicate the year’s strategic priorities, how actively you’ve engaged your Board, and how clearly you’ve scoped your fundraising activities and events.

Your organization’s fundraising success depends on 3 key factors:

1. Planning: Do you have specific and measurable strategic goals for the year?

2. Team: Are your fundraising team members clear on their roles and responsibilities?

3. Mindset: Do you feel energized, sustained, healthy, and clear about your priorities — both at work and at home?

If you want to strengthen any — or all — of these three areas, I can help. Set up an appointment today. 

Spring – A Time of New Growth

Ah, it’s spring … the time of new growth!

I know it feels early to think about next year’s fundraising goals and targets, especially when you’ve got another couple months before this fiscal year ends (and many more dollars to raise before you sleep…). 

You might be thinking: Who has time to step back and plan for next year?!? I’ll take care of the Dev Plan in June when I have time to breathe. 

I remember this feeling all too well. 

And I also remember that my best fundraising years were the ones where I kicked off the fiscal year with a really strong Plan. 

These kinds of Plans take T-I-M-E to create. Piece by piece.

You need time to:

• Assess what worked + what didn’t from years previous;

• Gather input from your staff + board;

• Foot your fundraising targets with next year’s budget;

• Align your fundraising targets with actual strategies;

• Identify tactics that can be executed upon, and measured for impact;

• Sprinkle your special sauce + magical ideas so that you will successfully hit your goals!

You need time to:

• Assess what worked + what didn’t from years previous;

• Gather input from your staff + board;

• Foot your fundraising targets with next year’s budget;

• Align your fundraising targets with actual strategies;

• Identify tactics that can be executed upon, and measured for impact;

• Sprinkle your special sauce + magical ideas so that you will successfully hit your goals!

If you use your time right in building the Plan — strategy by strategy–  it will becomes one that guides, and even inspires, you + your team. Your senior leadership. And your Board.

Sure, you could go into the next fiscal year without a plan. Or scrape together a plan that only includes target fundraising goals and a few ideas for how you hope to hit those targets. But that’s not a plan.

Weak plans are worse than no plan at all. They often articulate the monetary goals (i.e. we will raise $350,000), but fail to identify actionable steps towards achieving those goals. Worse, weak annual plans are created in a vacuum without the input and buy-in of key stakeholders. Sound familiar?

Good Fundraising Plans are never perfect documents. They often shift and evolve throughout the year. But they do nail the strategies.

Taking the time to really hone your key strategies:

• Gives you and your team clarity;

• Anchors your fundraising tactics so that they align with your strategies;

• Provides a backstop to measure your ROI throughout your year;

• Drives your activity so that you raise dollars and hit goals!

To help YOU build a Strong Plan — step by step — I’m offering a special Build Your BEST EVER Fundraising Plan class  and would love to have you join it. The class will include four – 90 minute modules, some homework in between, and an hour of coaching 1:1 with me.

• Webinar dates: May 4, May 11, May 18, June 1

• Class time: 10:00-11:30 a.m. PST

• Price: $555 (per organization)

• Hour of coaching can take place at any point during the class + up to one month after

Together we will walk through the elements of creating a Strong Fundraising Plan and tease out the critical inputs you need to get from others between sessions. By our last class, you will have a thoughtful, strategic fundraising roadmap that will guide you throughout your year — one you will be able to share with your Board and senior leadership. More details here.

Space is very limited, so please sign up now if you are interested. More than one person within the same organization can sign up together (no more than 3 people per organization, please).

Wishing you an abundant spring season.

Hit Your Fundraising Goals By Setting Inspired Intentions

For many fundraising professionals, January represents a calm after the hectic autumn months where events, annual appeals, grant deadlines, and year-end giving can overtake you and your teams. October through December can feel like a tidal wave of activity. Sound familiar?

While January may not feel calm, it is the perfect time to reground and refocus on what it’s going to take to achieve your fiscal year end goals. And, since January is also the month where we are energized to set personal intentions and goals for the calendar year, it can be helpful to see where your intentions intersect with your fundraising goals.

Some tips:

1. Create a victory log. Jot down a list of things you are proud of from 2017. These can be personal and professional and can fall into categories like family + friends, finances, fun + recreation, career, relationship, health + wellness, etc. The victory log is a nice jumping off point for thinking about the new year.

2. Drill down on some of the accomplishments you had related to your organization’s fundraising efforts. Did you host a successful event? Have a powerful connection with a new donor? Manage up to your Board effectively? Hire an amazing team member? Produce a rock solid Annual Report?

3. Set intentions for your year. I recommend starting with your own personal and professional intentions — perhaps 1 or 2 in each category. Intention setting can be very powerful because it’s an opportunity to visualize and give power and energy to what you want. The best intentions are also inspiring. They excite you!

4. Finally, drill down on some specific intentions you have for your organization’s fundraising between now and the end of your fiscal year.

Because the annual fundraising cycle can feel like a flurry of year-round activity, it’s easy to get off course only to realize come March that your day-to-day activities are not helping you reach your fundraising target.

Taking the time now to create and visualize some inspiring intentions for you and for your organization’s fundraising is an opportunity for you to catch your breath, align with your purpose, and focus your energy on where you want to be in June.

If you think I can help you or someone you know set intentions, get aligned around your development goals, and bring the magic back into your organization’s fundraising efforts, please reach out.

Wishing you a year filled with inspired action!