Tag: professional

Trust the Expertise

Steven Screen  |  Repeat
Build trust.

Want to know what “letting a Fundraiser do their job” looks like?

Here’s a quick story.  I recently caught up with a longtime friend who is a “fundraising lifer” like me.  He shared a story from earlier in his career when he was brought in as a Director of Development with a specific task of growing the organization.

A couple months in, he presented a fundraising campaign to the Executive Director for approval.  The campaign was different than what the organization had done in the past.  And in an example of leadership and trust, the ED said,

“This makes me deeply nervous.  It is approved without any changes.”

It’s hard to express how much I love and admire that response: the ED acknowledged their feelings, then let my friend do the job he was hired to do.

The nonprofit fundraising world could use more leadership like this.  It’s good to acknowledge our feelings, because feelings are real and strong.  And it’s good to let Fundraisers do the jobs they were hired to do and live with the consequences. 

When a boss regularly doesn’t let a Fundraiser try a new tactic or a new message, that boss dooms the nonprofit to underachievement.  The organization never achieves its potential because any Fundraiser with talent and ambition will leave.

Let me put it this way: for a tiny bit of risk (trying something new), the organization has the chance to discover a way to raise more money AND increase the chance that a talented employee will stay. 

And the campaign my friend put together?  It was a remarkable success.  It was the beginning of a four-year run that tripled the revenue of the organization.  That growth would not be possible without the trust and leadership shown by the ED.

In my experience, the upside of that trust and leadership is FAR greater than the downside.

Avoid Looking Too Sleek or Professional

Sarah Lundberg  |  Repeat
Sleek professional.

Before my time at The Better Fundraising Co, I used to be a Director of Marketing and Communications for a nonprofit. But then the nonprofit I was working at needed me to create their fundraising materials from scratch, and I discovered a whole new world of expertise – it challenged the beliefs that my nonprofit and I had for how fundraising worked.

But we started raising a LOT more money. 

Before we learned fundraising best practices, we spent a fair amount of time trying to make our fundraising look sleek and professional.

I remember sending a donor a thank you note and taking the time to print out a label on the printer to make it look more professional.

Little did I realize… a hand scribbled address would have been the better choice.

We were a medium-sized nonprofit and we had the mistaken assumption that we had to have a certain polished “look” to be taken seriously by our donors. For us, this meant highly designed pieces, glossy paper, and yes… many, many printed labels.

Then we learned how powerful it was to be real – to show our donors that there was a human behind each communication. Being authentic and making a connection became more important than looking sleek and professional.

We began to look for opportunities to show donors that a human had touched the communication they were reading.

Things like a scrawled “thank you” on the carrier envelope of a newsletter or a plastic coated paperclip clipping together pieces of a newsletter pack (brilliant idea from John Lepp of Agents of Good!). These tactics showed that a person was behind the mailing, not a brand or a marketing campaign.

Over time, it felt like we were building a friendship with our donors through direct response fundraising, rather than just trying to get a donation.

As with the other best practices we learned along the way, being real and less polished with our donors made our job easier. It felt more like “us.”

Being real and less polished with our donors caused them to trust us more!  And their donations increased because it was clear that a person was asking them to give, not just a brand or an organization.


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