I was first taught MD fundraising 14 years ago. I remember it well, the conference room space at the top of the NSPCC building on Curtain Road in East London. My eyes popping out of my skull. Prospecting. Researching. Cultivating. Ask. Steward. Solicitation Cycles. Portfolios. I remember the terminology blowing me over. Fast forward 14 years and I have been teaching these same principles for over 10 years. Over the last three years I have had an increasingly niggling sensation that teaching from the best practice of the past means that we are tied to the potential of the past. Imagine if scientists, engineers, designers and more only worked from the information of the past instead of the vision they had for the future. We might still be looking up at the stars instead of down from them and we might still be sailing months across the seas to visit loved ones instead of connecting with them in an instant. The techniques, the language, the assumptions, written and unwritten rules have built my fundraising success and those who I have worked with but we have been hearing the creaking of our old practices for several years and haven’t fully responded. More than that the world seems to be crying out for the services of our organisations and major gift fundraising is surely one of the most powerful ways to make an impact. To do this we need to pause for a moment and consider where we are starting from. If you will allow me I’d like to refer to the fundraising techniques, the language or words that we use, the ways of working, the written and unwritten rules, the assumptions and rationalisations we use as the ‘Technology' of Major Gift fundraising. It is the knowledge that we use for practical purposes. And take a look at some of them. The 9-4-1 rule, 18 months to gift rule, the cultivation cycle of identify, research, plan, engage, ask, thank, steward. The concepts of portfolios and prospects, the assumptions that Trustees should give and be a part of fundraising to have success, the concept that major gift fundraising is difficult or that you need established connections or to be an organisation with a big brand, or the supporter needs to have a connection to your cause. The list goes on. You know the assumptions, judgements, rules and unwritten rules. What is the impact for major donor fundraising if we continue to play by these rules? I’m just not sure we have the time to play by all of them if we are going to have the impact we want to have. I’m not suggesting that we don’t use the old technology where it is helpful. Gravity is an old rule that still proves valid and helpful today, but some technology is naturally superseded or becomes obsolete. Fundraisers like Tony Gaston at EMMS International who joined me for the session at the conference are breaking these rules all the time and it is so exciting. Tony shared how he started major donor fundraising from scratch in a little known organisation as someone without any contacts. He has doubled his income year after year to be generating nearly £1m in 5 years. He is showing everyday how you don’t need to be a big organisation to bring in big funding and you can be the face of important relationships as ‘just a fundraiser’. And his secret? He doesn’t accept the industry standards and norms. I’m now working with an organisation that has never professionally fundraised before. They are definitely not comfortable with it and the usual major donor stuff just won’t work so we have had to build from scratch. That started with fundraising language. I can’t talk about ‘prospect meetings’ or ‘fundraising’ because the team look like they want to head for the hills, so we talk about ‘conversations’ and ‘inviting people to join us’. I refuse to use time limitations such as 18months for gifts coming in and will never mention ratios for conversion of cold possible supporters. That is a limiting mindset I don’t want anyone in the team to relate to (let alone the language!). We also use mindfulness practice at the beginning of all conversations about fundraising to reduce fear levels, get past our cynicism and open up new opportunities. This is the technology that is necessary in this organisation to achieve success so I want to use it. I’m not ready to throw out all the old tools - there are staples I’m definitely still using, but I am worried that we work from the best practice of the past at the peril of ignoring what we can learn from the future that is emerging in front of us. Surely this is how we will work from where we want to go, not where we have been. I’m going to be having the conversation about the future of Major Donor fundraising a lot over the next few months, I’d love to hear your thoughts - please share!

Three years ago when I uncovered the work of Tania Singer, a professor working at the Max Planck Institute in Germany, I had an almost out of body experience. Tania's work was looking to see the impact of training the brain with mindfulness techniques. Her results, proven by MRI scans and the rigour of neuroscience has shown incredible results. The outcome for participants? Greater attention to detail, better perspective taking and empathy, increased grey matter (yes you even get smarter!) and lower levels of cortisol under pressure (yes, less stress people!). When I think about the techniques that set the most exceptional fundraisers and managers I know apart from the rest, so much of it is rooted in a mindset that is calm, really really able to understand supporters, able to fully appreciate their perspectives and empathise with the emotions that they have. This is why next year will see me increasing my use of mindfulness practice for my coachees and in my training and consulting. The results are just too hard to ignore. Have you ever explored mindfulness? My first attempts using a popular app resulted in a rather disastrous affair over 5 years ago and I promptly gave up, but Tania's research has prompted me to put my money where my mouth is and really commit. 20 minutes a day (sometimes on the tube looking like a melting wax work out of Madame Tussauds) has now become one of my favourite moments during the day. The thing I'm loving the most is the impact of slowly becoming the observer of my thoughts rather than being those thoughts. This is the distinction that has begun a rather exciting journey because if you are not what you think, and you are not governed by that inner narrative, then the possibilities become so big. Inner narrative not just for you but for all those you work with can often bring judgement, cynicism, fear. Anything sound familiar? Think about what potential supporters say when you talk about your organisation. What internal staff say when you try to get things done. What the voice in your head says throughout the working day! So taking command of this and being able to relate to those around you with a really open mind and with empathy and with excitement about what you are making happen is a rather lovely antidote. If you are keen to explore how mindfulness could impact your work or your team, get in touch with me for a chat. In the meantime, why not give that 10 minutes of closing your eyes and focusing on your breath just one more go... BLOG UPDATE: If you are keen to find out how all of this mindfulness works in practice join me on the 20th March 2019 for a morning session where we will apply mindfulness to preparing for supporter meetings. Bonus, we will be in the most unusual and inspiring of places - a bedouin tent in the middle of London City. Book your place now!

I remember feeling guilty, like I had been caught snooping around someone’s house. I was one week into my first job as a fundraiser when I was handed my first piece of research on prospective donors and supporters I had yet to meet. So now I had an idea of how much they might give, how I might contact them, what interests they might have, what charities they might like to give to, what commitments might keep them from giving. It was overwhelming and I was not happy about it. A lot of you will have heard me refer to that moment as the time I felt like a professional stalker. In the years since that first encounter with prospect research and data I have learnt about how valuable it can be. When I’ve had good (legal!) information I have wasted less time (my own and that of potential donors), made more people delighted to be giving to charity, and raised more faster. In short I’ve been a far better fundraiser for playing by the rule of understand your donors better, raise more. And of course, it’s not just my observations that attest to this. To name one, Macmillan have raised an extra £5m from understanding their Coffee Morning supporters better and researchers Alan Andreasen and Philip Kotler have well documented the impact that a target audience mindset can have on fundraising. Their experiences show that if you know your audience well enough then you know what will get them to take action and how you can give them a benefit for interacting with you. Win win. So if there is so much to be gained from knowing your supporters better, what on earth is the information that could ruin your relationship? Here it comes... All of it. That’s right, every last morsel. No, I don’t mean to contradict myself, great research can lead to great fundraising, but here is the ‘but’. It CAN lead to great fundraising only if as fundraisers we don’t forget that no one can be brought to life on two sides of A4, particularly not when it comes to something as personal as giving to charity. This rings particularly true for fundraisers working with major donors, companies, trusts and legacy givers, where there is often a personal relationship established. I have watched so many of my coachees start out emotionally and rationally stuck behind hypotheses about what donors ‘might’ or ‘could’ do. “I don’t think they would want me to bother them at work”, “I don’t think this is the kind of project they would want to fund”, “I don’t think this is the kind of charity they would want to support”. “They aren’t going to want to take a call from a fundraiser”. I could go on. Any of them sound familiar? And here lies the danger. We end up making assumptions about people based on relatively limited data. In the last week alone, I have had two coachees jumping up and down about the positive responses they got when they just picked up the phone to get to know someone. They stopped making assumptions and they used their research to guide their contact with potential supporters, but not dictate it. And there is a big difference! Using research as a guide gives you hints, tips, suggestions. Using research to dictate your approach fills fundraisers with assumptions and anxiety, and in my experience a lot of excuses about why they shouldn’t reach out. The best of the best extend an invitation to people and get to know them, properly know them. So here are my top tips on how to build glowing relationships with prospects and supporters: Take hints about approaching and working with your supporters from good quality prospect research. Never ever make assumptions about what a prospect or donor is really thinking or going through. Give people the chance to say yes or no, don’t make that decision for them. Spend more time working up how you talk about your charity. We fail to engage people because of the language we use and the way we deliver it. Building better relationships is entirely within your grasp no matter how experienced you are, what causes you work for or where you are based. No excuses. Get to grips with good research and take action, listen to the response and keep making changes until your results are speaking for themselves. Like any of these tips? Share the love and help fundraising everywhere.

Are we ignoring the reality of mental health in fundraising?

We are beginning to redefine fundraising. We are redefining it to truly fit the purpose of serving a supporter experience. Fundraising was about raising money from people and organisations to serve our causes. It is shifting to become a gift in itself. Research from Philanthropic Psychologist Professor Jen Shang and Social Neuroscientist, Tania Singer both point towards the positive personal benefits of giving. Happier, healthier individuals thanks to compassion and altruism. So fundraising needs to become increasingly less about the money and so much more about the experience of giving that fundraisers can offer their audiences. To be in a place to facilitate gift giving and all the benefits it has to offer, fundraisers need to be able to listen and understand supporters better than ever before. They need to be able to hear what supporters don’t feel comfortable disclosing, what social norms keep them from saying.

It is a familiar story. You get a third of the way into your year and take a look at the plan that you and colleagues spent weeks pouring over last year, only to conclude that if it floated off out of the window it would likely have little bearing on what you raised for your organisation. I've heard great fundraisers denounce gift tables, cash flow projections, pipelines, declaring them pointless. I can't really argue with that reality. By the time you are in the swing of your year the unforeseeable is happening and the agile fundraiser is making the most of new opportunities, weaving them in amongst the skeleton of the original plan. So why bother if it is all going to go to pot anyway? The answer to that for me lies in how we define planning. If we call a plan 'what we are going to do', then it is likely to be the most frustrating document created. But if we call it, 'How I know I can handle what is expected of me', then the purpose changes. It goes from a blueprint to a toolkit. It has detail of what could be delivered to meet goals, but it should also ensure the right resources are available to meet unexpected circumstances. And importantly, because the planning process (if done properly) ensures that the goals are completely realistic and that breeds a confident fundraiser which, let's face it, is usually one of the least common species of fundraiser out there! So planning for me is non negotiable, it has to happen because I want my fundraisers to be confident. That confidence comes when they can see that the goal for the year is aligned with what they can deliver through their activity. And that activity in turn is aligned with the resources, skills and processes that they have to hand. When these come together there is a satisfaction akin to solving an equation. Thankfully, to achieve this we don't need Matt Damon's Good Will Hunting mind. I have a simple presentation technique that I'm creatively calling a '4 Tiered Planning Model' which has been a helpful starting point for teams. Here is a simple overview of it:

When you drive in first, second, third, fourth or fifth gear, the speed and power of the car is completely different. The fuel consumption is completely different, the sound is completely different. The ‘feeling’ is completely different. When you are responsible for fundraising, you might be quite conscious of which gear you are working in. Lower gears burning through resources as you establish your momentum, higher gears seeing much better efficiency and speed towards your goals. I’m not going to lie, this analogy is proving to be better than I initially anticipated. So what has driving in neutral got to do with it? This means standing still, surely? Well, you are right it is precisely that moment of pause that I want to check you are taking. Pausing in neutral means deciding what route and performance is going to get you to your goal safely and on time. But more than that, neutrality is important in the sense that you try to remain unbiased in your decisions. Travel a particular fundraising road regularly and it becomes your natural choice out of habit, even though it may not be your best one. Marketing academics refer to this same principle in deciding media planning as ‘media neutral’ and they know just how important it is. It means that if you are clear on the outcome you are looking for and on the messages you want to convey, then you should remain neutral about which types of media will work best for you and choose a mix or blend that best suits that campaign. I wonder how much of a gear shift we could have if we borrowed the concept for fundraising? If instead of investing in the fundraising techniques and activities that we did last year, we stopped to ask which are the ones that would best suit our ambitions and needs this year, could we achieve more than we thought possible Over the years dozens upon dozens of fundraisers have said to me,” I don’t think we should still be doing this event”, or “I’m trying to engage people who just don’t seem interested” or “this type of fundraising just isn’t working for us”. Now diagnosing why in all of these areas is essential, but we also have to stop to evaluate whether we should be doing them at all. The essence of great fundraising is about achieving as much as possible with as little as possible. To get there we have to be brave enough to try new avenues, take risk and shift investments around. Some fundraising planning neutrality could be just the thing to make sure you aren’t headed in reverse. If you’re curious on how this played out at the NSPCC then take a look at the paper published in the International Journal of Nonprofit Voluntary Sector Marketing, by Angus Jenkinson, Branko Sain and Kevin Bishop called Optimising communications for charity brand management.

You thought it was the nearby bin that hadn’t been emptied or the kitchen after lunch. But no, it was much much closer. It was coming from your desk, from your note pad or even your computer...the stench of the stale to do list. Festering lines of text about something that should have been done days, weeks, yuck...months ago? Has it got to the point where it is too hard to look? Where a peek at the list brings on a bout of nausea and thoughts of quitting your job, escaping to an island paradise where no one knows your name and your to do list can’t find you? If you are answering yes to any of the above then a) I love your sense of drama and b) maybe I can share some insights from my recent coaching that will act as a fresh meadow breeze to your fundraising and release you from a life of to do list odour. One. Let’s stop calling it a ‘to do’ list and make it a ‘do list’. No wonder we never get round to that list, we have declared it something that belongs to the future, never to be united with our present day. Don’t let bending time come between you and action satisfaction, change the title and busy away. Thank you Rob Woods for that moment of clarity! Two. Climbing a mountain is daunting, climbing a molehill is...bish bash bosh...done in seconds. Have a quick look to see how many times you have said things like “Prepare report for donor x”, “Write fundraising plan”, “Start financial report”, “Sort out prospect research”, “Prepare for meeting with X”. Now, these are all perfectly entitled to pop up on your Do List, but they are examples of actions that need a lot to pull them off and you know it. These giant actions can set up home on your list. Stop to think, what are all the components of this action and list these out on your Do List instead. Small molehills feel so much more achievable and give you ten times the number of actions to tick off. Now that’s what I call satisfying. Three. Don’t know where to start? Try ranking your actions out of 10 in terms of the impact of not getting them done. Some will come out as fairly big with a 5-7 rating, others with a much higher 8-10 and well...you know where to start. And for those low numbers...don’t be afraid of challenging whether they should really be on your list at all. Four. Quit complaining about not having enough time to do everything. I can almost hear the groan of ‘Are you kidding me?!’ resounding from fundraisers everywhere. But, no, I’m deadly serious. Here’s how I see it. If you work efficiently, strategically and with passion, then you do everything that you can do. If you don’t work efficiently or strategically or without passion then you can make changes. Identify these changes, make them happen and you will be doing everything you can. And if you are doing everything you can and there is still a list of things to do, then that list doesn’t belong to you, it belongs to someone else. Fundraising takes resource, don’t burn out talent make the case for investment! Five. I speak to a lot of fundraisers who tell me how hard it is to focus on long term planning actions and yet they are always chasing their tails. The only way to stop this happening is by taking one action each day that will make a difference to the future, not just tomorrow. First pull out all of those long term actions and look at how you are going to make them happen in bite size pieces (see tip 2!). Then spread them out over your daily actions. And don’t try to kid yourself that they aren’t as important as what ‘needs’ to be done today. See point 3! If you want to become a superhuman fundraiser then your long term goals and aspirations are just as important. Like any of these tips? Share the love and help fundraising everywhere.

Studying the impact of our professional language on organisations for the last five years has been a fascinating glimpse at the havoc that words can play on teams. We borrow words from sectors we don’t like being associated with like the Sales industry (think prospect, pipeline, target). We look to abbreviate complex ideas with catch all words that leave us having little individuality (think support, empower, advocate). And we use words without interrogating what they really mean, or even more importantly, what they should mean to our individual organisations. Think stewardship. You’ve probably heard of it. You might even say, 'we do it’. You might even be able to say, ‘stewardship is more than just a thank you for supporters, it is a supporter experience’. If you have got to that stage, I take my hat off to you. For so long we have buried this crucial part of the fundraising cycle at the very end of the steps we take. The last thing we have trained ourselves to think about is the bit that comes after the ‘ask’. The afterthought. We are so preoccupied about how to ask for the donations and bring them in that we haven’t even run a course on the 'thank you' at the IoF until now. 'Crazy!' I hear myself shout. We are diving into the 2018/19 financial year on the back of a wave of socio-cultural change agents and an appetite and motivation to crack on and actually make some significant changes to the way in which we fundraise. The international development scandals have proved to be the latest tough reminder of how dangerous it is to be complacent of scrutiny and just how much damage it can have on supporter trust and ultimately the survival of our projects. Now we need to say that the definition of stewardship is donor experience, but we need to prod and provoke as much discussion about this as possible as The Commission on the Donor Experience is doing. Without this discussion we don’t craft a shared meaning for this word. We don’t craft a meaning that is admired and inspiring. We don’t help fundraisers to explore what this term means in their organisations. What it cannot continue to be is a set of reminders to send thank you messages. It cannot be a typical charity event to invite people to. It cannot be a series of emails with spin and a snippet of what the reality is. It needs to be a review of how the organisation listens to and responds in bold new ways to what supporters want, not what works for the organisation. In August I’m bringing together a group of fundraisers to explore in real terms what supporter experience means in their organisations. Tangible stuff. No fluff, no jargon, no assumed meaning. We are going to lift stewardship as a term right off its place at the end of the solicitation cycle and reframe it around the entire cycle. An all-encompassing bubble of experience. We are going to start designs that challenge the ways in which we work and showcase those bravely making the leap. We are going to give these fundraisers the confidence to make the commitment to supporters in exactly the same way they make commitments to their beneficiaries. Why am I hosting this session? Because I found myself reflecting in a keynote speech in March about my fears that nothing, not even GDPR would ultimately make a huge difference to how we fundraise. So this is my first commitment to the sector that as a faculty member I will teach how to build trust, not just business as usual. If you want to be a part of this and push your organisation’s thinking with the next curve then join me on 1st August in London . Post first published on The Institute of Fundraising site 8 May 2018