Small Nonprofit: Fundraising Tips, Leadership Strategies, and Community-Centric Solutions for Canadian and American Nonprofits

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RE-RELEASE CURATED BY: Kim Peterson, Cedar Fundraising

I know you have a long list of “to-dos” that never seems to end. I can also guess that on that list, somewhere towards the end (and seemingly never moving) is to create a  Case for Support for your organization. 

Well, today you’re in luck because our podcast guest Leah Eustice is a pro when it comes to writing a Case for Support and she’s going to give you all of her tricks and tips. The best part about it - she shows you how you can write your Case quickly and still make it meaningful.

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RE-RELEASE CURATED BY: Kim Peterson, Cedar Fundraising

In times like this, it’s so important that we stay connected. The same goes for our donors. They want to hear from you about how you and your organization are doing. I know what you are thinking: donors already have a lot on their plate right now. Why would they want to hear from me?

On today’s podcast, David from The Common Good Philanthropy shares a great story about how donors felt so connected to a small nonprofit that they got upset when they were not called to help in a time of crisis. David wants us to think about fundraising as community building, and offers great advice on how to connect with our donors as our authentic selves. Take a listen!

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RE-RELEASE CURATED BY:  Sara Hoshooley, Charity Shift

Small nonprofit organizations face the same fundraising challenges over and over again. They often believe that one fundraising strategy can solve all of their problems and look to large organizations for inspiration. Better marketing, major gift campaigns, corporate sponsorship- they have so many ideas, but most of the time, those solutions are not aligned with what will raise their organization money today and in the near future and grow it into a sustainable program.

Myths that Cindy wants us to walk away from

• A donor meeting is an ask for money. Donor meetings are not an ask for money. It is not a pitch and it's not talking about your organization very much. This is an opportunity for you to get to know your donors, why they support you, what they care about. Maybe they even have feedback around your fundraising or ideas to help you raise more money.
• It’s okay to make assumptions about your donors.  We make so many assumptions about our donors based on our beliefs around fundraising and the value of our work, and almost always we're wrong. And then we use these wrong assumptions to then drive our fundraising strategy and decisions, which leads to us making bad fundraising decisions, which leads to us not raising the money we want to make or raise for the organization. 

Cindy’s thoughts around fundraising 

• Get to know your donors. Most of our fundraising decisions are made by people sitting in a boardroom or around zoom and we make assumptions about our donors. And almost always these assumptions are wrong. We need to stop making assumptions and start verifying information about our supporters. The more information we know the more we can think about fundraising strategies that make sense for their donors and of course for our mission.
• Donor meetings help you find more donors. By getting to know your donors, it will help you see patterns and learn about their values. They have probably shared these values with their friends and networks.  Your donors are one of the biggest untapped resources in finding new donors to your cause so the more you get to know them and build that fundraising strategy in line with them, you're also creating opportunities for them to welcome more people and introduce your organization to more potential donors.
• Communicate with donors. Getting to know your donor is an opportunity to understand how to communicate with them. By leveraging tools and technology, you can find ways to connect more with them. And to be effective, you need to communicate in a way that is aligned with your organization’s mission and what your donors are supporting. This could also be an opportunity to fix some problems with donors who are misaligned with your mission and lead them to learn more about your organization. 

Favourite Quotes from Today’s Episode

“We always get so caught up in elaborate fundraising plans and strategies, and we have to do these big things. It's not fundraising. Success comes from consistency and finding those points of intersection between your organization, its mission, and your donors.”

Resources from this Episode:

Charity Shift is offering customized, End of Year Campaign Strategy packages for charities ready to raise more money than ever before this holiday season. Visit charityshift.ca to download our free tips and to learn more.

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RE-RELEASE CURATED BY:  Sara Hoshooley, Charity Shift

Fundraising is all about mindset. And if you don't believe that, chances are actually that you need to work on your mindset. If you've heard me speak about my fundraising origin story, you’ll know that I have loved fundraising right out of the gate, but I know that that's not the case for everyone. And so today you're going to hear from someone who hated fundraising and learned to love it by focusing on changing the mindset. 

Mallory Erickson, CEO & Creator of the Power Partners Formula, joins us in the podcast to discuss how you can change your mindset about fundraising and raise more money for your nonprofit. 

Myths that Mallory wants us to walk away from:

• Mindset has nothing to do with fundraising.  How we feel and think about fundraising ultimately impacts how we show up and the results that we see. We can overcome the barriers to fundraising success by reframing our mindset and developing new habits.
• Great fundraisers don’t get rejected. Good fundraising is a job that involves regular rejection and it takes a lot of intentional building of resilience to be able to not internalize that rejection or make it about you, or have it relate to your stories about yourself that get in the way and keep you in a paralysis and perfectionist state.

GAIL: four primary types of thoughts that hold you back from successful fundraising

• Gremlin or self-critic is the voice in your head that says  “I am not good enough. I am not smart enough. I am not pretty enough. I am not enough” which plagues all of us. It gets triggered in fundraising because fundraising is a job that involves regular rejections and it takes a lot of work to build up your resilience so that you don't take them personally.
• Assumptions This is the result of our belief that when something has happened before, we believe it's going to happen again. For example, one donor didn't give last year, now we think that they're not going to give this year. But in reality,  the data shows the exact opposite.
• Interpretations are the stories that we make up about someone’s behavior that is not based on facts.  For instance, a donor does not respond to your email in 48 hours, and you make up an entire story about what is happening, how they feel about you, what they think about you, and if they're ever going to donate to your cause. We make these stories and hold on to them as if they were true, but in reality, they are not based on facts. 
• Limiting beliefs are things that society puts on us that restrict our ability to think outside the box. The hundred percent model is a great example of a limiting belief, where we have been trained to think that there’s too much money to overhead. This is simply the limiting belief that we are all continuing to perpetuate, even as fundraisers. However, once you begin to challenge these beliefs, they disappear. 

Resources from this Episode

What the Fundraising Podcast

Power Partners Formula 

The Good Partnership

Charity Shift is offering customized, End of Year Campaign Strategy packages for charities ready to raise more money than ever before this holiday season. Visit charityshift.ca to download our free tips and to learn more.

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RE-RELEASE CURATED BY BRIDGERAISE: https://www.bridgeraise.com/

Anti-oppression, anti-racism, inclusion is an important conversation for our organization and there's so much work to be done around this. This interview with Christina Sackeyfio, Principal of Boldly Inclusive, articulates that space between an articulated inclusion or diversity effort and what you're actually putting into practice.

Tune in to learn how to identify and address oppression, how to create an inclusive culture and how to benchmark your organization's effort on inclusion and diversity so you can track your efforts.

Connect with Heather on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nelsonheather/

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RE-RELEASE CURATED BY BRIDGERAISE: https://www.bridgeraise.com/

We hear all the time about corporate fundraising as an ~easy~ solution to all of our funding needs and we see a lot of organizations not do it quite right. 

Not sure how exactly to get started?  We are joined this week by Heather Nelson, an incredible thought leader in the corporate fundraising space, who shares guidelines for creating that valuable partnership with corporations and businesses. 

In this episode, you’re going to learn:

• How to have the right conversation with the right person at the company or business
• How to build a successful corporate fundraising program
• Advice on building and maintaining your relationship throughout the year
• What your opportunities are in big or small businesses
• The strategies you need to help turn employee engagement into financial support
• Common pitfalls and how to avoid them

Through exploring the relationship nature and the bottom line of corporations, Heather deep dives into what you can do to ensure that your partnership is one that is sustainable and lasts. That win-win partnership starts with a conversation.
 
Visit www.bridgeraise.com/smallnonprofit!

Have a question that didn’t get answered in the episode? Need a cheerleader to help motivate you? Feel free to email Heather directly at [email protected]. We also love her partnership plan which you can find on her website [bridgeraise.com] along with more valuable resources!

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The nonprofit sector has a problem with racism and white supremacy. Well, not just the nonprofit sector - a lot of sectors and really, society in general. But hey - this is a podcast for the nonprofit sector, so we’re going to be focusing on that in today’s episode with Martha Awojobi,  the curator of #BAMEOnline Conference, a series of online events that centers fundraisers of colour, showcases new talent, and gets to the heart of how we can dismantle structural racism in fundraising and in the wider charity sector. Martha is a consultant for non-profits specialising in event curation, recruitment and income generation with an anti-racist lens. 

The truth is that philanthropy has a long history of excluding people of color from their missions and communities—and it's not just about money. It's also about how we think about making change. 

Myths that Martha wants us to walk away from:

• Wealth is a product of individual hard work. The wealth in our sector didn’t come out of “hard work”. There was a history of wealth accumulation based on the  theft of knowledge and on slavery that has built the riches that we see in philanthropy.  
• White supremacy doesn’t exist in our sector. As a sector dedicated to “good work”, it’s hard to see that racism is also perpetuated. This is made worse by the fact that many people just put their head in the sand and don’t engage or want to talk about their privileges and how these systemic issues affect people of colour. We have to acknowledge that it exists and reflect on how we participate to create change. 

Five Stages of Decolonization

• Rediscovery and recovery. Acknowledging racism, colonial practices and harm is hard work. This is all about learning and unlearning and discovering the ugly truth of colonization. We are all products of a white supremacist society and the first step is to recognize it in yourself and really dedicate yourself to learning. 
• Mourning. This is the social process that we are supposed to do together. It involves grief, anger, and sadness. It's not just for people of color, white people have to dehumanize themselves in order to participate in the system of racism. Learning to let go in sadness and anger is part of the process.
• Dreaming. This is about decolonizing the mind to bring in new ideas instead of using the same ideas that have been introduced by colonizers. This is perhaps the hardest stage, but also exciting.
• Commitment. Establishing the intention to manifest your anti-racist vision. 
• Action. Select the steps that you want to take and do what you have to do. 

Favourite Quotes from Today’s Episode

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“The lack of learning and the lack of willingness to learn, that lack of willingness to see yourself as part of the problem and to understand the white supremacist within - it's kind of all the nature of racism and white supremacy. To make it so ugly and so terrifying that people don't want to engage with it. ”

BAME Online Conference 2022

JMB Consulting

Martha Awojobi | Twitter

The Good Partnership

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We love busting myths in this podcast and in this episode, we are diving into more fundraising fallacies and why most of them are actually harmful for our beneficiaries, donors and relationships in our sector. 

Here to share their Five Fallacies of Fundraising are Tanya Rumble and Nicole McVan. These two have been showing up on virtual stages for a while now and I’m so excited to have them on the podcast to share their framework and how it can help organizations and fundraisers.

Tanya and Nicole's Five Fallacies of Fundraising: 

1. Wealth is built by the smartest and most capable people. In fundraising, we often think of white donors pictured with a racialized person or community member who's benefited from the funds that they donated. As fundraisers, we need to acknowledge the structural advantages that allowed donors to build their wealth and debunk the myth that they gained it only based on merit because this narrative creates more harm and deepens inequity in philanthropy. 
2. The donor is always right. The donor-first-at-all-cost mentality essentially gives away all of the power and creates zero or very limited boundaries for the individual fundraiser and for the organization. If we continue to please and follow our donors it will be difficult to feel a sense of control and can have a negative impact on the direction of our program and mission. 
3. Donor centricity should trump everything else. Fundraisers should not subjugate ourselves, keep donors away from work and give away our power. Donors, by and large, don't want to be on this pedestal. Oftentimes it's the charity themselves that creates these recognition grids for donors. This fills the sector with unrealistic expectations from donors and later on drains the resources of the organization for stewardship and donor recognition. 
4. Beneficiaries are deficient and need a donor to save them.  Saviorism is when we center ourselves in the story instead of our beneficiaries. As fundraisers, we need to take an asset-based lens when we talk about our communities and beneficiaries that have identities that have been structurally disadvantaged from time immemorial, and we need to be thoughtful about how we position those. 
5. Resources are scarce, and we must fight each other for funding. Charities and fundraisers are worried about losing donors because our sector is built on a scarcity mindset of there's never enough, and we're constantly having to go out there to earn the money to be able to survive. But the reality is there are tons of folks out there who think about your charity in a different way. 

Favourite Quotes from Today’s Episode

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“We're not fundraising for fundraising's sake. We're fundraising to make a difference. And if we miss an opportunity to connect with the hearts and minds of our donors, to help them understand how they could change the behavior, not just give money, we're missing a massive opportunity to move our missions forward.” - Nicole M.

[email protected]

Nicole McVan | LinkedIn

Tanya Hannah Rumble, CFRE, MFA-P™ | LinkedIn

thegoodpartnership.com

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It's no secret that nonprofit organizations are a bit behind the times when it comes to technology. There are many reasons why nonprofits are slower to adopt new technologies, from a lack of funding and resources to the fact that many of them work on tight budgets, which can make tech seem like an unnecessary expense. Add to that the fact that as humans, we don’t generally like change - adopting new technology at small organizations can feel insurmountable.

In today's episode, I’m talking with Beth Kanter and Allison Fine, authors of the new book “The Smart Nonprofit: Staying Human-Centered in An Automated World” to share with us how we can integrate smart tech into nonprofit work to work more effectively and improve the impact of our work on the sector.

Myths that Beth and Allison  want us to walk away from:

• Smart technology is neutral and infallible.  There are two things that can make smart tech biased. One is the assumptions and biases of the computer programmer who made the tool, and the second is the datasets on which the AI is being built, which it uses to learn and create its patterns. 
• Cost is the main barrier for nonprofits to using smart technology. The number one barrier for nonprofits is not the resources and cost of the tools but the knowledge about what the tech does and how to use it to free up time for staff to work effectively. 

Beth and Allison’s tips on integrating smart tech into nonprofit work 

• Readiness: The first step is really pinpointing the pain point from the end user's point of view. We have to go through radical prioritization of what the pain point is and make it tiny especially if you're a smaller organization.
• Setting: Know what are the tools or the technical partners that we should look for.  The vendors that you select with smart tech have to have values that are aligned with your organization. 
• Mitigation of bias problems:  Be aware of the bias of the tools and try to mitigate the problems that it creates. One way you mitigate is to ask the developers what assumptions were built into it, how it was tested and then you can test it yourself.
• Go: This is where we start to implement. We implement it in really small pilots and set it up, learn as we go, and make it better. 

Favourite Quotes from Today’s Episode

“It's really focusing on this reset, focusing on making the shift to smart tech so you can improve the culture of your organization. And both of them take this intentional work. And our dream is that organizations will embrace this because what we see if they do it again, this time to think time, to breathe a time to really improve the impact of their work on the sector. ” - Beth K. 

“You don't start to solve problems with a tool. You start to solve problems in conversation with a large group of stakeholders.” Allison F. 

The Smart Nonprofit

The Good Partnership

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We've all heard the stereotypes about giving and donors: They're wealthy, they're old, and they're white. But what if those stereotypes are wrong? Perhaps it’s time to rethink what you thought about giving and donors, and start to understand who is actually giving and how you can reach out to in order to raise more money for your nonprofit. 

In today’s episode, we are going to debunk some of the myths that you know about giving and donors with Tim Sarrantonio, Director of Corporate Brand, NeonOne. NeonOne provides nonprofits and social good organizations with unified tools and services they need to help fulfill their mission. The team works hard to help social good organizations raise more money and build sustainable, long-term growth with software, services, and resources. 

Myths that Tim  wants us to walk away from:

• People with higher income are more generously.  Regardless of your income level, most people on average give between 1.5% to 2% of their income. People who earn more are NOT more generous!
• Philanthropy is for white people. The Urban Institute has done some multi-year analyses and the Federal Reserve in the US has done this too, where black families in the United States are more likely to give higher percentages of their annual income to charity versus other demographics.
• Giving makes people uncomfortable. When somebody gives, the brain's dopamine centers activate at a higher rate than either receiving or entering into a more transactional relationship. It’s important to understand that people actually WANT to give. 

Tim’s highlights on individual giving 

• Showing gratitude: When creating a thank you note for your donors or designing an appeal, always focus on the person and not the transaction. You can highlight the generosity of the person instead of the amount of donation they gave. For example, instead of saying thank you for your generous gift - try thank you for being generous.
• When do people give:  Neon One found that Thursday is the day of the week that donors are most likely to give online and during the early afternoon around 11:30. 
• Geographic analysis: Neon One also reports that donors are more likely to give to organizations that serve their local community. Small shops should look into the geography and demographics of the people who live in their community. 

Favourite Quotes from Today’s Episode

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“And the best piece of actionable advice I can give a small shop is when you're designing something like an appeal, for instance, when you're writing your thank you notes or the emails that go out or thinking about when you are talking to somebody, ask yourself, am I looking at the person or am I looking at the transaction?”

“ But ultimately, all people are generous. There are just different ways that they're showing their generosity. ”

Neon One Individual Giving Report 

Neon One Resources 

The Good Partnership

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