What the Fundraising

15 years ago Lynne Twists’ first book - The Soul of Money - completely changed the trajectory of my life, and it became the foundation for much of the work I do today. It is one of my greatest honors to get to interview someone on What the Fundraising who has been so instrumental in changing the course of my life and my relationship with money.

Over the course of her extraordinary 40-year career, Lynne Twist has been recognized as a global visionary whose innovative ideas challenge received wisdom. In addition to co-founding The Pachamama Alliance, she is the founder of the Soul of Money Institute. Today, through her new book, "Living a Committed Life: Finding Freedom and Fulfillment in a Purpose Larger Than Yourself", Lynne is challenging us to reconsider commitment – the role it plays in our work as nonprofit leaders and the power it has to fuel deep, systemic change. 

In this far-reaching conversation, we explore the pillars of commitment and it’s importance to heart-centered fundraising. Lynne explains how she has managed to raise multi-millions over the years, undeterred by rejection: “You make a commitment, and then out of that commitment you hone yourself, or the commitment hones you, into the kind of person you need to be to fulfill it.” 

Lynne radiates a sense of mission and asks us to bring every bit as much intention and intensity to our own efforts to serve. We discuss why she gravitates towards – not away from – suffering; how to avoid burnout by staying connected to our purpose; and what it means when the opposite of scarcity is simply enoughness - sufficiency. Lynne’s empowering vision of commitment calls upon – and empowers – us to become the people we need to be in order to fulfill the epic global moment we are in. 

Get all the resources from today’s episode here. 

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If you haven’t already, please visit our new What the Fundraising community forum. Check it out and join the conversation at this link.

If you’d like to integrate a more integral, heart-centered approach to fundraising then you’ll want to check out this upcoming Soul of Money Institute workshop, Fundraising from the Heart.

A big shout-out to our sponsor Bloomerang for the generous support and fantastic resources like their Diversity, Inclusion & Equity policy template.

Check out my Power Partners Formula and register for a masterclass here. You might also be interested in taking my Fundraising Superpower Quiz.

What might happen if we removed the veil and said that no one was a fundraising expert? I think it might lead to a lot more fundraisers trusting their gut, taking risks, testing, and realizing that their constant learning around fundraising is what matters - not being an ‘expert’. That’s what I’m talking about in this episode of What the fundraising with Tim Kachuriak, Chief Innovation & Optimization Officer at The NextAfter Institute. In the conversation, he highlights the forensic research, applied analysis, and behavioral study that are the basis for the actionable resources and training they offer and share. He’s also explaining why he prefers to see nonprofits flip the funnel paradigm and make it instead into a mountain built on understanding and respecting actual donor experience. “Using data to monitor how the donors respond is one of the ways that we can evolve our understanding of who our donors are, what they care about, and how we can message them more effectively,” says Tim. He offers fascinating thoughts about all the micro-decisions that impact fundraising outcomes and how to keep donors motivated. (Hint: It’s all part of creating a genuinely personal, engaging journey.)

Much of our conversation focuses on building humility and empathy into nonprofit fundraising culture while also emboldening each of us in our mission to do good from a place of abundance rather than scarcity. The NextAfter Institute’s many original, evidence-based resources and data-driven training have been developed specifically to support long-term, sustainable philanthropic relationships. Tim and I explore what it looks like to use AB testing - a powerful tool for quickly culling what’s working versus what isn’t in terms of metrics like email opens and click-throughs. We also consider the important upsides of failing. The episode wraps with a reminder of why those of us in the nonprofit sector remain committed to the work despite the noisy emphasis on sales and acquisition in our consumption-oriented culture. Two words: Meaning and purpose!

Get all the resources from today’s episode here. 

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Connect with Mallory on LinkedIn

If you haven’t already, please visit our new What the Fundraising community forum. Check it out and join the conversation at this link.

If you’re looking to raise more from the right funders, then you’ll want to check out my Power Partners Formula, a step-by-step approach to identifying the optimal partners for your organization. This free masterclass offers a great starting point!

Today’s episode of What the Fundraising is a conversation with Emmie Erickson, my 3-year-old daughter. For months Emmie has been asking me to ‘make a podcast’ and I decided that GivingTuesday would be a great time for Emmie to read you her favorite book - I Am: Book of Reminders by Juana Medina. There are affirmations inside this book that feel particularly important to remind you of this GivingTuesday. Plus, scientific studies demonstrate that we release all sorts of feel-good chemicals when we see or hear something cute — we're wired to positively respond to cuteness. So, I hope this puts a smile on your face and if you need to practice the affirmations captured here, I highly recommend you listen multiple times and repeat after Emmie. Let’s boost those feel-good chemicals to help get you through this GivingTuesday, listen now to meet Emmie. 

You can find today’s episode here. 

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If you haven’t already, please visit our new What the Fundraising community forum. Check it out and join the conversation at this link.

Are you ready to get uncomfortable? Whether in the nonprofit sector or the entrepreneurial startup space, my guest on this episode of What the Fundraising is advocating for a growth mindset that says “okay!” to rejection, makes friends with Imposter Syndrome and just says no to self-critic noise. Estelle Giraud, CEO & Co-Founder of Trellis Health, demonstrates the power of honoring ourselves – even when important funding conversations go south. Pitching a comprehensive health data platform in the hyper-competitive world of venture capital is not for the faint of heart, which is why Estelle has very deliberately chosen to embrace setbacks as nothing more than an opportunity to learn and move on. In other words, it’s nothing personal! For many of us, this isn’t easy to do. But even if the answer is no, we have the right to take up space – without apology. Because remember, as Estelle says, If you’re not getting hit with lots of rejections, you’re probably not aiming high enough!

In this conversation, we explore important self-awareness and growing-edge tools, sharing with you some of the strategies we’ve seen work to create safety and somatic calming. And Estelle is also giving us the gift of vulnerability, sharing how she has weathered disheartening rejection by relying on simple, potent strategies to reconnect with her most grounded self. We talk about the mindset women need to take into the board room, whether on behalf of a nonprofit or a startup venture – one that recognizes the valuable skills and impact we’re offering in exchange for funding. We are not beholden! And we are also not without the resources to cultivate wellness in body, mind and spirit. It starts, says Estelle, with a willingness to be honest with – and present to – each other. “There's benefit to sharing some of that (fundraising) journey and learnings, even if it's not perfectly wrapped up in a little bow and successful,” she says. “There is benefit in sharing a raw process as it happens.”

Get all the resources from today’s episode here. 

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Many thanks to our sponsor, Neon One, the all-in-one donor management system that keeps small and midsized nonprofits on track with fundraising, communications, events, volunteers, and more. You can learn about Neon One's entire suite of products and services here.

If you haven’t already, please visit our new What the Fundraising community forum. Check it out and join the conversation at this link.

If you’re looking to raise more from the right funders, then you’ll want to check out my Power Partners Formula, a step-by-step approach to identifying the optimal partners for your organization. This free masterclass offers a great starting point!

Can you imagine a vibrant social impact marketplace built on outcomes-based data? My guest on this episode of What the Fundraising certainly can – because that’s exactly the platform he and his team at 60 Decibels are building out. CEO & Co-Founder Sasha Dichter explains the why behind creating a foundation for genuine benchmarks and repeatability when it comes to measuring nonprofit results. The goal is to give organizations a window into how their programs are performing relative to peers and to set targets based on meaningful feedback. 

Our conversation touches on the power of partnerships and lessons learned when Sasha moved from the corporate to the nonprofit sector. Far from his initial impression of fundraising as the pursuit of dollars at benefit dinners – somewhat remote and hands-off – he quickly identified the importance of building partnerships based on trust, not transactions. As Director of Business Development and then Chief Innovation Officer at Acumen, a strategic investor in organizations and people fighting poverty, Sasha learned first-hand about the transformational impacts that can occur when a clearly defined mission meets a genuinely engaged funder. He shares his thoughts on how to identify the core DNA of your organization, bring confidence to the table with donors (you have something of equal or greater value to offer) and build sustained relationships through authenticity and honest conversations. “You actually want to have the goal of a conversation (with funders) that involves trust and mutual respect,” says Sasha. “If you don't have that, you can't fake it.” 

At the end of the conversation we get to learn more about 60 Decibels and it is exciting stuff! With more than 1,000 researchers doing qualitative surveys in 77+ countries, 60 Decibels is creating a tech-enabled resource with huge implications both for incrementally improving the quality of what nonprofits deliver and unleashing capital investment based on systematic metrics that funders can get behind. Think of a future landscape in which this data-fueled tool could be used to pair funders and nonprofits whose values align. There is so much in this episode for nonprofit leaders, you don’t want to miss this one!

Get all the resources from today’s episode here. 

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Check out Bloomerang’s fantastic resource:How to Collaborate With Your Community to think through how you can start working smarter, not harder, by aligning yourself with the right partners around the ecosystem. We’re so grateful for their resources and for their support of this episode. 

If you haven’t already, please visit our new What the Fundraising community forum. Check it out and join the conversation at this link.

If you’re looking to raise more from the right funders, then you’ll want to check out my Power Partners Formula, a step-by-step approach to identifying the optimal partners for your organization. This free masterclass offers a great starting point!

You could sit back and relax if only you had a big celebrity attached to your nonprofit, right? Well not quite, as my guest on this episode of What the Fundraising explains. For all her professional skills and the competent staff behind Usher's New Look, President & CEO Careshia Moore still works hard to keep the organization financially healthy, vibrant and strong. Even with the deep, long-term involvement of a major performer like Usher Raymond IV and his mother, Jonetta Patton, no organization is sustainable without multi-level buy-in, sponsorship and community engagement. Fortunately, Careshia and her team are up to the challenge! 

In this episode, you’ll learn about the roots of Usher's New Look’s and how it has transformed the lives of more than 50,000 under-resourced young people in Atlanta and New York. Their remarkable programs develop global leaders by sparking their passion and breaking down barriers to entry – whether it be access to quality education, internships or career opportunities. In our conversation, we also explore what it means to operate from a position of abundance, which is often hard for fundraisers (who feel perpetually beholden). Careshia is all about speaking up, owning the power of what her organization brings to the table and offering donors a chance to contribute in multiple capacities. And speaking of capacity, here’s something important to consider: Overhead shouldn’t be a source of shame, says Careshia. It’s actually an opportunity for funders to get involved in the infrastructure that supports all those programs that make everyone feel so good!

This conversation is full of actionable strategies, operational and budgetary priority recommendations for unpredictable times and new ways to think about ourselves as mission-driven professionals running enterprises that just happen to have a different tax status. 

Get all the resources from today’s episode here. 

Follow along on Instagram 

Connect with Mallory on LinkedIn

Many thanks to our sponsor, Neon One, the all-in-one donor management system that keeps small and midsized nonprofits on track with fundraising, communications, events, volunteers, and more. You can learn about Neon One's entire suite of products and services here.

If you haven’t already, please visit our new What the Fundraising community forum. Check it out and join the conversation at this link.

If you’re looking to raise more from the right funders, then you’ll want to check out my Power Partners Formula, a step-by-step approach to identifying the optimal partners for your organization. This free masterclass offers a great starting point!

In this episode of What The Fundraising, James Citron, Founder and CEO of Pledge, shares his top advice for nonprofits wanting to dream big and launch partnerships with companies. Having founded and/or led the growth of three of the largest mobile messaging and engagement companies in the United States and the world, James took a leap of faith eight years ago when he decided to dedicate his life to helping the world on a bigger scale: by creating Pledge, a fundraising platform powered by the generosity of humans. 

In this conversation, he reveals how he strengthened Pledge’s professional partnerships – expanding with Zoom, Cameo, and even celebrity e-commerce brands. Despite the pandemic having threatened 1/3rd of the nonprofits to go out of business, Pledge helped meet donors and nonprofits where they were so fundraising could happen more seamlessly. From James’ vantage point, the key to nonprofit success – among other things like risk-taking, resilience, faith, and grit – is transparency. When your donors know where their money is going, you strengthen your impact, says James. he also shares his perspective on nonprofit failure, his faith in the goodness of humanity, and his thoughts on enabling people to help others. There is a lot of great advice for nonprofits inside this episode, plus we know you’ll love hearing their exciting 3% annoucement too!  

Get all the resources from today’s episode here. 

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Ready to streamline and modernize your organization’s fundraising strategy? Smash through stumbling blocks with my VIP Day, an intensive one-to-one executive coaching experience. You can also click here to learn how I can work with you to pinpoint problems, develop a clear plan, and create content and design habits to support your nonprofit in achieving its goals.

Here’s a thought: What if we had a platform for nonprofit grant writing like the online Common App that colleges and universities have adopted with such great success? That was similar to the initial inspiration for my guest on this episode of What the Fundraising, Gauri Manglik. Gauri is the CEO and Co-founder of Instrumentl, a platform that brings grant discovery, research, and tracking to one place. With Instrumentl, development staff are more effective and efficient at finding the right grants for their nonprofits and in this episode, she talks about the journey to creating this powerful tool and a lot of lessons and insights she gathered along the way. 

Gauri challenges nonprofits to integrate a more data-driven, tech-inspired orientation, while also offering important advice for startups that aren’t quite there yet. I love that she talks about who is and who ISN’T right for Instrumentl - alignment is everything and it’s clear that Gauri doesn’t just want more organizations on her platform, she wants the right organizations on her platform. We touch on Instrumentl’s functionality, which includes robust prospecting, calendaring, collaboration, and tracking tools. Gauri shares thoughts on building blocks nonprofits want to have in place before focusing on grant writing in a significant way, including establishing baseline traction as an entity and adopting an empowerment mindset. We also talk about why metrics aren’t robust enough in the nonprofit space and how a commitment to leveraging a more data-driven approach can yield payoff in terms of conversion rates, and help identify formulas, and the right levers to pull.

Get all the resources from today’s episode here. 

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Want to raise more from the right funders without hounding them? Mallory’s FREE masterclass offers a great starting point!

Please note: This episode is a part of a very special series called The People Behind the Products. More than ever, nonprofits care about the company behind their technology and service providers. What’s the underlying mission and vision of the company? What do they stand for? And how are they thinking about the sector and serving nonprofits? This series is an opportunity to get to know some of my favorite nonprofit technology companies so that the next time you’re making a tech decision, you can understand a little bit more about the people behind the product. There is no sponsorship or industry money behind the production of this series and the editorial content was at the sole discretion of the What the Fundraising team. 

Want to build trust with donors at first glance? That’s what happens when you have a solid, user-friendly platform like the one my guest, Justin Wheeler, has developed. As he shares in this episode of What the Fundraising, years of field experience are baked into Funraise, a digital ecosystem that streamlines nonprofit messaging and fundraising. Their state-of-the-art tool is designed to help nonprofits acquire donors at scale by tapping all the traditional and new fundraising channels available with amazing results. The more efficiently we fundraise, the more deeply our organizations can focus on the core mission!

You’ll learn all about what Funraise’s platform has to offer, including everything from event ticketing and management to recurring giving, online campaigns, email automation, CRM, automated workflows, data mining, and dashboard/reporting. Justin shares insights from his experience building up multi-million-dollar philanthropic organizations (Invisible Children Uganda and Liberty in North Korea), busts some fundraising myths and reminds us of the importance of maintaining a positive mindset. In wrapping up, Justin reflects on things he knows now that he wishes he knew earlier in his fundraising journey as well as the essence of Funraise’s top priority: Modernizing giving through a powerful platform maintained at a price point accessible to nonprofits with budgets of any size.

EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS:

(00:30) How an "Invisible Children" documentary changed the course of Justin’s life. 

(01:32) Justin’s work with Liberty in North Korea.

(03:02) The myth of fundraising ratios.

(05:20) How to inspire donor trust by ensuring a user-friendly experience.

(08:00) What it looks like to establish digital trust and remove donor doubt.

(09:09) Trends that Funraise is monitoring.

(10:10) Mallory and Justin reflect on the important influence that narratives – positive and negative – have on donor behavior. 

(14:00) Why it’s so important to incorporate clear, repeated “asks” without fear of overstepping. 

(16:26) What Justin wishes he’d known during his early days in the trenches.

(18:00) Funraise’s core mission. 

Get all the resources from today’s episode here. 

Follow along on Instagram 

Connect with Mallory on LinkedIn

Ready to streamline and modernize your organization’s fundraising strategy? Smash through stumbling blocks with my VIP Day, an intensive one-to-one executive coaching experience. You can also click here to learn how I can work with you to pinpoint problems, develop a clear plan, and create content and design habits to support your nonprofit in achieving its goals.

Please note: This episode is a part of a very special series called The People Behind the Products. More than ever, nonprofits care about the company behind their technology and service providers. What’s the underlying mission and vision of the company? What do they stand for? And how are they thinking about the sector and serving nonprofits? This series is an opportunity to get to know some of my favorite nonprofit technology companies so that the next time you’re making a tech decision, you can understand a little bit more about the people behind the product. There is no sponsorship or industry money behind the production of this series and the editorial content was at the sole discretion of the What the Fundraising team. 

SEO. The mention of those three little letters sends many of us in the nonprofit sector scurrying for cover. But spend a little time with my guest on this episode of What the Fundraising and I promise you’ll feel empowered to explore all things Search Engine Optimization! Rafi Norberg, President of Nexus Marketing, walks us through what it means to raise your online profile and shares some great (free!) tools to get even the most tech-phobic among us started.

You’ll be interested in hearing how the world of digital marketing has evolved over the eight years since Rafi founded his company and the ways in which he has pivoted. Riding the tides of change and a human-centric approach, Nexus has kept the work fresh, engaging and organically satisfying. How? By emphasizing a collaborative, relationship-based approach to getting the job done. Whether we’re talking community awareness or donor engagement, Ravi believes that partnerships are foundational to growth. “Being open to more conversations generally leads to different opportunities,” he says. “If you're overly exclusive … it actually makes the process of building your digital brand very difficult.” Ready to raise your online profile and boost your outreach? This episode will give you the digital insights and tools you need to get started on that path!

Get all the resources and timestamps from today’s episode here. 

Follow along on Instagram 

Connect with Mallory on LinkedIn

Have you stopped by our new What the Fundraising community forum? Check it out and join the conversation at this link.

Ready to streamline and modernize your organization’s fundraising strategy? Smash through stumbling blocks with my VIP Day, an intensive one-to-one executive coaching experience. You can also click here to learn how I can work with you to pinpoint problems, develop a clear plan, and create content and design habits to support your nonprofit in achieving its goals.

Please note: This episode is a part of a very special series called The People Behind the Products. More than ever, nonprofits care about the company behind their technology and service providers. What’s the underlying mission and vision of the company? What do they stand for? And how are they thinking about the sector and serving nonprofits? This series is an opportunity to get to know some of my favorite nonprofit technology companies so that the next time you’re making a tech decision, you can understand a little bit more about the people behind the product. There is no sponsorship or industry money behind the production of this series and the editorial content was at the sole discretion of the What the Fundraising team.