737: How to Fundraise for Leaders Who Never Wanted to Fundraise, with Alice Ferris

Dave Stachowiak [00:00:00]:
Fundraising is not a word that sparks joy for most leaders. In fact, many people who do fundraising never planned it to be part of their career. And yet, almost every leader has an aspect of fundraising in their professional or personal lives. In this episode, how to get better at it. This is Coaching for Leaders, episode 737. Production Credit: Produced by Innovate Learning, maximizing human potential.

Dave Stachowiak [00:00:32]:
Greetings to you from Orange County, California. This is Coaching for Leaders and I’m your host, Dave Stachowiak. Leaders aren’t born, they’re made. And this weekly show helps you discover leadership wisdom through insightful conversations. One of the challenges that many of us have in our organizations, either because it’s part of our job or because or we work for a nonprofit or we know folks who have this as part of their role, is fundraising. How do we be able to provide the resources for organization to do good work in the world? It’s one of those things most of us never went to school for, but we all have an eye to it in some way. Today, a conversation on how do we do a better job at this thing that so many of us never got any training at. I am so pleased to welcome Alice Ferris to the show.

Dave Stachowiak [00:01:23]:
She is the founding partner of Goalbusters, a firm working to help small and mighty fundraising teams achieve big impact by planning practical strategies, teaching essential fundraising skills, and doing the hands on work to turn vision into reality. She has more than 30 years of professional fundraising experience specializing in strategic and development planning, campaign readiness and development, program assessments, board and organizational training, executive leadership coaching, individual giving and grant proposal evaluation. She’s also a graduate of our academy. Alice, so glad to have you on the show.

Alice Ferris [00:02:02]:
Thank you, Dave. It’s a pleasure. I’m looking forward to this conversation.

Dave Stachowiak [00:02:06]:
Me too. And before we get into this conversation, we of course are going to talk a lot about fundraising and how to get better at it, both as a leader, as an organization. I know there’s folks listening who hear this topic fundraising and they think like, well, my organization doesn’t fundraise, I don’t work for a nonprofit. Why should we all care about this topic? What is it that’s important for all of us as leaders?

Alice Ferris [00:02:35]:
Well, I think you may have missed out on one other reason why someone may not want to listen to this conversation, which is, oh, I hate fundraising. I don’t want to do that. If somebody asks me to fundraise, I don’t want to do it. And I think inevitably everyone in their professional career or even just in their life ends up doing some kind of fundraising. You think back to your childhood, you think back to school. You probably had to do some kind of fundraiser for some cause when you were in school. Or if you are a parent or even a grandparent, you are probably supporting someone, a young person who is also having to do fundraising for school. You may be involved in volunteer activities where you need to do fundraising, or as you mentioned, you may actually be a professional in the field who needs to do this.

Alice Ferris [00:03:21]:
And I will admit, even those people like myself who have a lengthy history in fundraising, we have those moments too, of the oh, I so do not want to do this. And what I like to do is talk about fundraising, to try to demystify it for people who will inevitably have to do it, but also to make it something that is a little less scary. It is not as hard as you think it is. And you can potentially translate some of the relationship development pieces to other parts of your life.

Dave Stachowiak [00:03:53]:
You’ve already changed my mind a little bit just in this few minutes we’ve been talking. Because prior to us starting this conversation, if you had asked me like, okay, have you ever been majorly involved in fundraising in any way, I would have said no. Like, that’s not been my professional path. And I certainly know people who have done that. And then I got to thinking about it. I’ve served on a board of a nonprofit and I’ve helped folks to do things. And I’m actually involved in raising money for an organization right now. But like, running a virtual marathon.

Dave Stachowiak [00:04:25]:
And I got to thinking about it just in the last like minute or two of like, okay, just in the last year. No, I’m not, I’m not doing that professionally, but I’m involved either personally or supporting others or supporting other organizations and fundraising. And it’s just, it’s like, it speaks to the point you made, which is, even if this isn’t your role, even if it isn’t what you’ve been trained for, knowing what works and what doesn’t in the space is so critical.

Alice Ferris [00:04:53]:
Yeah. And I think also what often happens is that people who come to fundraising as a volunteer, we frequently, those of us who are fundraising professionals, just to let you in on a little bit of a secret, we frequently will use the phrase well intentioned volunteer. And part of that is because fundraising is not just about the ask. And that’s what most people focus on. Even those people who are new to the profession frequently will say it’s about the ask. And in reality, the ask is the Smallest percentage of the process. So that idea of the, hey, would you donate to this virtual marathon? There’s a whole bunch of stuff that leads up to that actual ask. And what sometimes happens with volunteers who are involved in fundraising is that because they’re not aware of the full process, they will jump right to that and frequently either minimize the amount of investment that they potentially can secure, or they’ll just mess up the ask altogether because they’re essentially asking for the gift too soon.

Dave Stachowiak [00:05:56]:
Yeah. And one of the things you’ve taught me is that 90 to 95% of fundraising is not actually the ask. It’s not doing the close, as we might say. Right. It’s the things leading up to and after that. And what are those things? For those who’ve never stopped to really think about that, what is that, 90 to 95?

Alice Ferris [00:06:17]:
This is something that I had the privilege of learning really early in my career. And I will credit Don Gray, who at the time was the vice president of advancement for the Wisconsin School of Business. He’s long since retired. He’s still around teaching in Wisconsin, but he taught me an easy way to understand how fundraising works. And. And he explained it as, it’s like dating. It’s all about relationship development. So the first element of fundraising is essentially having a pool of potential prospects, a pool of potential donors.

Alice Ferris [00:06:53]:
And so if you do this dating analogy, it’s essentially, here’s the pool of all the people that you could date. Okay, great, we’re starting there. But what you don’t do is walk up to every single person in a room and say, will you go out with me? You need to winnow it down to qualified prospects. And so that may be that you have a type, it may be that you have moral filters, but it is the narrowing it down to the qualified prospects makes that pool much smaller. These are the people who are more likely to essentially be into you, but you can look at that person across the room all day long, and you are not getting that date unless you introduce yourself. And so that’s when you get into the, hey, we need to make some kind of initial contact. This person needs to be aware of our cause. They need to be aware of our organization, and they also need to care, because if they don’t care about your cause, then they’re not going to get more involved.

Alice Ferris [00:07:53]:
So at that point, they may exit out of this process. And so it may be that person that you walk up to to introduce yourself, and they’re like, oh, hi, yeah. And then they walk away. Don’t go chasing after them, there’s plenty of other fish in the sea, so to speak. So then once you make that initial contact and you make that connection and this person is interested in your cause, then you can start developing the relationship. And in the fundraising process, we call this cultivation. This is the getting to know each other phase. Now, one of the things that can be challenging in the get to know you phase is that we tend to talk a lot about ourselves.

Alice Ferris [00:08:28]:
But what we want to do in that cultivation stage and that relationship development stage is have a conversation, have it be much more of a two way dialogue. And that can be one to many, that can be one to one. It doesn’t matter the size of the gift or the level of the relationship. You need to get to know the potential donor as well as them getting to know you. And then you can finally get to the ask. But then when you get to the ask, it may be you don’t ask for the right thing. And this is why people freak out, oh my gosh, someone’s going to reject me. But in reality, back to the dating analogy, most people, if you ask them out, they don’t say, oh my gosh, you have seriously misjudged this relationship.

Alice Ferris [00:09:08]:
I can’t believe you asked me for that. You’re a terrible person. Never talk to me again.

Dave Stachowiak [00:09:12]:
Thankfully.

Alice Ferris [00:09:13]:
Thankfully, more often than not, it’s the, oh, I’m sorry, I’m busy on Saturday. So maybe it’s the wrong timing or hey, I already saw that movie. Maybe it’s the wrong thing or maybe it’s the, hey, I’ve only known you for a couple weeks. I think it’s too soon to be your date to your sister’s wedding. Maybe it’s too big of an ask. So then it’s not that you’ve been rejected outright, it’s that you just need to adjust the ask. And so you may have to go back to the asking questions and then ask again and then go back to asking questions and ask again. And it may happen multiple times before you get to the right thing.

Alice Ferris [00:09:46]:
But then once you get to the right thing, then you have to do the stewardship piece, which is the actually showing up for the date and doing what you said you were going to do. Because then you go through this relationship development cycle over and over and over. And as you’ve already heard, the ask is the smallest portion of it. The rest of it is mostly get to know you show up for the date and make sure you’re identifying the right people.

Dave Stachowiak [00:10:08]:
And I want to ask you more about this in a bit, because one of the things I’m hearing there is, okay, yes, of course there’s an aspart, but there’s a lot of other work to be done in fundraising outside of that. And like, different people can be involved in different stages with different strengths of this, which I’d love to get into. Before we do, though, I want to, like, tackle some of the other things you’ve taught me as far as just some of the myths, some of the gotchas that come up in this. And one of the things that you’ve highlighted for me is that a mistake generally that a lot of organizations make is how they set goals around fundraising, and that the fundraising goal just becomes whatever dollar amount is needed to make up whatever the budget shortfall is. What is it? That is a mistake about thinking about it that way?

Alice Ferris [00:10:59]:
I think one of the things that we do a lot in the charitable sector is that we set goals that aren’t necessarily achievable and that, as you can probably imagine, becomes demoralizing for the people who are doing the fundraising. And so to your point, what we often do in the fundraising sector, in the nonprofit sector, is that we say, here’s all the things we want to do and here’s how much it’s going to cost and here’s the revenue we know is coming in and then here’s what’s left over. So chief fundraiser, whether that’s a team, an individual, a volunteer, this is your responsibility to come up with that gap. And if you don’t come up with that gap, we’re kind of hosed. That is a lot of pressure to put on your fundraising team. What that often will lead to is, well, not often, but occasionally will lead to an organization or a fundraising program taking shortcuts of the how can we get the fastest money in the door? And in reality, there will always be situations where you have to do that. I’m a realist. There will always be situations where you just need to get money in the door.

Alice Ferris [00:12:09]:
But if you are looking at a robust fundraising program, what you want to do is you want to be able to build longer term relationships so that you have a consistent base of revenue. So what is a better way to look at the fundraising budgeting process is to be much more collaborative and to have the organization itself, regardless of size, determine, here are the things that are mission critical. This is why we exist. This is the core of our being. How much money do we actually need to do to do that? How much money do we need to raise or to have on hand to do that core mission. And that’s what I like to call the must do budget. If you are already hitting that, fantastic. And then there’s the next tier up, which is the.

Alice Ferris [00:12:57]:
Here’s the revenue that we need to come in to do the things that we’re doing now. So this is the steady state budget. If there’s a gap there, then that ends up being a much more reasonable fundraising goal of the, okay, here’s how much we need to bring in to keep things the way they are, because clearly you’ve already been doing this, so that’s a good thing. Then what the next tier is is that how do we grow, how do we increase our impact? How do we address issues that are coming up in our communities that we haven’t been able to address before that becomes the aspirational budget? And then that’s where you can get a little bit stretchy, so to speak, with your goal. If there’s things that you can do that are new or innovative or will expand services, then you can still set that as a fundraising goal, but it gives you a tiered approach to this so that you can have levels of success as you go through the process.

Dave Stachowiak [00:13:50]:
And part of thinking about those different lenses of budget, too, is also thinking about the other side of this, which is expenses. And I know one of the things that you run into and see people do is they’ll increase their fundraising targets, but then they’re also not thinking about the expenses that go along with that. Where do folks get in trouble there?

Alice Ferris [00:14:13]:
One of the things that we are notoriously bad at in the nonprofit sector is doing more with less. And the number of times that nonprofit organizations will say, hey, we can add that additional service, we can add that additional program, and we’re not going to actually add staff is probably the biggest pitfall that I see in charitable organizations. You want to make impact. And that’s one of the things that I will always be very proud of in terms of our sector, is that we’re built for purpose. We are an impact sector. We’re not about making profit. But what that often leads to is that we have people who work in the nonprofit sector who have really big hearts and want to help everybody and want to continually serve more people, but they try to layer it on top of the existing staff and not build that resource. So I think the biggest challenge on the expense side is not investing in people.

Alice Ferris [00:15:15]:
This is something that’s been going on for decades in the nonprofit sector. And I think right now we’re seeing a huge challenge in that because we have a lot of vacancies in fundraising in particular, and we have a lot of things that are going on in the nonprofit sector where we’re having difficulty recruiting qualified people. This is a leadership crisis that has been years in the making, but it’s starting to come to a head as baby boomers start to retire and as other people get into the sector. We really need to think about how are we investing in the people in the nonprofit sector, especially in fundraising.

Dave Stachowiak [00:15:54]:
Well, and speaking of people, one of the other challenges, and I know you run into this a lot because people will reach out to your firm and say, hey, can’t you just raise the money for us? Like, why do we need to have, like, a person or bring on staff? And all the things you just mentioned, what is it that makes that not work?

Alice Ferris [00:16:15]:
Well, back to the relationship development. As much as I would like to say that it would totally work to hire a consultant or a contractor to come in and lead your fundraising program, and just truth be told, I have done that before. So I have been an, and still am, a fractional employee leading a fundraising program with one of our clients. The challenge with that is that one of the fundamental adages of fundraising is that people give to people, and they want to know that you have a genuine connection with the cause and with the organization. And so sometimes when you try to hire someone outside of your organization who’s not really connected to your cause, it becomes much more difficult to develop those relationships. Now, again, full disclosure, I have done this and in fact, for one of our clients, a public radio station, kawc, in Yuma, Arizona, I have been their outsourced development director for close to 20 years. But what that means is I’ve had an opportunity to develop those relationships, even though I’m very clear with and very transparent with the donor, that I’m not a staff person and I don’t live there. But over time, we’ve been able to develop those relationships connected to the mission of the organization, and that’s a good thing.

Alice Ferris [00:17:31]:
But in general, when you’re trying to outsource these things, you miss out on that personal connection, and that’s really what gets people to continue to support a cause.

Dave Stachowiak [00:17:42]:
This all comes back to relationships in so many ways, doesn’t it?

Alice Ferris [00:17:46]:
Absolutely.

Dave Stachowiak [00:17:47]:
Which is a good lead into how do we do better? And we’re talking during a time. I mean, you mentioned so many of the demographic shifts that have been happening anyway, and also just the Politics, economics. The realities of this time is that there’s been a lot of changes in, like, what grants look like revenue in the last few months especially. And it’s a hard time. And one of the things that I know you’ve been advocating for is communication. Like, donors want to help. Communication is key, isn’t it?

Alice Ferris [00:18:27]:
And I think that this is a time when nonprofit organizations are dealing with a lot of uncertainty and chaos. So there is a couple of different camps on this. There are a couple camps on this. One of them is the, oh, we can’t show our donors that we have weaknesses because then they will not support us. And then there’s another camp, which is the, no, we have to be completely transparent and tell our donors everything. And I would say I lean more towards that side of the spectrum. And it is a spectrum. It’s not an either or.

Alice Ferris [00:19:04]:
And part of the analogy I’ve been using lately with the organizations that I work with is that when you think about you personally, if you got an unexpected and scary health diagnosis, would you keep it to yourself? And there are those people who would say, yeah, I would absolutely keep it to myself. But then I would push on them a little bit. Say, would you tell your immediate family? And there will still be those people say, no, I wouldn’t tell them either. But most people, I think, would respond, if I had a difficult health diagnosis, yes, of course I would tell my immediate family and I would potentially tell my inner circle. Even if I don’t know what the outcome’s going to be, it might be the, I’m talking to a doctor and we’re developing a treatment plan. I don’t know how this is going to work. I don’t know what the outcome’s going to be. But I wanted to let you know that this is going on and I would appreciate your support.

Alice Ferris [00:20:01]:
That’s the similar conversation that I think nonprofit organizations in crisis need to have with their donors, because their donors are that inner circle. They are family to many of them. They have that feeling of, no, you are my cause, and I really want to connect with you. And so if you don’t say anything about it and they hear about stuff going on, they’re like, hey, what’s going on over there? And then they’re relying on the rumor mill, essentially. But if you communicate transparently with your donor as an organization, then they know what’s going on from you, and they can have that perspective. And even if you don’t have something for them to help with right now, they have the window to say, okay, at least I know what’s going on and I’m ready to help when you need it. So I am really encouraging people to have those transparent conversations. You don’t have to tell them every little tiny detail, but at least let them know that, hey, something’s going on, we’re aware of it, we’re embarking on a treatment plan, for lack of a better phrase, and we would like your support when the time is right.

Dave Stachowiak [00:21:08]:
Thinking about that and how so much of being a healthy leader and a healthy human being is asking for help, and also knowing part of majority is asking for help and knowing that sometimes people might say no. And that’s just the reality of life. And as I think back to organizations that Bonnie and I have supported over the years, and when someone has reached out with something like that, like, okay, we’ve run into this headwind, or there’s been this huge funding change, I think almost 100% time, like, we’ve been glad to know sometimes we’ve responded and helped personally or in some way, sometimes we haven’t. But I think, like almost always I’m like, wow, great. Like, good to know. Because if we did want to respond or help or support or something, then we have the opportunity to do that. And like so much of work, of leadership in general is like teaching people how to help us, how to help our teams, our organizations, because people do care and they do want to help. And especially in this space, as you said, so much of this is about heart and the support we give to organizations, especially those who already raise their hands and have that donor relationship.

Alice Ferris [00:22:17]:
And I think that when you think about the causes that you really, really love, you want them to succeed and you also want other people to know about it. So one of the things that’s great about communicating with your donor and maintaining that conversation with them is that they will share it. They will be amplifying your message. So in many respects, what we’re looking for when we are talking to a potential donor is we not only want to get the financial gift, and the financial gift, of course, is incredibly valuable to any nonprofit organization, big or small, but we also want to get the advocacy piece of the if you feel passionately enough to not only voluntarily give your hard earned money to this organization, but then you also feel passionate enough about it to talk to other people about it, that is incredibly good. Which is why I think back to your original question of why should people care about fundraising who are not necessarily in fundraising? You may already be in fundraising because if you have a cause that you really care about, and you’re telling people, this is amazing. Guess what? You’re part of the fundraising process.

Dave Stachowiak [00:23:28]:
You’re part of the fundraising process. Yeah, well, and that’s actually a good lead into. One of the other things that I know you teach leaders in thinking about this is that from a professional standpoint of like, getting better at fundraising, bringing that resource into your organization, that it’s really helpful to have someone who’s dedicated to execute that work versus what it sounds like happens a lot, which is like, fundraising just gets added to the list of someone’s responsibilities. Tell me more about that distinction.

Alice Ferris [00:23:59]:
Well, fundraising inevitably gets assigned to somebody else, especially as an organization starts. Because when you’re looking at making an impact in the world, most people get into the nonprofit sector because they want to do that piece. They want to make an impact. So they want to be in the service delivery portion or they want to be in the creating the programs that are going to help people. What they don’t necessarily think about is, how are you going to pay for that? So it ends up being, oh, yes, I want to do this really impactful thing for my community. I want to rescue that puppy. I want to be able to help that child get an education. I want to make sure that person has access to healthcare.

Alice Ferris [00:24:43]:
And then when they get into the nitty gritty, it’s like, oh, I don’t have any money to do this. I will go find some money. And so typically, people who are in the program space, the execution space, will end up adding fundraising to their duties. As the organization evolves, it becomes very easy because people are program focused to add additional program people. But what they sometimes forget to do is how do you add the people who are going to back up and provide that support to make the impact possible? I like to think about the fundraising function as I’m facilitating the ability for that person to execute. I don’t necessarily need to be the person who is delivering the service, but I’m still involved in the service delivery because I’m generating the revenue to be able to make that happen. So when I think about the overall staffing of this, you really need to have someone who has their eye on that ball, because if it is left to adding it to all sorts of other people’s responsibilities, you can either develop conflict where people are competing for resources, or you can develop a situation where people are so focused on other things that they just drop the ball on the fundraising piece. And as we’ve already talked about, it’s a relationship development process.

Alice Ferris [00:26:04]:
And if you drop the ball on a relationship, they’ll give you grace a couple times. But if you don’t pick it back up and be more consistent with it, at some point, you’re going to chase the donor away. And that’s one of the other statistics that has been really consistent in the fundraising sector for many, many years now, because one of the volunteer projects that I’m involved with is the Fundraising Effectiveness Project, which is a collaboration with the association of Fundraising Professionals and Giving Tuesday. And we’ve been measuring the statistics on donor retention in the US for over a decade. And the overall donor retention for the sector is about 42 to 43%. So if you have 100 donors, 43 of them will stay with you to the second year, but the rest of them go away. And I think a lot of that is the. We don’t have someone who’s keeping an eye on that relationship.

Alice Ferris [00:26:57]:
So if you’re being ignored, you decide, okay, well, maybe this organization doesn’t need me. And so you leave.

Dave Stachowiak [00:27:04]:
Yeah. Which again, reinforces the point of having someone who’s dedicated to this, especially when you get to a certain size, is really important because it’s so easy to drop the ball if it’s just like, okay, I’ve got this amongst all the other programmatic stuff that I have to be doing, because we’ve just kind of added it to everyone’s list. And that actually brings me back to what we were talking about earlier is a lot of times we think about fundraising as just the ask. It’s just asking for whatever donation, and we don’t think about the full spectrum of everything else involved. And you have articulated the different roles that can be part of this. And there’s three connector, expert, and closer that different people may play. Could you share a bit about that?

Alice Ferris [00:27:50]:
Absolutely. So this is taken from two sources. One is Malcolm Gladwell’s the Tipping Point. And in that book, he talks about. In one chapter, he talks about how to essentially create a social epidemic, and he talks about fashion trends and various other things in that chapter. But his words for this are connector, maven, and salesperson. Now, what we’ve done in our teachings in the nonprofit sector is that we’ve changed maven to expert because we’ve learned that west of the Mississippi, not a lot of people know what maven is. And then salesperson just felt a little bit too commercial, so we changed it closer.

Alice Ferris [00:28:32]:
But the fundamental concepts in this are that the connector is the person that is as it kind of alludes to is connected to everybody. They have an incredibly strong network of people. And the thing about the connector is that what they bring to the equation is that they build trust based on the fact that you know them and love them because you have those people in your network where it’s the okay, if I need to be connected to so and so I’m going to call Dave and see if Dave knows that person. And then you would say, oh, of course I know that person. Let me introduce you. Those are the types of people that really are important in that first part of the fundraising cycle. The making sure that we are identifying qualified prospects and making sure that we have someone to make that initial contact, because that initial contact is incredibly important. Because if we don’t have an ability to make that initial contact and open the door to a relationship, we can’t start the rest of the fundraising cycle.

Alice Ferris [00:29:32]:
So the connectors are really important for that building trust because they already have the relationship. The expert brings to the equation. Building trust because they know a lot about the service or the impact or the product. So for instance, if you have someone who, like a friend of mine who has a lot of expertise on audio equipment, if I’m going to buy something, something new, I am going to call Kevin and say, hey, Kevin, what should I buy? And he’s going to give me a ridiculous number of recommendations. And I will pick amongst those things, inevitably, because I know that he knows this so well, so I trust him because he has a high level of expertise. This can also be, in the case of nonprofit organizations, someone who provides a testimonial. Actually, in the commercial sector as well, it can be someone who provides a testimonial or review. This is the person who says, hey, I personally have used this and I think it’s awesome.

Alice Ferris [00:30:33]:
So that’s bringing trust to the equation because it’s a real person who doesn’t get paid to say something on behalf of the product or service or organization, but has that strong passion for it. The expert is involved in the cultivation stage, but also can be involved in the stewardship phase as well. And then the closer is the person who actually makes the ask. This is the person who says, will you consider a gift of. But the way that they bring trust to the equation is that they call back and make connections to whatever the connector and expert have said. So it’s not just this. I mean, to be crass, if you’ve ever been in a timeshare sales situation where they’re being all nice and then they say, hey, I’m going to bring in the sales manager. And you’re like, uh, oh, yeah, we don’t want it to be that.

Alice Ferris [00:31:21]:
We don’t want it to be someone who just comes in and says, I’m here for the close. So the closer is actually involved in the entire process and has to have the ability to essentially connect the dots. So you can imagine that the closer is involved in that actual ask phase, but the closers also involved in the cultivation and stewardship phase.

Dave Stachowiak [00:31:43]:
And I’m thinking about this too, also from the lens of you have volunteers who are ready and willing to help, oftentimes in a nonprofit organization and may not be the kind of folks who would be the closers, and may feel like they couldn’t do that or be involved in that and maybe shouldn’t even be, but yet might be the experts, might be the connectors, might be able to play a role in different ways. I mean, just thinking about the different lenses, again, coming back to that 90 to 95%, there’s a lot of work to be done that’s outside of just the ask itself.

Alice Ferris [00:32:15]:
And I think actually most volunteers would be better suited in the connector and expert roles, because I have been in situations where a volunteer will essentially mess up and ask, because again, either they’re asking too soon or they’re asking for too much or too little, and maybe they come across as being incredibly nervous, because they might actually be very nervous, and it ends up not being all that effective. So the way that I recommend most organizations work at this point is that you have volunteer engagement in the connector and expert roles. And predominantly the closer role is filled by a staff person. It could also be that you have a board member or two that happen to be really good at it, and so absolutely use a volunteer in the ask a role. But the way that the fundraising sector has been professionalized, really, we’re relying on staff leadership to do the actual ask, and we’re looking for volunteer support to be in the other parts of the cycle.

Dave Stachowiak [00:33:21]:
Alice, as you know, we have many folks across all industry in our listening community and a number of leaders in the nonprofit sector. And I am sure there are some folks listening who have heard what we’ve just talked about and are thinking, okay, there’s a lot I could do, or at least a couple starting points of getting better at this. And you have been extraordinarily generous to share with me in advance that if someone would like to reach out in the nonprofit sector and have a conversation with you and just set up a time to talk for a few minutes and get some high level help or at least a starting point on where to begin that you’d be happy to do that and if folks would like to do that. By the way, thank you so much for making that offer. If folks would like to do that, what’s the best way for them to get in touch?

Alice Ferris [00:34:06]:
Absolutely. It’s my pleasure. Please connect with me on LinkedIn, it’s AliceFerris and send me a message and we can set up a 20 to 30 minute call complimentary to talk about some of your challenges and hopefully we can find a way to maybe provide some quick solutions.

Dave Stachowiak [00:34:23]:
Alice Ferris is the founding partner of Goalbusters. Alice, thank you so much for your work and all the work of your team.

Alice Ferris [00:34:31]:
Thank you. This has been a pleasure.

Dave Stachowiak [00:34:39]:
If this conversation was helpful to you, three related episodes I’d recommend one of them is episode 299, how to lead Top Top Line Growth. Tim Sanders was my guest on that episode. We talked about the bigger picture of sales and top line growth, which of course fundraising is a component of. And we talked about some of the things that have shifted. And one of the big shifts that Tim has noticed in his work and research, and you heard it echoed today from Alice too, is not thinking about fundraising or sales more broadly as a one person lone wolf operation. It is a team effort that has been a huge shift in sales and marketing in recent years. And in episode 299 Tim talks about the importance of thinking about and working as a team whenever trying to lead top line growth. Again.

Dave Stachowiak [00:35:23]:
Episode 299 for that also recommended episode 662, how an executive Aligns with a Board. Joan Garry was my guest on that episode. Joan is perhaps the leading voice in nonprofit leadership and how leaders can do a better job as executive directors and leaders in nonprofits. And in that conversation we looked at how to work effectively with a board. One of the most key relationships in any nonprofit organization is the relationship between the executive director, the senior leadership team, and the board of directors. In episode 662, Joan and I talked about that dynamic and how that is so critical at the of the success for the organization. Episode 662 for that and then finally I’d recommend episode 664, the reason people Make Buying Decisions. Marcus Collins was my guest on that episode and he made the point in that conversation that many leaders assume people love their brand, but it’s not really about the brand, it’s how people view themselves.

Dave Stachowiak [00:36:26]:
And he invited us to think about the people we’re serving as congregations and such a critical mindset shift for us if we’re really wanting to get engagement and support people in making the decisions that will support them. And of course our organizations too. Lovely conversation. A great compliment to what we heard today from Alice episode 664 for that. All of those episodes you can find of course on the coaching4leaders.com website and I’m inviting you today, if you haven’t done it before, to set up your free membership@coaching4leaders.com A few reasons for doing that. One is it’ll give you access to the entire library, searchable by topic. You can access the whole library and all the apps, but you can’t search by topic. So we’ve made it as easy as possible to find what you’re looking for.

Dave Stachowiak [00:37:12]:
We have a whole section in the library on finance and budgets. We have a whole nother section on sales and selling. We have another section on marketing aspects of this. Of that all of course in today’s conversation and many other conversations over the years since 2011, you can find it all there inside the library. Plus, when you sign up for your free membership, you’re going to get a message from me. One message a week, usually toward the end of the week, with a summary of the conversation. The summary coming from today’s conversation with Alice, all the recommended episodes I just mentioned, also all the links and resources, things that I found for you during the week that I think will be helpful to you, and also a few reminders of some of the key points from past conversations too. All of that is part of the free membership.

Dave Stachowiak [00:37:56]:
There’s much more. You can find out all about it just by going over to coachingforleaders.com and just about every single morning I start off the day with a 5 or 10 minute call with my friend Scott Barlow from Happen to youo Career. We have been accountability buddies and of course friends for many years. We get on the phone with each other, we talk about what we’re going to be doing that day, how to help each other stay accountable. And of course we learn a lot about each other’s work and our organization. And one of the things that Scott has taught me over the years is a lot about career transition, what people do and don’t do during career transition because of course him and his team are focused on that. So effectively he was on the show recently. And if you are in the process of thinking about a career transition right now, or as Scott often tells me, the folks that they work with often are folks who are have had great success in their careers and they’re just feeling a bit stagnant in their current role and they don’t see the opportunity right now to continue to grow where they are today and they’re looking for something new.

Dave Stachowiak [00:39:02]:
Scott and his team might be able to be helpful to you as an official partner of Coaching for Leaders. If that’s you right now. Find out more about how his team might support you or any of our other expert partners of Coaching for Leaders by going over to coachingforleaders.com/partners. That is the place to begin the conversation again. Coachingforleaders.com/partners coaching for leaders is edited by Andrew Kroeger. Production support is provided by Sierra Priest. Next Monday, I’m glad to welcome Faisal Hoque to the show. We are going to be talking about how to partner better with AI.

Dave Stachowiak [00:39:40]:
Join me for that conversation with him. Have a great week and see you back on Monday.