Exploring fundraising (week of November 25, 2024)
This month I'm dabbling with creating retrospectives that share what I've been learning and doing to explore fundraising careers each week. They will be quick and unpolished.
The week in a sentence:
I got some encouraging early feedback from peers about my potential fit for fundraising roles, I think because of my experience with donors, my fit for building solid relationships, and my interest in gratitude for connection.
Wins and actions:
Note: I typically don't gender people in these notes, mainly to anonymize conversations I didn't ask for permission to publish publicly.
- I had a virtual chat with B., someone with both fundraising and grantmaking experience in the animal movement. I was struck by their passion and conviction. We discussed varying levels of team-wide collaboration on fundraising. At organization A, the whole team would band together to get a grant proposal over the finish line. At organization B, the feeling was a bit more like "that's your job, we don't have capacity to assist." I think this came up because I'd mentioned the idea of a fundraising ethos at an organization: a recognition (and willingness) of everyone on the team to feel some responsibility for fundraising. I think building this ethos is important but it easier said than done. I also think it can't just be built by itself, that it requires the organization to have a solid mission and vision and to have staff that are genuinely excited by them. Another interesting thing I learned from this chat was that there are organizations for whom the development team is mainly responsible for institutional giving, and the communications team is more responsible for individual giving. We also talked about how lots of organizations struggle to create good grant applications, and how this person's transparency and frankness helps them build trust with a wide range of donors.
- I had a catch-up chat with a friend in the EA movement who doesn't directly work in the animal space. They'd been searching for a full-time job for almost two years and in the meantime had held a variety of high-responsibility contract positions. It can take a long time to find a good gig! We talked about gratitude and connection, which are topics that I find typically bring up nice stories and examples. They'd been involved in organizing a recent conference, and it sounds like they put special effort this year into creating an individualized note of gratitude to each speaker, which included data about the speaker's impact, via data on attendee and talk engagement collected during the conference. In Nonviolent Communication, one learns that it's important to be specific when giving gratitude, mentioning exactly what the person did to contribute to anothers' wellbeing.
- I wrote my first post in a very long time about animals: 73 Cows.
- In terms of what motivates people to make donations, I heard two different sources with considerable experience give the same pithy advice: People give to a person they trust to reliably turn money into impact.
Struggles:
- I was given the feedback that because of my experience with RC Forward, and therefore all of my experience working with donors, that I had a strong donor network that would be attractive for organizations considering hiring me. I had to navigate some self-critical narratives after receiving that feedback, because I don't consider myself to have a strong donor network. I briefly thought, after that, that I "should" have one. More realistically, it's unsurprising that I don't currently have active relationships with many donors I met through RC Forward, despite my interactions with them being a highly enjoyable part of the job. RC Forward had a culture of mores facilitating connecting donors with the projects they were already excited to support. It was quite uncommon, at least when I was there, to actively help a donor decide where to give. (Though we were happy to do that as well when asked.)
New-to-me resources from this week:
- There's a theme running through all the content I find engaging right now: the importance of building an organization that has strong fundamentals, so that strong relationships and fundraising can arise. Kevin Brown's fundraising schick is in-line with this: to fundraise, be fundable and findable. This means, he says, "Being fundable and findable is your brand. Your brand consists of your theory of change, strategic plan, positioning strategy, and marketing communications. And your brand — not just more fundraising — can fix your fundraising."
- On How I Learned To Love Shrimp, Joyce Tischler talked about 45 years of animal advocacy, with some moving stories. One was about working to save feral donkeys in the Mojave desert in California. Donkeys that had been left behind from colonizing times past were now ambling nomad burros. There is a military base in the Mojave with an airstrip. To stop the ambling burros from posing a risk to landing aircraft, military personnel would shoot them. Joyce ended up working quite collaboratively with the military base to come up with alternative solutions and understand each other's positions. When it came time to settle on a way forward, it sounded like there was teamwork and a relatively amicable solution found. I'm always inspired, frankly moved to tears, when I come across stories of people choosing to find common ground across difference.