Rainmaker Fundraising

Latest Episodes:

Leadership Field Notes with Bobby Lewis at Love Worth Finding Jun 03, 2020

Show notes

Leading well is critical -- especially during the challenging times in which we find ourselves these days. That's why I think my recent conversation with Bobby Lewis, Executive Vice President of Operations at Love Worth Finding is so important.

According to Bobby, great leaders:

Are lifelong learners who focus on adding knowledge and skills regularly
Lead THROUGH others rather than trying to do everything themselves
Invest in mentoring others so that skill-building becomes an ingrained focus across organizations
Develop deep, meaningful relationships with those they mentor, rather than trying to rush the process
Lead through collaboration and consensus-building instead of dictating
Embrace the power of relationships rather than focusing on authority-based leadership
Get close to people -- staff, donors, and clients -- in times of crisis, rather than pulling away
Build trust by investing in people and relationships

There's some real leadership gold in this episode. You don't want to miss it!

Special Offer From Our Episode Sponsor, Velocity Strategy Solutions:

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Responsive Fundraising with Gabe Cooper May 16, 2020

Show notes

Gabe Cooper is CEO at Virtuous Software, Founder of The Modern Nonprofit Fundraiser Podcast, and Author of Responsive Fundraising.
We got together recently to talk about the concept of Responsive Fundraising, and what it means for the future of the nonprofit sector.
What's exciting is that the concept of Responsive Fundraising doesn't require you to throw out everything you're doing and start over completely. You don't have to lose ground in order to improve donor relationships and increase revenue.
Responsive Fundraising is really about applying the hyper-personalization that Americans are accustomed to in their daily life to their charitable giving experience. It's about using data you have at hand (or that you can get your hands on) to develop highly personalized donor experiences that communicate to your donors that you value them, you know them, and you are committed to providing them with a meaningful experience every time they interact with your organization.
Here are Gabe's key points about Responsive Fundraising:

It's less about tactics and technology and more about shifting your mindset.

The success of Responsive Fundraising requires that you Listen (i.e., collecting more and better data, and understanding how it influences donor behavior), Connect (i.e., how can you use simple marketing automation to deliver relevant messages to your constituents at the exact time they are most likely to want it and engage with it?), and Adjust (i.e., creating a feedback loop so that you are modifying your organizational engagement approach based on what you see and hear from your donors as you deliver them this new experience).

Responsive Fundraising doesn't require to stop mass fundraising activities like direct mail, email, and telemarketing. Instead, it gives you a framework for making those interactions more meaningful (and more valuable) to the donor.

You don't have to burn your entire program down and start from scratch. You can start small, with just two or three key elements. Once you prove out the value in small ways, use that success to increase the scale of Responsive Fundraising in your charity.

Embracing and deploying a Responsive Fundraising philosophy and strategy in your organization doesn't require you to upend everything you're doing and change staff. It does, however, require that everyone be aligned around the goal, and willing to learn and change the way they've worked in the past.

Change of any kind -- but especially change like this -- requires a willingness to take risk and embrace failure in the service of creating something better for those you serve.

As Gabe shared, ultimately results matter. Organizations that have adopted this Responsive Fundraising approach are improving their retention rates by as much as 15%, and are also moving the needle on average gift by as much as 10-15%.
You can download your own copy of the Responsive Fundraising Blueprint here.

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Framework Leadership with Dr. Kent Ingle May 13, 2020

Show notes

Visionary leaders don't succeed with just great ideas. They succeed because they've built a framework that inspires others and provides their teams with the necessary tools to perform."

I was recently blessed to have a fascinating conversation with Dr. Kent Ingle. In this fast-paced conversation, Dr. Ingle delivered huge leadership wisdom and value -- and I think you'll get a lot from this conversation.

Dr. Ingle is President of Southeastern University in Lakeland, FL. He's also author of multiple books including Framework Leadership, 9 Disciplines of Enduring Leadership, This Adventure Called Life, and The Modern Guide to College. He also hosts The Framework Leadership Podcast.

Here are just six of the key takeaways from our conversation:

1. Focus on being self-aware and self-disciplined. Self-awareness allows you to understand who you are, your gifts, your passions, your abilities and experiences. And always knowing that helps you to understand the opportunities before you.

2. If you want to succeed as a leader, you need to build habits of discipline. Whether they be physical, emotional, educational, spiritual, or other, your ability to be disciplined in your own life will greatly impact your ability to lead others.

3. People long for value and significance. As a leader, your responsibility is to help people understand their value and significance in the world.

4. Leadership is all about your relational connectivity and how you interact and influence and have impact.

5. One of the most difficult and challenging things for any organization is to be excellent at systems thinking where you see the big picture, understand how the individual parts really interconnect to each other to accomplish the big picture. Especially at times of change, if you aren't growing your systems at the same speed of your overall growth, you're probably going to hit some plateaus.

6. To be successful as a leader, when leadership requires you to build a map to a place you've never been before, you need a framework. A successful framework for leadership requires four key elements:

Listening - You must constantly listen to all stakeholders and constituencies.
Contextualize - After you've listened to all involved, make sure that you've appropriately contextualized the situation so you fully understand what the issue really is.
Audit - Continue to audit your perceived understanding of the issue. When you think you've listened, and you think you understand the context, keep clarifying until you have certainty that there's shared unde...

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Avoid These Grant Seeking Mistakes, with Coral Dill May 03, 2020

Show notes

Coral Dill is the Founder and Principal at Grant Writer Etc., and a contributing author to the 2019 #1 Best Seller, 101 Biggest Mistakes Nonprofits Make And How You Can Avoid Them. Coral is an expert grant writer and regularly helps nonprofits of all shapes and sizes become "grant ready", and has helped those organizations raise millions of dollars over the last decade.

In this episode Coral talks with us about some of the biggest grant seeking mistakes and how to avoid them. According to Coral, the biggest mistakes she sees are:

Starting with grants: So many organizations - especially start-up nonprofits - assume that the fastest way to significant funding is through grants. But the reality is that most funders want to see a track record of success and fiscal health outside of grants before they'd be willing to consider a funding request.
Sending unsolicited funding requests: Grant seeking my be functionally different from individual donor fundraising, but there's one major similarity. They're both deeply relationship-based. In the same way that you wouldn't think of calling an individual donor you'd never met before and making an ask on the spot, don't make that mistake with grant funders either.
Assuming that everyone wants to fund you: Grant funders have specific focuses of their philanthropy. If your approach to grant seeking is to "spray and pray", you could end up sending a million grant requests and get the same result as if you'd sent none at all. Instead, invest the time to research, find funders that are aligned with your mission, and engage them deeply -- that's where you'll find success.
Making poor revenue assumptions: This isn't unique to grant seeking, but it's critical to avoid. The mistake here is assuming that you're going to get funded by every funder or that they'll fund you at 100% of your request. It's rare that any organization gets funded at 100% by 100% of the funders they solicit. Make sure you're not executing spending plans based on poor assumptions like this.
Not being prepared to manage the grant: Most organizations are prepared to accept the funds associated with a grant. But as Coral explains, often organizations are ill-prepared to handing the various stipulations, reporting requirements, and other aspects of actually fulfilling on the grant terms. If you're not prepared for those, you're not ready to solicit the grant yet.

This conversation is full of great insights and context around the biggest grant seeking mistakes that organizations make, and what you can do to make sure your nonprofit doesn't make these same mistakes.

You can download the full show notes here.