Nonprofit Leaders: Is your fundraising team hiding?

Jul 6

Are your fundraising staff or board members hiding from your donors? To answer why it’s important to ask that question you’d have to ask my client, Emma whose $100 donor just gave $50,000.

Yep, you read that right.

That's a 500X gift size.

Back to this concept of hiding. There are lots of reasons we hide…here are examples:

🗨️ “First I’ve got to get my [insert: database, major donor pitch deck, annual appeal, leave-behinds or board] ready and THEN, I can go talk to that donor.”

🗨️ “What would I even say to them? What’s my reason for reaching out?”

🗨️”I don’t have time to go meet everyone in person, so let’s just send an email or letter.”

🗨️ “I hope they don’t ask me about the budget or percentages.”

🗨️ “Yes, we solicit our donors. We make asks at events.”

The next time you’re tempted to hide behind things like this, look at what’s REALLY behind that. Typically it means:
📌 Your team isn't not confident in what they’re sharing or worried they're not doing fundraising or "asks" right.

📌The org has so few prospective, large donors, you need ANY GIFT (thus, defaulting to an email/letter).

📌They’ve got way too much on their plate and couldn’t conceive of having time for 1:1 donor relationships or conversations.

📌Everyone is uncomfortable with asking, so you’ll risk underselling your mission for far less than its impact.

And has there EVER been a time in history when we shouldn’t be underselling impact?

In this example, there’s never been a time where Emma’s organization’s mission has been more important.

The best news for Emma? That is STILL NOT that donor’s best gift. And because she's equipping her team to learn to not hide anymore, the gift can and will grow again.

How about you? When do you feel like hiding vs. showing up?

Whenever you’re ready, here are THREE things you can do next:

👣 Follow me on LinkedIn where I share the same lessons I teach my clients about attracting larger gen-ops dollars so they can scale.

🍎 Read my GUIDE! THE TRUTH ABOUT GIVE/GETS :: Top 5 Reasons Your Board’s Give/Get Is Leaving Thousands (Sometimes Millions) on the Table. See how limiting board members to the Give/Get model keeps your staff from reaching their full fundraising potential. Here to get it.

📈 Work with me to fund your organization’s Strategic Plan and scale your budget by 2 - 5X // If you’re a business-minded CEO already raising MILLIONS but still need more general-operating revenue to invest in growth, you can apply to work with me here.

Sherry Quam Taylor

Sherry Quam Taylor works with growth-minded Nonprofit CEOs who are scaling their organizations but still need larger amounts of general operating support to truly grow. She breaks their teams free from the limitations of transactional fundraising and helps them reimagine their entire approach to revenue generation.

The high-performing leaders Sherry works with want to find and secure more unrestricted revenue from investment-level donors. They simply need more funding to do what’s in their Strategic Plan. To achieve this, she transforms their teams and boards into high-ROI revenue generators - revealing how they can align every hour they spend fundraising with new principles that double and triple donation sizes.

As a result of learning her methodology, Sherry’s clients regularly add 7-figures of gen-ops revenue to their bottom line by learning how to attract investment-level donors that WANT to fund their work. But the biggest transformation they experience is knowing the exact strategy, path, and team that will propel them to generate the 2-10X dollars their strategic plans require.

Sherry attributes the success of her business to her passion for modeling radical confidence to the future CEOs in her house - her two teenage daughters.

https://www.QuamTaylor.com