Episode 276: Shooters Keep Shooting: How to Overcome that Fundraising Drought
I can't thank you enough for taking a few minutes of your day to join me. Randall, on this issue of around with Randall. Depending on when you're listening to this, and it's more likely from a timing perspective and what I'm going to compare it to that it's more my time. But I love the NCAA basketball tournament, and this year we had a great joy in over the year watching Nebraska, which has never won a game in the NCAA tournament, do very, very well and better than we can ever imagine.
So and they have one player on their team and his name is Price Sanford. And none of this connects to philanthropy quite yet. But what he is a is a shooter. He is amazing. And what today's conversation is to take what he deals with when shooting and apply it to philanthropy. And so you may be thinking, what is this connection?
I don't know, Nebraska basketball, I don't know, probably Sanford don't really care. But here's what I know. Part of it is watching him. Part of it is being a coach. And in my earlier life a player is that shooters and that's what he is. He's a three point shooter. Plus there's a lot of other good things, but he's known for a shooting shooter shoot.
And you might not be a basketball official and I don't know what does that mean. Well, shooters in basketball keep shooting because they know that eventually, based upon the way that their mind works, the way that they've built their legacy, their career, that kind of the thought process, the way they approach the game is they have to shoot.
You can't make a basket if you're not shooting. And yet we know that the best shooters go through droughts. They go through moments where they're not making it. And in basketball, we want those players, the ones that are good at scoring, shooting to keep shooting. We don't want them to hesitate. They have to almost wash the memory of missing the last one, two, three, six, nine, whatever away because we don't want them stopping to take those open shots.
We want them to trust that the next one's going to go in and they understand this philosophy as almost fundamental. It's almost natural to them that one cold stretch does not define the next series of opportunities. What does all of this have to do with fundraising? With philanthropy? I think that philanthropy in many ways is the same way as the shooter in fundraising, fundraisers, fundraising that weeks may go by where we don't have donors as available as we want, that visits get canceled, that the solicitations and annual giving may not go the way we want.
They don't. We don't get the mail or that in the mail. There's no returns that conversation stall progress is ceased or ceasing because of external factors. Proposals go unanswered. It feels like nothing's working. And then, if done correctly, much like the shooter and shooters get hot and all of a sudden they make 4 or 5, six, seven in a row.
And that's by threes 12, 15, 18, 21 points that the same happens in philanthropy. All of a sudden meetings begin to stack up and conversations lead to commitments and donors come out of the woodwork and you get that unknown state gift you didn't even know about. Momentum returns. All of this has to do with asking a simple question what are you doing when those moments of lag occur?
What is important and are you a shooter? Do you keep shooting? Are you a fundraiser? Do you keep fundraising? Today I want to talk about the cycle, the psychological connection to this concept, and then really six tactical things that will help you enable to stay and remain and continue to be a shooter fundraiser, even when things don't really line up the way that you want, many of which are probably out of your control in the first place.
So let's start at the top, as we always do, and work our way down to the tactical is the psychology of missing and the psychology of not getting what you want. That when in fundraising, when we think something's amiss, we're not getting things to go the way we want that things like rejection, silence and delay are ever present part of our life.
That donors maybe decline, that response rates decrease, visits don't materialize. This is a psychologically very human factor. Whether you're a shooter in basketball or a fundraiser, and you're having these moments where things aren't going as well as you want, there's a psychological effect to this. It's called loss aversion that mentally we want to avoid loss, that negative consequences, negative outcomes from a humanistic, emotional, psychological perspective.
We try to avoid some of the same thing happens over and over. And that's negative. The loss aversion instincts inside of us say, well, I'm going to stop doing that because it doesn't feel good. I don't like it. It hurts. I feel negative towards it. And there's a validity to that feeling that, well, if I don't do it, then I don't have to worry about it.
But over time, loss aversion leads to other things. It leads to things like hesitation, like you think it looks good, but should you do it in a shooter's world? That shot open. But I've missed the last six. Now I'm hesitant. And shooters, when they're hesitant, they'll make shots. Fundraisers when they're hesitant. Don't make connection. Make contact, make relationships deeper.
Gift officers in this case will delay calls. They'll maybe stop asking for visits. They'll spend more time maybe prepping than actually engaging. And what happens is there's a decline in outcome and it becomes discouraging. And over time, what we find is, is that we see the numbers drop. This is why I don't believe in month over month hard comparisons or breakdowns of our strategy or goals by month.
Not for goals, but for execution. Because there are things we can't control in this and this idea that everything should be totally equal in quarters or months or weeks. It's just not realistic in our profession, but the effort we put into it can be. So we're going to differentiate between results and effort. High performers in this field look at effort different than outcome.
And the same is true with shooting. But in our world, what we need to know is, is that to get back on track, we have to put forth the next shot, the next effort, control what we can control.
If activity slows because our confidence or our belief system, our thoughts around what we do and how we do it around the activity that we need to be leading and engaging it, what happens is pipeline shrinks, metrics shrink, and we stack up months after months of negative performance outcomes. Now it builds a deficit and now we have a problem.
I would be remiss if I didn't bring because I'm a nerd and I like to do this, bring some math into this as well. Is that fundraising outcomes are a lot like shooting or basketball or field goal percentage that you're going to miss more often than you make. The best three point shooters, like Price Sanford at Braska, are going to shoot somewhere around 40%.
That means they miss 60%. It's just like philanthropy. If we're closing 100% of our proposals, I would argue that we're not asking for enough money or asking or pushing the envelope in terms of the relationships, this matters over time. When we talk about a mathematical concept called regression, the mean in statistics, in math, if you do something long enough and you have a series of negatives, the regression to the mean means that eventually you're going to have the positives to make the average over time be consistent to whatever you do or whatever it should be.
Let me give you a couple of examples. We had basketball and coin flipping as a kind of a parallel. If you make the first five three pointers in a basketball game and you shoot 40% if you shoot enough of them over time, the regression to the mean means you're going to come down to 40%, which means you're going to miss more than you make over time.
If you make the first five, the same concept is in flipping a coin. Each individual coin flip is either 50% heads or 50% tails, and over enough flipping of a coin, it's going to come up 50%. Just that's math and statistics. If you have six in a row that are tails, it doesn't mean the next one is more likely to be a tail or a head.
But what it means is, is that over the next 20 or 30, there may be more of. In this case, if you flip five in a row, their tails more heads, because the regression of the mean just over time, it has to be 50%. By design.
All this to say is, is that all you can do is control. What you are in charge of is either the shooting or keep flipping the coin. Now let's change it to what we do in philanthropy. In fundraising, that means that the short term doesn't mean that's the long term. If you do your job well, eventually it'll regress to the mean.
And number two is, is that you have a choice as to what you control. If you make the next called, you have the next visit. You think about the basics of what we do in shooting. Sometimes we say that shooters, three point shooters, you should go get a layup or go to the free throw line because if you see the ball goes through the net, it changes your mentality.
The same thing is true in philanthropy. If you've made six proposals in a row, maybe it's better just to have a meeting and talk about what they're wanting to support. What the organization does that doesn't push the solicitation to see that success, just to feel good about what you do, to have just a phone call. Shooters go through cold stretches, fundraisers go through cold stretches, then we catch fire and everything kind of goes in.
Our positives. And it may not be in the time frames we want, but we know what happens. And so when you allow this momentary because statistically things will improve if you're in kind of a down spell or not, things aren't going as you want.
Things begin to then layer and it becomes really more psychological because the fear of rejection elevates. We get more afraid of being declined because that's what we've gotten used to. It's natural, but yet we can't let that stop us. The second thing is, is, is that we begin to overanalyze. We don't overanalyze ourself, our best practices, what we do, how we do it, are we calling the right people?
We do more research. We do more of everything rather than just do what we should, which is outreach. You want to do a proper research where appropriate, reflection, but we don't let it overcome us. We got to go. And the third, which we don't have control of sometimes, is all of a sudden we have a bad month or two where things don't maybe go the way we want that first quarter and it becomes organizational, institutional pressure because people have broken down goals and the expectations may be moving towards, hey, we need more immediate results.
That's why I look at philanthropy over the long term, not the short term. None of these three things rejection over analysis, organizational pressure, help performance, and it can erode confidence for fundraisers around not trusting the process, not the ideal shoot or shoot.
So what are six things that we can do to help ourselves overcome these moments? To continue to be appropriately and rightfully so, moderately aggressive in what we try to do outreach, connection, relationships, things about that. And there are six things that would help us. The first is what I always talk about, about tracking proactive and kind of predictive modeling behavior rather than reacting or reactionary behavior.
And this is really about the idea of economics. But what we talk about often in the end is how much money we've raised. But yet what I talk about in terms of predictive modeling is we need to measure things that are under our control. The number of appropriate donor conversation visit requests, follow up proposal discussions. When you force yourself and the organization forces everyone to track activity, inevitably, ups and downs of outcomes become less emotional because we're actually tracking what we can control.
Now, that doesn't mean we shouldn't track things we can't control, like how much money we raise to ROI, business. But I've always learned if we do the right things on the front side, if we truly make the right calls, have the right visits, have the right conversations, that over time those things will become the independent variable, the independence of and the control of what we do.
And the money becomes more realistic, more kind of predictive, because we've done all the right things. And over time, that's the dependent variable. A lot of math today, if we track the right things, how we reach out, when we reach out, how often we reach out, then what will happen is the right outcomes. But we feel better about it because we're tracking activity.
What we control. The second is really maintaining a consistent and robust pipeline. I've done many a podcast about bringing down the size of portfolios I bring. I've talked about the idea of how you have to bless and release people, because you can't just keep calling someone 51 times if they don't ever respond to a certain point, you know, three, four, five phone calls, two, three, four emails.
If they don't respond and they aren't a long time donor, go on, go bless and release and let them go. Well, we'll give them some annual fund opportunities. Or if you email someone 4 or 5, six times a certain point, quit mailing because it costs money. Shooters keep shooting because they know the opportunity is coming. The reward is at three point in fundraising.
That means we need to have a broad portfolio, because when the activity centers on a fewer number of people who are because of unique circumstances or just chance all in the same boat, what happens is, is those delays become more magnified because we have a smaller group of people that were depending all of our results upon, we need the widest reasonably pipeline possible, the best possible prospects, grateful patient, probably in health care alumni and other community leaders in education, your longtime donors in any nonprofit and you know their $10 have a point giving conversation with them they've given you for ten years.
I'd like to know why. Realize that the pipeline development, constantly bringing the right level of new people that are most likely to give, will lessen the idea of feeling that stagnation. And that's a part of overcoming the concepts of rejection and, you know, over analysis. And then working through the organizational pressure, you have more things to control and the things that you can do with different people.
The third is, is that we need to separate the two concepts silence from rejection.
I want to start with a basic premise, though. If every time you reach out to someone and you, all you do is ask them for money, there will be a point where they won't respond. There is silence and that is rejection. But if we do our jobs correctly, if we really develop relationships, if we concentrate on what they're trying to accomplish and listen two thirds, one third talk, two ears, one mouth, use them proportionally.
What we get is a more deeply held, more realistic, more dynamic relationship with donors, which means we can think of silence not being rejection. Donors have many reasons they do and don't call. I had a this had nothing to do with philanthropy, but I had a long term, long time friend who needed to chat about something. And this last week was just not the week for me.
It's been crazy. And they finally sent me a text and I take blame for this. This is on me. But they finally reach out and say, you know, hey, are they first started with did I do something wrong? It was, are you okay? And I should have responded. It was foolish of me and just said, hey, I'd love to chat.
It's the next 3 or 4 days are crazy. Tweet unless it's emergency. Can we push this off till the end of the week? I didn't do that. That's my fault. But they took it as silence being rejection. And I covered this with them. And I said, first of all, I screwed up. I should have responded more, you know, more quickly.
But secondly, just because I'm silent doesn't mean I don't want to talk to you. It just means that moment's not perfect unless it's really, really important. The same is true in philanthropy. Professional persistence matters. We need to continue to do outreach. So if you don't hear from a donor when you want to hear from them, send an email, follow up and then they say, I left you voicemail.
Sorry I didn't hear from you. Sure you're busy? I'd love to hear from you. Love to find some time, chat or then three weeks later jot them a handwritten note. This is why we want multiple ways of reaching out, but we have to be diligent and not take silence. Well, I made the call. They never call back. If you do anything else, silence isn't necessarily rejection.
If we build the relationships in the right way, we have to be okay with silence, but with knowledge that we need to do some outreach to close those communication gaps or opportunity gaps. Number four is a realization, and maybe it's a better way to put it is to normalize slumps quite times. An experienced fundraiser can point to a million different periods where nothing seemed to move forward.
And then the dam broke and everything happened. It is really important to realize these are cycles which goes back to what can we control? Short term droughts, so to speak, do not invalidate the work we do for really building relationships. Times come and go where we have interaction, and the other thing is going back to what we're talking about, about silence not being rejection.
Our donors have lives. Our volunteers have lives, our board members have lives. There. They run into challenges and issues. We should be okay with that, that we're going to be respectful, but we're going to be constant in terms of our outreach and that if things don't go well for a couple of weeks, a month, maybe two, if you have a slump for four years, we got a different conversation to have.
But slumps are normal. They happen. And let's like shooters. They go through droughts, keep shooting, keep reaching out. Remember the basics. It's relationship building, not just ask. Number five is the antithesis of protecting momentum that when results are slow, we need to maintain our rhythms, our efforts of outreach and conversations. And I mean this momentum from an internal personal perspective.
That momentum is fragile. When I watch in particular more often football than basketball. But basketball has it too. You can see in the younger the age, the more they're able or not able to deal with this. You can see momentum shifts and all of a sudden that momentum shift on the positive moves a team forward and they score a bunch of points.
Good things happen. And you're like, oh, but it's the team or the switch. The players on the negative side of momentum shift that I'm really wanting to talk about. Momentum is fragile. And so when activity drops, we think about philanthropy and our jobs. It's tough to rebuild that. But the way to rebuild it is to go back to the basics, i.e. make phone calls, stop by somebody, office, write them a note, say thank you.
Find unique ways of just putting yourself or the thought process of you wanting to meet or have a conversation in front of them without really even asking. So all this in the paper, sort of, you know, hey, we just produced this report, thought it might be interesting. You're not even asking for anything. But what you're doing is, is you're controlling that idea of activity which will make the rebounding effect of momentum loss easier, quicker, more advanced.
And so you need to protect that momentum when you can by doing all the basics. The more basics you do, the less momentum you'll lose. And the final is if two of you are not alone in an office or an organization or fundraiser or whatever, celebrate success to see the team win. If you're on a basketball team. Price.
Stanford's been our example. There have been plenty of times where because he's very well understood, he's the cornerstone of scoring for the Nebraska basketball team, where the other team puts multiple guys on it. They're just not gonna let him score. But yet they're Sam Hoiberg or Butin gel or whomever. And that's a real really scoring. And you see price smile.
You see him celebrate with his team with the success of the greater organization. And that actually endorphins are released and you feel better about who you are because you see yourself as a bigger effort, part of a larger group, a team effort. It's a team game. Even if you're the only fundraiser. The organization is doing great things serving food, providing education, providing health care, whatever.
When you see others succeed, you're more likely to look at what you're doing more positively to engage in those moments when things aren't going well. And it's their hard work. As long as their success is based on hard work, you don't want to feel like, well, that's not fair. I'm working my tail off here. And they did some success and didn't do it, had success and didn't do anything.
But if the organizations working hard of people working hard, celebrate with them. It'll make you feel better. It'll make them feel better. It'll make the organization more, more successful. And that all leads the idea of changing the momentum. So track activity, review the six track activity, always have a consistent pipeline. Realize if you're doing your job correctly.
Silence is not rejection that we want to normalize slumps. They happen that we want to protect that momentum. Go back to the basics and we want to celebrate as a team so we feel better about ourselves. If you do these six things, what you end up with is being a shooter shoot. They wash those negatives, they move on to the next thing.
When they miss a shot, they take the next one. And for us, donor relationships are built over time. They not happen in one moment and that conversations develop slowly. Trust develops slowly. It takes time. But those that are consistent with the basics and the outreach are going to be the ones successful. And eventually your philanthropic shots, they'll begin to fall to realize that this is an up and down game.
It's not perfect. The rejection that the decline that negative outcomes and they're really negative. They're just not. Gifts closed happen more often than the ones that do. We need to keep shooting. You need to keep shooting. Be unafraid to be a positive influence in your community and on your donors for the things you believe in your the mission of your organization.
Don't always ask and completely legitimize what is most important in our profession. Trust in the relationship building process. You do those things, you'll score a lot of points.
Don't forget to check out the blogs at hallettphilanthropy.com. Two a week, 90-second reads. Things that I see, think about, read just things that get you thinking. RSS feed right to you. If you'd like to reach out to me, make a recommendation for a particular subject. Podcast@hallettphilanthropy.com.
We need philanthropy. We need nonprofits. We need you. You are part of the gap. And I always talk about that gap free enterprise once doesn't want to do certain things because it doesn't make money. Government is not in all that efficient. And in between. That's where nonprofits of philanthropy live to serve the greater community. All this is to say is, is that what you do is incredibly valuable and incredibly important.
And I hope you've said that. Don't forget my favorite saying, some people make things happen, some people watch things happen. Then there are those who wondered what happened. You're someone who makes things happen. You're someone who partners with others. You make things happen for the people, the things, the organizations, the moments where people are wondering what happened. That's an amazing way to spend a career and feel good about who you are to, in some ways, keep knocking down those threes to help your team win.
We'll look forward to seeing you the next time, right back here on the next edition of Around With Randall. And don't forget, make it a great day.