As a baby ED, I didn’t understand that my lack of success in fundraising was largely due to my mindset about it.
Until one day a master fundraiser told me: “It’s you that is blocking the energy.”
And I was so confused.
Wasn’t I doing everything I could to chase down donations? Segmenting donors, making phone calls ’til I was blue in the face, events, social media, the whole shebang.
How could I be the one blocking donations?
Then I started doing a lot of inner work and I realized what he meant.
My mindset and the decades-old money trauma I was carrying around like a couple of wet blankets were squeezing the life out of my asks.
And if you’re in the same boat, let me tell you, that stuff runs deep. The family baggage and personal baggage about money we carry. The desperation we unconsciously transmit when donations don’t show up. The way we shrivel up inside when it’s time to ask.
No wonder the donations aren’t flowing!
Once I started to unpack these stories and believe different things about the world and about abundance and about what was possible, that’s when the money really started to flow for me.
And I wasn’t working any harder or changing my tactics. I had just cleared the internal money blocks holding me back.
But I don’t want you to hear me wrong on this. As a fundraiser, there are some things you can control, and some things you can’t.
You can control how you approach fundraising. You can control how you set it up, how you handle the cultivation and the solicitation.
But the outcome actually isn’t up to you.
The sooner you can come to terms with that, the sooner you will be able to tap into your executive mode, enter that flow state, and start enjoying the process.
There’s nothing that will benefit your fundraising efforts more than healing your trauma, uncovering your money mindset, and letting go of the outcome.
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Struggling to raise money for your nonprofit? Are desperation and scarcity sabotaging your fundraising success? 😣
You’re not alone, my friend. Many leaders try tactic after tactic, only to come up short again and again. Exhausting, right?
But what if the real barrier isn’t your savvy strategy, but your mindset? 💭
On this week’s episode of Nonprofit Lowdown, we’re diving deep into money mindset to discover how trauma and the stories we tell ourselves about money affect our fundraising for better or worse.
Here are a few of my takeaways:
🔑 Trauma and money experiences get encoded in our brains and bodies, affecting our fundraising mindsets and results
🔑 Attaching heavy emotion like desperation or scarcity to money activates our fight-or-flight response
🔑This traps us in survival mode rather than abundance – and donors feel that!
🔑By unpacking our money stories and shifting to an abundance mindset, our outer results can transform.
This is where the real work starts. We have to go inward to unearth our subsurface money narratives. What did your family say about money? What emotions come up when you fundraise? When you uncover the answers to these questions and shift your mindset, you’re going to see a huge transformation in your numbers too!
Ready to address inner blocks and finally hit your fundraising goals?
🎯 Listen to the full episode right here:
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/280-money-mindset-and-fundraising/id1436858854?i=1000651065637
