Fundraising leaving you frazzled? 😫 I’ve been there too. Turns out the problem isn’t stingy donors – it’s our own money mindset. 😳
I used to get bent out of shape whenever a gift fell through or the budget got tight. Then I learned around 80% of fundraising flows from how we feel about finances deep down.
Repeat after me: “Scarcity thinking repels resources. Inner abundance attracts support.”
Join me and nonprofit Jedi Hugh Ballou as we confront the roots of money trauma and offer refreshing perspectives to rewrite our limiting stories. Shift reactive panic into responsive inspiration through emotional awareness and box breathing. Stop chasing uninterested donors by embodying, then emanating, the very wealth consciousness we seek.
The path from poverty mentality to prosperous reality starts within.
Listen in as we map it out together.
Important Links:
Free Webinar: 3 Reasons Why You are Burned Out on Fundraising – https://go.rheawong.com/3reasonswebinar
Connect with Hugh Ballou – https://hughballou.com
Episode Transcript
RHEA
Welcome to Nonprofit Lowdown. I’m your host, Rhea Wong.
Hey friends, this week’s podcast is an episode I did with my friend Hugh Ballou of the Nonprofit Exchange. I hope you enjoy it. If you’re interested in hearing me speak about any of these topics, specifically how to stop chasing and start attracting donors, join me for a free webinar, February 2nd at 1 PM Eastern, the registration link will be in the show notes, also feel free to check out Hughes free community for nonprofit leaders.
Again, information in the show notes. Thanks.
HUGH
Welcome to the Nonprofit Exchange. This is Hugh Ballou, founder and president of Center Vision Leadership Foundation, And today I have a really special guest, Rhea Wong. So Rhea, welcome and tell us a little bit about who you are, your background and why do you do this important work?
RHEA
Oh, Hugh. Thank you so much for having me. It’s such a pleasure to be here and to talk to your audience. For any of you who’ve known me you’ll know my story. I was a little baby ED at the age of 26. I’m very grateful for the opportunity, but honestly, I didn’t know a thing.
my first day on the job, they gave me the keys, they gave me my email address and I did two Google searches. Google search one was what does an ED do? And Google search two was, how do you fundraise? And I have to be honest, I don’t think that this is a unique case. I think it’s gotten better now.
You’d be surprised, or maybe you wouldn’t be surprised, at how many people I meet in my world who have been given this very important job of raising funds for a very important cause, causes that change the world, and they’ve not received any formal training in fundraising. after 12 and a half years of running my nonprofit in New York City, I transitioned and I thought why did it take me 12 and a half years to figure this out?
So I’ve now made it my mission to help all of the people who were like me, little baby Rhea as an ED who had no idea how to fundraise because frankly, we don’t have time for you to take 12 years to figure this out. The problems that we have right now are so pressing. We need resources now to help solve the problems now.
HUGH
Whoa, you can tell this is going to be a power interview our title for today is managing your brain for fundraising success it’s about 80 percent of the challenge of fundraising is all in your mind.
Would you explain that?
RHEA
Oh my gosh. Okay. Thank you. Here, I’m just going to wind me up and go. So I remember being in one of these fancy fundraising programs and the person running the program said it’s really your, Internal energy blocks that you’re putting up that is repelling money.
And I was like, what are you talking about? I am a good Asian student, right? I did all the work. I took all the classes. I wrote the notes. I did the proposals. And money just wasn’t flowing to me. And I didn’t know why. Cause I had checked all the boxes and it wasn’t really until I did some of the internal work to unpack some of my stuff with money that I realized that in fact, I was repelling the money because.
And I know this sounds a little bit woo, but I I was coming at it from a desperation angle, right? I was just grasping so hard because in my family, my grandparents are immigrants from China. In my family, money meant stability, money meant security. And so I subconsciously believed that by asking people to support my cause, I was asking them to give up security and stability because I was projecting the stuff in my family onto them.
And it wasn’t really until I started to unpack that and tell myself a different story about money and about fundraising that actually I started not only to see more of the flow coming but I actually started to enjoy it. I really think of money as energy and energy cannot be stoppered, right? I always think about the Dead Sea.
Do you know why the Dead Sea is dead, Hugh? I don’t. So the Dead Sea. Is dead because it has a very high salt content, nothing can live in it. And the reason it has a very high salt content is that all of the, these oceans and rivers flow into the Dead Sea, but nothing flows out of it. And so when things are not flowing energetically, it dies.
what I realized I was doing is because I was coming from such scared place, such a fearful place about money, that I was really stopping the flow of energy from moving.
HUGH
Whoa. We were visiting before we went live today. And we think of fundraising all wrong. And as a transaction.
You said it’s a fun, it’s creative and it’s a creative and spiritual activity. Say more about that.
RHEA
Yeah. when we consider all of the wonderful things in the world, I was at a museum the other day. I live in New York city. We’re very blessed to have museums and shows and exhibits, et cetera, but I was walking around this beautiful exhibit and I just thought, if it hadn’t been for fundraisers, this exhibit would not exist. This museum would not exist, right? And so fundraisers are at their core, fundamentally creators. And isn’t creativity, isn’t that a spiritual act? And so I think that there’s something about fundraising that is spiritual. And I think often we tend to think of fundraising.
It’s this like dirty little secret over here on the side that we don’t really wanna talk about. And the truth is, fundraising makes missions possible. Gandhi had to fundraise. Mother Teresa had to fundraise. MLK had to fundraise, right? Fundraising is not dirty. Fundraising is a fundamental fact of how change happens in the world.
I think once you come to it from a place of possibility and fun and generosity and flow, it becomes a different kind of an activity. And I think people dread it so much because we bring so much of our own baggage about money to the table. We do.
HUGH
And we’re not even aware of how that’s hurting us. you spoke about money mindset.
Let’s dig a little deeper into that. What does it mean to you? And, we have, and I had shared with you that. I learned from one of my guests years ago that this is, we operate a business and it’s a non, we don’t identify, but we’re not nonprofit. We are instead of a for profit business, we are for purpose business.
So purposeful work. So we penalize ourselves, but the part about the mindset and how that money mindset paralyzes us or compromises our fundraising.
RHEA
Yeah, so Hugh, you and I were speaking ahead of the podcast. I always think of managing your mindset the way that Athletes prepare for games and look, I’m not an athletic person.
I do enjoy an NBA game, right? But when you really think about at the pro level, let’s say with basketball, what’s the difference between a LeBron James versus, a rookie coming out who maybe, you know, a good solid, but not LeBron James kind of player. It’s the preparation. And it’s the mindset after a certain threshold of skill level.
conversely, I think as fundraisers, if we want to approach this Act of fundraising as a sport, what’s going to differentiate the good from the great are the ones who learn how to manage their money mindset, manage their internal state. Compared to the ones who get very upset and, very riled up about money, either which way.
And I remember this very distinctly. when I was an ED, I had gotten a letter in the mail and it was a grant that I had expected that we were going to get, and we didn’t get it. And I was, kind of pouty and stomping around and I was blah, blah, blah. And my CFO at the time looked at me, he’s a wise man, Leonard Pearlman, if you’re listening to this looked at me and said, Rhea, why are you letting money affect your mood?
And I was like yeah. You’re right. It’s just money, right? And I think when we right size what money is a resource like anybody, like anything else. But the interesting thing about money is it’s a renewable resource. It’s not like air. It’s not like time. It’s not water is a non renewable resource.
Money is infinite. Like we’re literally printing more of it. So why do we get so bent out of shape about it? And so I think part of what we, and we’ll probably get to this, but. We have so much, we can say baggage, we can say trauma about money. A lot of it has to do with what we have received as messages in our upbringing. some of it is ancestral trauma. So epigenetics, like we might’ve inherited trauma in our DNA. Some of it is systemic and social, right? Racism and white supremacy and, various policies that have kept money out of the hands of folks of color. None of it comes from nowhere.
I think both, and yes, all of these things can be true. And we can choose to be discerning about what we want to believe and act on moving forward in our lives.
HUGH
Two different things acting on it is a whole different, ball game. People talk a lot. I think what I heard, I think Jim Rohn said this at only 3%.
3 percent of you will actually do something that I say. Yeah. It’s a hundred people have an idea. 3 percent will actually do something about it. So I see that you’re passionate about this topic, which is why you’re here. So there’s a, I’ve been working with The sector, this charity sectors is charity.
It’s tax exempt. And we have to make a profit, which is, we could call it proceeds. If that makes people feel better, got to have some money leftovers for salaries, product development. We got to serve people. So we’ve got to build that infrastructure and I see lots of Misconceptions about leadership, but also along with that there’s some misconceptions about money.
So How what have you encountered and how do we rectify that money mindset misconception?
RHEA
So I think a lot of it has to do with our sector. So you mentioned at the beginning we call it nonprofit, right? We’re already defining ourselves in a negative, what we’re not. And I think there’s something very invasive in the non profit sector about the stories that we tell ourselves about money.
And some of it are myths, like suffering is noble, or rich people are different than us, we’re not like those people, or the rich get richer, the poor get more, right? And so oftentimes, we will attach meaning to a particular story that we tell ourselves about the way that the world is.
And by the way, a belief is just a thing that you think again and again, right? It’s not True, necessarily, but it might be true for you. And because we, and I think this is a big one in the nonprofit sector, we really attach to this idea of suffering is noble and we’re not supposed to have any money and, we can’t afford that.
And, we like to play the comparison games and we like to make ourselves feel more noble because we’re not like those for profit companies that waste money and have the fancy, beer machines, like we’re doing the real work. I’m not saying that any of it is wrong or right, I’m just simply saying, is this a perspective that serves you?
Is this a perspective that helps you feel better? Cause if it’s not, you should probably change the story. And ultimately we’re human beings. We have these big, beautiful brains and we have this power to tell ourselves and create our realities. And the realities that we have are often internal realities, right?
Look, if you want to suffer, be my guest, I’m not here to stop anyone from suffering if they want to. But guess what? You don’t get a gold medal for suffering. I prefer not to suffer. there’s something very toxic in the culture and I think it’s also perpetuated by the way that funding happens, right?
So in foundation work we look at well What’s your percentage of overhead or like we’re not gonna pay X percent if you pay, you know this salary to your team the whole system is designed to keep us in this scarcity mindset in this scarcity mode And Paulotta addresses that in his Ted talk, the way we think about charities, but did wrong.
HUGH
Yes. Right. Is one of them and there’s some accounting principles that you can define overhead This is overhead actually serving people and is it really overhead? It’s not paying for the beer machine. It’s paying for people’s welfare So there’s a lot of misconceptions on how we do the accounting even and then how we interpret the accounting So you triggered something when you were talking earlier?
In part of this mindset about money, we don’t mind bringing people on the board and wasting their time in not having the planning, not having a system, but we obsess, we waste 10 cents of anybody’s donation. we can’t get the time back, but like you said, money is a renewable resource.
So how does this mindset potentially affect our fundraising efforts?
RHEA
Such a good question, Hugh. let’s talk about time and money. So I see, and it drives me crazy and look, no judgment. I did this myself, but it drives me nuts when I see an executive director who’s paid a very good salary, spending X number of hours doing things like data entry.
Because it saves them a hundred bucks. We’ve all been there, right? Or like they’re stuffing envelopes because, it would cost money to do it. And I’m sitting there thinking, okay, so the three hours that you just spent stuffing these envelopes or doing data entry or whatever else you were doing that wasn’t a high leverage activity has actually cost you not just the three hours.
The, of your salary that we just paid, but potentially three hours of going out there and getting a donor or getting a bigger gift, right? So I think we need to think about money strategically. And so I talk about expense a lot. So when we think about expenses, we should be thinking about it in three different ways.
Number one, if it gives you back your time, number two, if it makes you money or number three, if it increases operational efficiency. Either of those three things are true. It’s probably a good use of your money.
HUGH
And if you’re doing it, are you robbing a volunteer of an opportunity to serve?
RHEA
That’s also true.
Or you, or pay, you’ll pay someone 17 an hour to do it. If you’re doing data entry, you are literally the world’s highest paid data entry person. think it gets us into this world of we step over the dollars to pick up the pennies. We are not strategic about how we’re using our resources. And then we are asking too low, or we treat people like they’re walking checkbooks.
So when you get into the scarcity mindset, you tend to get very transactional. You tend to think of people as like numbers rather than people, right? that is a recipe for very shallow relationships. I don’t know about you, Hugh, I don’t like being treated like a walking checkbook. I don’t like I don’t like feeling like I just got networked, right?
I don’t like feeling manipulated. If you do, then, good for you. I haven’t met anyone who likes that. But because we believe that money is scarce, because we believe this is the last gift I’m ever going to get, because we believe that I got to get this gift at any cost, I treat you like you’re just a number to me.
And that means, sure, I might give you a thousand dollars now, but because you haven’t established the trust because you haven’t shown that you are willing to put in the time and energy. Like I could have maybe written you a 10,000 check, but now I’m not going to because you’ve shown me that I’m just a number to you.
HUGH
Wow. Wow. Yeah. And besides checkbook, it could be we treat people like they’re an ATM machine. That’s right. No, it’s your corporate donation changing. Thank you very much. Goodbye. So we’ve identified the problems. Big ones. And I bet you they’re more persistent, more relevant to more people than we realized.
We would call that in leadership, blind spots. So it’s time to acknowledge them and somebody like Rhea could help you realize those. So we’ll tell you about our website and how you can find her in just a minute. But what do we do about it? How do we help people with a positive money mindset?
RHEA
Yeah. So a couple of things that I just want to share some fun hacks.
So the first thing I would say is take some time and really sit down with yourself. Ask yourself, what did you hear in your family growing up? What did you see? What did you experience? Like in my family, all I heard was, money doesn’t grow on trees. Who do you think we are? The Rockefellers? I saw my parents scrimping and saving.
The biggest fights I ever saw my parents having were about money, right? So really just sit down and unpack for yourself. What are these stories that I’m telling myself about money and how did those stories affect my relationship with money today? Am I a spender? Am I a saver?
And why? Know that the Things that you do are survival mechanisms, right? We all have trauma in some ways in our lives. And so whether I’m a saver or a spender or I splurge or I go on shopping sprees or whatever it is I do is usually a reaction to my lived experience growing up. So I would say part of it too is to create a different story for yourself.
Okay. So if all of these things are true, if you have these beliefs that you don’t want to have, what would a new belief be? And how can you start to live into that belief? So let’s say I tell myself a story that I’m really not that good with money. I, it comes, it goes, whatever.
What if I wanted to have an identity of I am really good with money? If I had that identity, you can put it on a little post it. I’m really good with money. Then you start to operate as if, right? What would someone who’s really good with money do? And you start to practice. It’s like training for a marathon, right?
You’re not going to run the full 24 miles. The first time out of the gate, but you, maybe you go around the block and then maybe you do a mile run, then you do three miles, right? And eventually you iterate your way into this new identity of, Oh, I actually, I am good with money. So that’s the first thing.
The second thing that I would say is your brain is only in one of two modes at any given time, executive mode or survival mode. Hugh, what would you guess is the percentage of time people spend in survival mode on average?
HUGH
Oh, I bet it’s pretty high, a lot higher than, I would say more than half.
RHEA
Oh yeah, 70 percent on average or fair in New York City, I think it’s 90%.
Anyway, the point is, survival mode is when your amygdala is taken over. That’s when you’re in this sort of high reactivity, high emotional agitated state, right? You’re either in your fight, flight, or freeze mode. And you’re operating from almost this instinctual animalistic perspective of Oh, like this is a threat to me.
So I’m going to react. So if I’m perceiving, not getting a certain gift as a direct threat to my person, I’m going to have lots of emotions about it. My, heart will start beating. Maybe I’ll start sweating. And so one thing to do, and this is a quick hack is to take a breath and Identify the feeling that you’re feeling.
So I’m feeling frustrated. I’m feeling anxious. I’m feeling whatever. It’s important to say I’m feeling as opposed to I am. So instead of I am stressed, like I feel stressed. The reason being I am is an identity statement. I feel is a feeling and feelings pass. And just the very act of identifying what that feeling is, moves the energy to your prefrontal cortex, which is this beautiful part of your brain right behind your forehead.
And that part of your brain triggers your executive function. Your executive function is when you’re in the flow state. It’s where generosity lies. It’s where you see different possibilities, whereas in survival state, it’s very black or white, right? It’s run or fight. And so you can trick your brain into being in executive mode.
And then the last strategy that I’ll offer is breathing. Hugh, I’d be willing to bet when you get stressed out, your breathing gets quite shallow.
HUGH
Yeah, I’m nodding my head. Sorry, people can’t hear that. Sorry.
RHEA
So quick tip here.
There’s a thing called box breathing, which by the way, Marines do, which is pretty cool.
You breathe and you should breathe through your nose. So you breathe in for three counts or four counts. You can choose. You hold for four counts, you exhale for four counts, and then you hold for four counts. And it’s actually the exhaling and the holding that do the most because it stimulates your vagus nerve. by calming the body down, you calm your brain. So there are Top down strategies, which is like brain oriented, down to the body, and then there are bottom up strategies, which is the body to the brain. So those are a couple that you can try in your everyday life.
HUGH
She’s giving you a lot of good stuff.
So Rhea, I want to take a minute and let people see your website and tell, I’m going to, for people looking, they can see it, people listening, it’s Rhea, rheawong.com. So what are people going to see when they go there?
RHEA
They’re going to see lots of resources. So I have a book called Get That Money, Honey. There are book bonuses. I also have a podcast. I also have a webinar series and a newsletter. There are all the things and if you’re interested, I have a group coaching program where I work with folks for six months to help turbo charge their individual gift fundraising.
So that is open right now. I also have a fun free quiz that I can offer folks, which will be available on the podcast notes.
HUGH
Man, oh, man, oh, man, this has been some good stuff. There’s many factors that we could talk about, but, this, the clock isn’t in our friend today, but it, there’s so many things you’ve given us.
Can you give our listeners one piece of advice to help them improve their money mindset and consequently their fundraising efforts?
RHEA
Yeah, I love a dating analogy. What I would say is that when you are putting yourself in a place of wholeness and security and safety, you are able to be the best fundraiser you can be as a partner to your donor.
And the last thing I’ll say is desperation is a stinky perfume. So I think all of us have had the experience where we’ve been out there like going on dates, trying to find the one and it almost gets a little desperate. And that is not when you find. The one, right? So I think you got to do the work on yourself first before you can expect someone to want to be your partner in life and in fundraising.
HUGH
Absolutely Rhea Wong, your wisdom greatly exceeds your linear years on this planet you’ve given us a lot of things to think about and very valuable information that we can Thank you for being our guest today on The Nonprofit Exchange.
RHEA
Thank you, Hugh. It was a pleasure.
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