🎤 Why be a hero when you can be a guide? đź§
On this episode of Nonprofit Lowdown, we’re chatting with author/fundraiser Evan Wildstein as he dishes on servant leadership – how embracing empathy, community, and self-growth can transform nonprofit fundraising. 🙌
Servant leadership isn’t about being a martyr (hard pass). It’s about mindset shifts from “me” to “we.”
Evan shares out-of-the-box tips like recording yourself to improve listening skills. 🎧 He explores healthy boundaries and psychological safety so teams can have real talks on topics like equitable hiring.
Tune in to find out why mindset and training matter when it comes to connecting your mission and money. Discover feel-good fundraising that’s about people, not just dollars. đź’¸
“Thorough servant leadership translates to dollars.” – Evan Wildstein
Important Links:
The Nonprofiteers Fundraising Field Guide: https://www.amazon.com/Nonprofiteers-Fundraising-Field-Guide-Servant-Leadership/dp/1666767514
LinkedIN: https://www.linkedin.com/in/evan-a-wildstein/
Episode Transcript
RHEA 0:00
Welcome to Nonprofit Lowdown. I’m your host, Rhea Wong.
Hey podcast listeners, Rhea Wong with you once again with Nonprofit Lowdown.
Today I am joined by my friend and guest Evan Wildstein. He is a dad, non profiteer, and author of the newly released book, The Nonprofit Tears Fundraising Field Guide. So we’re going to talk about all things fundraising, particularly servant leadership, which is the central theme of the book.
So Evan. Being a new dad, welcome to the show. Thank you for being with us and conscious.
EVAN 0:39
Hello, I’m awake. You’re awake.
RHEA 0:42
I’m here. You are here. And aside from being a coach, author, consultant, you’re also a fundraiser. So your day job when you’re not, up at nights with a small child is that you are the director of community philanthropy for every Texan.
So you, you walk the walk, you talk the talk. I.
EVAN 1:00
See all the challenges. I try and work to improve on them. And that’s what I do I’d love to say nine to five, but we all know it’s not
RHEA 1:07
Yeah, good luck. I’ve never worked nine to five in my life. So before we jump into the book, which is exciting I just saw all the really positive reviews on Amazon, which is great.
Talk to us about your own journey in the nonprofit world
EVAN 1:20
When I was a small lad Which is funny because, as you know now, I am a small lad still, but getting into this work was uber accidental. Although, I think when I fast forward 20 25 years and I’m done with this work formally, it’ll all sort of make…
A heaping of sense, like I’ll be able to say this is how I wound that snake. I did a lot of performing arts stuff. Personally, I was lead singer bands and jazz groups, other things through college. That’s helped pave my scholarship. And so this idea of big. Public personality was something that I was super comfortable with and I did a lot of arts and culture work when I was near the tail end of Realizing what I thought I might be doing in my 40s, which was being a performer and finishing undergrad I was with a rock group that were doing a lot of benefit concerts, rock for the blank cancer cure Haiti earthquake and things like that, and so I somewhat cobbled that together into the start of a non profit career.
I finished undergrad, the rock and roll thing fell apart, and my parents were uber encouraging of me to do all that, but then they said, make sure you finish your undergrad, pull together some semblance of a degree, because you might just need it, and I might just did need it. And with the arts and culture stuff, I was real lucky to get a job at the Juilliard school, which led to another role in the arts another, another, another, and along the way, I’ve done all this wildly interesting stuff in multicultural spaces for the opera performing arts, Asian American cultural programming, and all the underpinning of a lot of that was just to do programs.
Sometimes you really need to make sure that there’s enough money coming in the door to make sure that you can pay your staff, pay your artists, et cetera. And a dear friend of mine, probably about 10, 12 years ago, said, you know, you do fundraising over here on the periphery. So it’s like lower bullet points on your resume, but have you considered trying it full stop?
And so I made that pivot in the early 2010s and I, at some point I might look back, but I haven’t yet. And it’s been interesting and fun and challenging and sleepless and wonderful.
RHEA 3:12
Yeah, it’s so interesting how people enter the field, like there’s so many accidental fundraisers. I mean, I’ve made a whole career out of helping accidental fundraisers, right?
Because so many of us accidentally got into this career. We’re charged with these big jobs, big missions with zero training. So fun.
EVAN 3:29
Yeah. We should just talk about that. I think it’s. Instead of servant leadership, that’s, it’s its own subject, it’s its own book. All right let’s
RHEA 3:36
just, let’s just pause there for one second because I, this is like my personal pet peeve.
I say this a lot, you would never go to a doctor who hasn’t been to medical school. You wouldn’t go to a lawyer who hadn’t been to law school. Why do we expect these executive directors and development directors to raise money when they actually haven’t been taught how to do it? And yet it is the lifeblood of a mission.
Your thoughts?
EVAN 3:55
Some of this is conditioning. And I think sometimes by lack of conditioning, there is conditioning, like we’re trying to sleep train our baby absent sleep training, baby’s gonna do whatever he wants. So in some ways, we do this to ourselves. And a lot of the stuff that I talk about issues that we might have with Program staff, externally, donors, board members.
I think this is wrought internally. I think most of the disconnects of the discord we have with those who are recipients of our mission work comes from internal struggle. That’s not an absolute, but I think when you look at the difference between processes and people stuff, it’s people oriented, this is a field where the ability to be lean.
And what I talk about this disparity between organizational fitness and organizational health. I was listening to your episode with, I’ll say Dr. Wong, because I’m forgetting her name. Oh, Ellen.
And this idea of what we think about happiness and health and her as a doctor in that experience.
So we, we look a lot and I won’t name the organizations, but let’s just say organizations that focus on being a nonprofit centered around water. Put those two together. There are some really big, visible, what I call like the biceps and buttcheeks of organizations that are easier to build up, like follower counts, big, boosty budgets and things like that.
None of those things necessarily indicate if an organization has vitality or if it has health. If you’ve got a budget that’s 2 million that grows to 4 million that grows to 10 million, cool, look at how fit that organization is. Is it one fundraiser doing that when there should be three to five?
And is that one fundraiser rotating every 16 to 18 months? And so being an industry that prides itself on leanness, we don’t create like an outgoing chief development officer, incoming overlap. We don’t think about making some budget money available to say, can we have this role? for four to six weeks, if not longer, just overlap.
So we get to know where the bodies are buried. Sometimes more literal than others and how the new person can come in and build upon this stuff. And so there is that lack of investment I find in time and resources, however you want to define them, that keeps people from developing and healing organizational mistakes.
That’s a certain leader. Behavior and that’s what I have found and some of it is just simply conceptualizing how to be better with our resources because It’s always like one person’s role stops on like june, end of june The next person’s role starts on july 1st because that’s when the new fiscal year comes and that’s when we’ll have the money But that’s so short sighted and we are a sector that loves being short sighted with those things.
Oh my god. You said
RHEA 6:23
a mouthful Yeah, I, my personal pet peeve is the ways in which scarcity mindset really keeps us from thinking expansively about the future, right? So we’re just like fighting over crumbs. So to your user example sure, that might’ve saved a couple thousand dollars, but in the longterm, as far as continuity of donors, that probably just cost you like a hundred thousand dollars.
And so are we, what’s that term? Like we’re stepping over the dollars to pick up the pennies.
EVAN 6:50
Do what? Penny wise dollar, stupid. Yeah, I think that’s the way my dad says it and you said something and I think it’s Penelope Burke’s research that shows like the cost of a departed fundraiser and let’s talk specifically about fundraisers is something like upwards of a million dollars over a period of three years when you think about the personal relationships that walk out the door.
With that fundraiser and the productivity that’s wild. When we think about inflationary rates that are like anywhere from seven to 11 percent and fundraiser three is I need a 5, 000 raise. And we’re like, no, we can’t afford it. And then when that person leaves after 16 months to go find the next gig, hundreds of thousands, six, if not seven figures worth of money walks away with that person.
And we wonder, we think about that scarcity mindset and here’s a little story, and I know I’m going off on it, but I remember once coaching with an organization. I was looking at their grant applications and budget after budget, you had the expense line that they were pitching to the foundation and how many examples I saw of like staff salaries lines that were zeroed out.
And then all the expenses were kept on the program side. And it’s are your program staff volunteering their time? No, we keep ourselves and it’s a scarcity mindset that we think funders exacerbate, which is not entirely untrue, but we, again, conditioning historically do that to ourselves. Like we keep ourselves poor because we have that mentality and then we don’t pitch.
A budget that includes a reasonable staff salary, reasonable benefits. And I, you had a couple of questions for me and I think I have some semi intelligible responses for them. No,
RHEA 8:20
Let’s stop here. Cause I, I just feel like this is like therapy. Cause I was literally just talking about this with Sherry Quam Taylor yesterday about the squeak by budgets, right?
Like we just we put in these little incremental budgets, like hoping that we’re giving ourself enough of a raise that they don’t jump ship. And yet. The work costs money, right? Like we should be able to construct a budget that represents the real cost of doing business. And we don’t do that.
And so we’re like constantly in this starvation mode of we can’t afford it, but we can’t afford it because we haven’t brought in the resource, but we haven’t brought in the resources. So we can’t attract the right personnel so that we’re constantly starving. I hear this all the time with folks that I talk to.
About my accelerator, right? Because it starts in the place of we’re not bringing in money. Okay. If you enroll in this accelerator, I can show you how to bring in more money. No, but we can’t afford it. Okay. So what’s the plan? I don’t know how to help you if nothing changes here.
RHEA 9:46
That’s really helpful, and I couldn’t agree more that you have to approach this with intentionality.
My question and Either of you can answer this as well is around the change management aspect, because, if your board is, as I say, pale and male, and you’re making this very significant pivot to a new mission, a new sort of focus area, how do you manage that? Because, obviously as well these are folks that you want to continue to have a relationship if you can, who have been important to the organization, who may also have, contributed to the capacity and the resources are like, what. What does that look like in a way that, is as elegant as it can be?
EVAN 9:12
I was at lunch with a dear friend who we’re both in this fundraising space.
He’s on sort of the CSR side and I’m on this side. And we were talking about this and it was one of these moments from not a rom com. because it wasn’t romantic, but we both paused and we both looked at each other and said, It’s me. I am the problem. It’s me. And it’s who knew that Taylor Swift would be the beacon of what we do wrong in nonprofits.
It’s us. I think not all the time, but like enough of the problem is us just not being secure enough, not being sane enough to put forward a budget. What’s the worst that a funder could say? We don’t fund overhead. Let’s talk about that. Et cetera, et cetera. And
RHEA 9:47
honestly, I feel like many funders are over that.
I think it’s just us carrying the baggage because I think so many funders have realized that this concept of overhead is actually like the cost of doing business. If you’re not funding staff, magical fairies are not going to be doing this work. I don’t understand who you think does the work.
EVAN 10:03
Yeah, I’ve worked the, at Every Texan. We’re a statewide public policy organization. And previously I was at an urban research think tank. Our overhead, our programs was the overhead. We had internal staff researchers and data people at Every Texan. We’ve got some of the state’s smartest people in social justice, public policy.
Our program expenses are our people. It’s not the traditional 80 20 rule. Less than 10 percent goes to the rent and the internet and things like that. The rest of it, if we don’t have our people, we can’t make sure that equity is instilled in state budgets when it comes to healthcare, education, budget and taxes and things like that.
So that conversation sometimes is difficult when it’s not a lot of funders because to your point, they’re getting there. We need to be strategic. Sometimes strategy is like the space between the prudent thing to do and the creative thing to do. It’s we’re not trying to pull a fast one over on you.
84 percent of our budget is people who do the program. So if you believe that every Texan should have access to all these things, this is how we help you get there.
RHEA 10:59
let’s talk about how boards are responsible for some of the scarcity.
So I get, and I had a really interesting podcast about boards and board innovation, which is a little bit of an oxymoron. yeah. Boards generally tend to be very risk averse. What I find very interesting is when you have board members who come in from the non, the for profit sector, and I’m not going to paint the brush and say everybody, but it’s very interesting to me how there’s a disconnect between the way they think about their business lives and the way that they think about their nonprofit lives.
Like in their business lives, they wouldn’t be like, you know what we should do? Cut marketing. Like we don’t need to worry about that if we want revenue. And yet, As soon as they enter the boardroom, somehow all of that goes out the window.
EVAN 11:42
True. Sure. And there, there is some of that, I don’t know, it’s like amnesia.
How many times have we sat in, and I’ve had this happen before, in committee meetings or board meetings where the thought leading idea is find a celebrity to help us fundraise. And it’s like, I don’t necessarily hate the idea, but my response is always, Do you know Michael Jordan? Do you know BeyoncĂ©?
Because I’m in Houston. And it’s no, but like, just call them. They love what we do in Houston. It’s like, all right, let me get back to you. Boop. BeyoncĂ©? Oh, we went to voicemail.
RHEA 12:15
Oh, wait, why don’t we just call Oprah? Don’t we, can’t we just call Mackenzie Scott? And just get a million dollars?
Okay.
EVAN 12:25
Yeah. Yeah. So I don’t, part of this, I do think again, let’s go internally. Like when I think about the book too, and I know you had some questions about this, like when I broke down, I want to talk about this a little bit later, but I worked with Mallory Erickson on transitioning the book into stuff that is not just like the ingredients, like what is, is it Mark Bittman that like big red cookbook, like how to cook anything like that’s what the book is, but I wanted to turn it into something actionable.
And I was thinking about, internally, again, scarcity can be how we are truthful with board members we bring on. So if we find Transcribed that really chief expert marketing brain or revenue brain or something like that at for profit company x and we bring them in.
We do this thing and I see organizations do it all the time where we join the board. We really just want to use your likeness and get your thought leadership. We don’t have conversations about philanthropy and what that really means. Not necessarily. For you to participate, we need a 5, 000 gift.
Would be lovely. I don’t necessarily believe in or against the give get mentality, but all board members, I believe, should play some role. In philanthropy, if that’s they’re a really smart brain who can help us craft better messaging great that helps us get out the door better if they have relationships and are interested.
I’m not a huge fan of that. Is it been on? What is that?
RHEA 13:37
Yeah, the model. Yeah. Yeah. It’s closed down now. Actually, did you know that
EVAN 13:42
I didn’t but look color me surprised. We can do and I’ve seen board members come on and then when that philanthropy conversation is brought in at the first board meeting they go wait.
I was explicitly told I wouldn’t have to do this. And again, I don’t put that necessarily on the board member. I put that a lot on the CEO or it often board governance falls to like fundraising staff. I think when in small organizations, it’s like the most logical place. We have this issue with just like saying what we mean and being a uber transparent, like Kim Scott’s radical candor.
Just say, if you join this group, we want your thoughts, we want your advice on, reaching celebrities, but we also need to have serious conversations about the financial health of this organization. Again, not just the financial fitness.
RHEA 14:24
I 100 percent agree.
I have a whole training about this, which is. Clear is kind, right? So we cannot fault people for being resistant to doing a thing that they weren’t, that they didn’t know that they were supposed to do in the first place. It’s not fair. It’s almost if I, if I say hey, Evan, we’re going ice skating.
JK, we’re going surfing. And you’re like whoa. I didn’t sign up for surfing. I signed up for ice skating. Dumb analogy, but you see what I’m saying.
EVAN 14:48
I get it. Yeah. I’m there. Yeah. I’m there.
RHEA 14:50
Okay, we can talk all about the things, but let’s talk about the book. So I’ve written a book, you just wrote a book, what was the impetus for you?
Because it’s not a, an inconsiderable undertaking.
EVAN 15:01
It’s not, and yours is great, and I have to tell people who are listening, you were one of the early people to read the initial manuscript in sort and provide some commentary, I appreciate that so much. The end result, it was the narrative vamped up version of my graduate research.
I did my thesis on this topic that I thought would be, the thing I always say is that I thought in writing that research study that it would be adding to a field that had a ton of great stuff out there. And it’s like that meme, if you’ve seen it, it’s like the picture of all these forks and one of the forks is janky.
And it’s just because you’re useful, just because you’re unique does not mean you’re useful. And I said, when no one has really done a lot of research on servant leadership, from the perspective of the fundraiser, there’s a lot out there on giving money away. So the guy who coined servant leadership in the 1970s, Bob Greenleaf wrote, I think I just wrote this piece for Candid about foundations.
And he said that the giving away of money may be one of the most difficult ways to serve. And so he did a lot of consulting. He was funded early on by the Lilly Endowment to do for a non for profit consulting on revenue and things like that. But I just found this gap in the academic research out there, the scholarship out there and the narrative research out there and I wanted to fill it.
That’s maybe the lead singer in me just wanting to put myself in front of the curtain. But what I found in the research is that it was interesting. And then I had a mentor who was the person who advised me on my thesis in grad school. And he said, you should maybe consider doing something big with it.
Take it out into the field. So I did these narrative interviews, spoke with a bunch of great people. And the book came together naturally. I submitted it to a couple publishers. I was ready to self publish it, which is Has its own challenges and has its own expenses. And then I was very fortunate to find a publisher Wiffenstock who at the moment was very interested in servant leadership and they took a chance on me.
So I don’t, if anyone’s listening and they’re like, I want to learn how to write a book. None of that was advice. Cause it was like happy accidents, just like getting into fundraising. But that was the synthesis of pulling together these core behaviors of servant leadership, how I saw them play out in my own career, how I saw them play out in other nonprofit leaders careers, and pull it together in under 90 pages, which I think is one of the reviews on Amazon was like, he did all this in under 90 pages, and I think like clear and concise can be kind.
RHEA 17:10
I 100 percent agree. I was just going to say that. Look, I know my nonprofit folks, they do not have time to sit and read a 300 page book. They’re like, give me the highlights, Evan. So in the spirit of giving us the highlights, how would you characterize servant leadership for folks who are unfamiliar with
EVAN 17:10
what I need to get better at, this is like the sixth conversation I’ve had on the book. The place I go to is talking about what I don’t think servant leadership is, but I want to try and go with what I do think it is. The misconception is that servant leadership is a human being who just gives gives, gives, like service to a fault.
There is like a martyrdom, a caretaking philosophy that is often tethered to servant leadership. We see it rampant. in the nonprofit sector. Scarcity, right? Like the CEO who’s worth 110, 000 who’s been taking a 21, 000 salary. That’s, you’re not ever going to give from your abundance. You’re going to give from the depth of your skeleton.
So servant leadership is this notion, the way that I view it, whatever sector you’re in, growing the orbit around you while making sure you’re growing yourself. And it’s different, I find, than a lot of the traditional leadership models, like the great man model, which is not always men, but usually that great charismatic person at the top of the organizational pyramid, or authentic leadership, transformational leadership.
Servant leadership is the paradox in that world, because so many people, when they talk about it, write about it, pontificate on it, keep it very ethereal. They keep it at that 100 200 foot level, and very few people have taken it down to the practical. Level, but I, but that’s the guy you’ve asked me for a short answer.
And I think it’s just growing those in your orbit while making sure you grow yourself.
RHEA 18:38
Wait, I’m just going to pause there because I use this as an example of once I was presenting a budget to my board and there was a question about a salary line and the response was something to the effect of why do we need to worry about a raise?
Isn’t the work Enough of a gift aren’t they like compelled by the work and I was just like, I’m sorry, my head literally just exploded. Like, isn’t your work just enough? Do you actually need to be compensated?
EVAN 19:04
I’m dying. I’m dying on the inside a little bit.
RHEA 19:06
Yeah, it was I think, luckily I had other board members like slap that down, but I was just like, I literally do not know how to respond to such an asinine comment.
So I’m just going to not talk. Thank you. Thank you
EVAN 19:20
for your contribution. Are there any other comments on this matter?
RHEA 19:24
Yeah, isn’t the work compensation enough? Okay. Anyway. about the book, because I think when we think about fundraisers, when we are operating at what I believe is the highest and best use of our talent, we are actually helping our donors to realize their wildest philanthropic.
ambitions, right? And so can you give me a sense of like, how do we apply this notion of servant leadership to fundraising?
EVAN 19:49
When I think of fundraising, I think of the health and wellbeing of the person making the asks, entering the data doing the prospect research. I think all those folks are fundraisers. I found interesting after the fact when I took the 30 practical recommendations in the book and I put them into a spreadsheet and I went This is for frontline fundraisers.
This is for CEOs. This is for everyone. This is for internal audiences. This is for external audiences. I found that two thirds of the recommendations in the book, and this probably would have been a healthier thing to do before publishing the book. But, you don’t always get hindsight is super clear.
Two thirds of the recommendations in the book were for frontline fundraisers or people that are directly chiefly responsible for revenue coming in, however you want to shake that out and of those. two thirds of those recommendations were meant to engage externally with donors. And so there are 10 core principles in here.
You don’t need to and probably shouldn’t get into all of them, but for each of them, like listening, let’s take listening for an example. What they, what we talk about as being like to solve any problem, the true natural servant. responds by listening first. And when we think of problem, I don’t want to misunderstand that something is always wrong in nonprofits.
When I think of a problem or like the prospect, it’s something that could be improved upon. It could be a donor who is giving. They’ve told you they’re not giving to their full capacity and they want to know how to invest more. I see that as a problem to solve. It’s a deafening of the relationship in listening.
Some of the very easy things that I point to, which is like stuff. When I think about the things that I’ve recommended in this book, they’re all like for the version of me, almost 20 years ago, like when I was super bad at these things, listening uber easy when you’re having a conversation with a donor.
Try to not be the first to contribute to every point that comes up. Make sure you’re waiting a few seconds. I call it like the new five second rule. Like you drop food on the floor, having a kid, that five second rule is like a very different thing in my mind right now. But some of these things are very simple when we think about how we do what we do as fundraisers for the betterment or improvement.
Of the relationship with the donor and none of this is to say we need to give too much of ourselves again that service to a fault mentality, like leaning into a conversation by leaning back and coming from a place of silence to make sure that your donor knows that there’s space for them to speak.
That is super kind of donors and you might just hear something that could be useful. You may be on a call with someone and you may hear kiddos screaming in the background. What’s I hear a little ruckus going on. What’s going on back there? Oh, that’s my grandkids. Note for the CRM, Evan’s got grandkids.
Let’s maybe ask about that later on. So in the practical nature of these recommendations, all of them center Most of them center on how fundraisers can do their work to better improve relationships with donors, to get the donors more invested, to talk about how they scale their giving, and sometimes that’s a dirty idea, give a donor a scale and they’ll go at the low end, but not always, I’ve seen it scale up.
I don’t know if that, that hit close to Your question enough.
RHEA 22:30
Yeah, it does. And actually so many things I wanted to touch on. So I want to stop at listening because I think that there are degrees of listening. So when I first started in this work, I heard you got to listen your way to a gift. And then I realized that all listening is not created equal and it actually took me five years of having a podcast to realize that I wasn’t really listening and my husband might argue that I still don’t listen anyway.
But the point being that and I had Jason Frazelle on this podcast and he talked about the three levels of listening, right? So level one is I’m listening with an agenda and I’m like thinking about how to basically network you based on the things they’re saying. which I think a lot of us do. Level two listening is I’m listening and I’m just fully present and I’m, here and I’m really deeply like connected and locked in.
And then level three listening, which I think is rare and exhausting, but really special is I’m listening for what’s not being said, right? I’m listening for tone changes. I’m listening. I’m looking at the body language changes, right? It’s really hard to do. So talk to me about the ways in which you think we can get better at listening and listening without an agenda,
EVAN 23:35
the listening, hearing disparity.
That’s like the difference between level one and levels two and three. I would Put them that way. The hearing is a very physiological thing. You know, Oral, A U R A L, reception of sound. Someone has said something, I enjoy the work you do. Boom, I’ve heard that. Note in the CRM is they enjoy the work we do.
Listening, it’s The line I’ve said before is the 1975, that British pop band have a great song, I think it’s called Ugg, and the line is, this conversation is not about reciprocation at all, but I’m going to wait until you finish so I can talk some more. That is the, and I’ve cited the 1975 in an academic paper on servant leadership, probably the first person ever to do that.
I’ll share a link to it. That is what most people bring to the conversation. I’ve sat with CEOs who are just, that’s what they’re doing. Their body language is arched forward. They’re just waiting to, for the comma or the semicolon or the period of what the donor or the prospect has said to say what we do in organization is blank.
You may never get there. The largest gifts, the largest six figure gifts I’ve ever been a part of. And I won’t be one of those fundraisers who says I raised. 50 million in my career. I think any fundraiser who says that is junking the fact that like we as organizations raised it. The largest gifts I’ve ever been a part of raising did not come with an ask.
It was active generative listening, which you can do three times better than you can speaking. That’s the research shows you can hear three times, you can listen to three times more things and you can speak with your mouth. You’re walk away from those conversations with a donor saying, I remember one time I barely said anything with a donor and we left and he goes, it was so nice talking with you.
I learned so much. And I was like Well, did I fall asleep? I don’t know what I said, but that turned into a six figure multi year gift. Up from someone who was making a thousand twenty five hundred bucks purchase of the gala table, or something like that. It can be a very simple start of the physiological stuff, and one of the recommendations I point to in the book is record yourself.
asking a question in the mirror or something and then waiting five seconds and just see how uncomfortable that might feel in the moment and then watch back and just see how quickly that went by. It’s like you can’t just go start bench pressing 150 pounds. You need to practice up to that. You need To see how you settle into that kind of space and so start with the physiological Build in those four or five seconds make sure in meetings with multiple people You’re not the first person to speak and I find over time that those practices become behaviors behaviors drive everything else.
RHEA 25:51
I want to talk about I want to talk about community centric fundraising for a second so I, I think servant leadership is somewhat tied to this idea of, of donor centric, right? Like, how are we creating, the conditions through which our donors feel part of this community, important and so forth.
Do you think that there is a contradiction at all between this notion of servant leadership and community centric fundraising?
EVAN 26:16
You would think of someone who. has experience researching this stuff that I would have thought about that before. I would say not necessarily, you know, if it’s, let me ask you a question that we’ll flip this little bit.
When you hear the phrase servant leadership, what does that evoke for you?
RHEA 26:31
I appreciate this jiu jitsu that you’re doing, Evan. I see what you’re doing! It evokes somebody who is, I say this a lot, who’s the guide, not the hero. That I’m, I am here to help you do the thing that you want to do in this world.
EVAN 26:44
And I love that, and let me tell you why that’s right. If we go back to Robert Greenleaf who initially wrote about this stuff, and I point to him a lot. He came to this understanding, he had a long career, 40 plus years AT& T doing like in house management. They, from what I understand, they kept trying to promote him to executive leadership.
And he was like, no, I am best here. He was like a gardener, cultivator of people. He read Herman Hesse’s Journey to the East, where in this book, you find this group of people on a journey. And their guide is a servant named Leo. And so in, if you Google servant leadership, you’ll see a lot about Leo. Leo disappears.
You find later on that Leo was the true leader of the group through his acts of service. It’s sort of, even though Bob Greenleaf was a Quaker, a lot of people point to the nature of Jesus Christ and his disciples and how he followed. So you are very right. And also There is this notion that when we think of servant leadership, we focus so much on the servant part, and that’s why the, those of us who purport to this do the little hyphen between servant leadership, like they’re not separate, they are tethered uniquely together, and that you lead through acts of service.
So I, I suppose I might disagree a little that. Servant leadership is uber donor centric. It could be where you put the built community. And when, the 10 traits that I focus on, really the begin with listening and the list ends with building community and the work that I did with Mallory was reframing this in kind of a roadmap or a framework where conceptualization is first and build community is the end.
And I think that’s the ultimate goal. If by putting a donor in the. In the mix, I don’t know if I would put them in the center, you work on building a community where the donor feels good about what they do. If that’s a hundred bucks, it’s a hundred bucks. That limit might be that limit and just stop trying to get that thousand bucks out of them when they’ve told you or not told you explicitly or inexplicably that’s where they’re comfortable.
So if all of this works towards a built community, I think a built community builds community. And so it all circles back together. Grown people grow people. I could keep going. I’ll take the tongue out of my cheek now. But since I hadn’t really thought about it too much, I would say that it’s, it could be sort of service to a fault donor centricity, which might theoretically be the antithesis of CCF.
And I pointed a little bit by inspiration to CCF in that donor bill of rights or the development fundraiser bill of rights that I wrote, because I was just inspired by how they, that movement thinks about their worth. And their wealth of being and how that can work. It’s not an adversarial relationship with donors.
It’s if I give too much of myself just for the donor. I remember once a donor called me and said, what gala do I have this weekend? And I said, It’s not ours, so I’m not sure I would know what gala you have, like that. I’m not the concierge. There is that mentality out there, but that is donor centricity to a service to a fault mindset.
I probably went way off base to your question, but that’s no,
RHEA 29:22
No. So this actually opens a really interesting pathway. As a fundraiser of color, right? And I know folks who listen to this podcast tend to be folks of color. I think there can be like a real sort of visceral reaction to this idea of servant leadership as a fundraiser, in part because I think of the history of being and feeling devalued by, generally speaking, a predominantly white donor base.
Talk to me about how the fundraiser of color might use this notion of servant leadership in a way that doesn’t feel like they have to devalue themselves or that they’re giving too much of themselves.
EVAN 29:56
It’s a big question. I’ll be frank with you. I’m probably, at this point, not the right person to have a great answer for it.
I think it would be, like, reductive on my part, and I wouldn’t want it to be trite. Part of this is, when we think about how we value ourselves, There’s a couple notes that I made. Let me flip screens, because I was preparing for this a little bit. Especially for, let’s just call it what it is, people who are fundraisers who don’t look like me.
And this is, I think, the research that I, there’s a part in the book where I focus on diversity and servant leadership, mostly through the lens of how we equitably hire. Fundraisers. When we look at the a hundred plus thousand people who the Bureau of Labor statistics say are fundraisers, it’s like less than 1 percent of all nonprofit staff, the AFP data shows in a dismally small population of fundraisers.
So in the notion of servant leadership, and I’m going to flip to it, we can use a couple of those practices to build better teams, and I think part of that is how we look at the lens through which we look at hiring. And I was talking about this at lunch with a colleague yesterday, when we think about how many jobs have you ever gotten because of the network you have.
And then when you think about people who don’t get those jobs because of the network that they’re lacking, there’s that program out there, I think it’s called applied, which is a blind hiring program where your skills go front and center. So your skills and your experience would be up there with Joe Smith, the fundraiser.
And then think beyond that, if you’re growing a team of fundraisers, and you bring that person who might be a person of color into the interview process. And let’s say you, Rhea, are sitting across the table from six people who look like me. Does the organization have a diversity issue? Could you not find…
Anyone on the team who resembles more of the audience or the community you’re trying to serve. That is a whole other issue in and of itself, but for fundraisers, that may be very telling if you’re sitting across the table from six white dudes and you’re like, do you have a feeling on this stuff? So there are a couple of ways that I think you could do it to build.
A team of fundraisers that comes from a broad experience. I know we talk sometimes diversity can be diversity of thought. I think sometimes that’s a cop out because it’s like, well, we have diversity of thought here. It’s sure you do. Can we come back to the equity conversation and really get to the center of it?
Without trying to paint with a broad brush, those are some of the things that I can think of. Yeah, it’s such
RHEA 31:55
a good point about the retention and I’m just really thinking, and maybe I’ll reread the book and have some thoughts here, but, you know, I certainly have seen instances in which fundraisers of color, whether it’s a DoD, is under kind of this notion of servant leadership is asked to basically put themselves on the line, right?
In the idea of the donor is always right. And again, I think it’s tied to scarcity too, which is, yeah. our refusal to call out bad behavior, our refusal to like, not all money is good money, right? Money that takes you off mission, money that makes you feel bad. I certainly have had donors where I felt, not necessarily because I was a person of color, but just there are some people who are just like shitty people that you don’t want to deal with.
And I think I’m just trying to thread the needle here between servant leadership and then being abused.
EVAN 32:39
Yeah. And we know it happens. Realistically, some of the things that we can do when we talk with donors, especially, is we need to have more prudent conversations about the reality, like naming the hard things. And so some of the research that I did for this, for the master’s work and for the book talks about the true nature of how much revenue gets raised annually.
And the research that I found over a 10 year period of time, it looked like 3. 9 percent growth year over year when you average it out. And so if you were to have doesn’t matter what kind of fundraiser, but especially if you have a fundraiser of color who may come from an experience pool, that makes them put themselves on the line.
And then you’re thrusting that person into an environment where you say, we need to grow, we need to hire six new staff, and that’s going to grow our budget 16%. Next year, if your organization is the kind of organization that gels with that 3. 94 percent growth year over year, you, there needs to be an environment of safety and comfort where any fundraiser, and I think in particular, fundraisers of color need to feel supported and cared for enough that they can broach that subject.
And so like this notion of if we do everything, We can’t and we sometimes might end up doing nothing because everyone gets in this cycle of burnout. And to be able to have that conversation, honestly, with donors, the example you gave were like money in money out, like we don’t have the bandwidth, the skill set to necessarily do these programs.
Is it bad money if it comes in where we have to redirect away from the mission? And that I think sometimes we put that Servitude concierge mindset on people a little bit more than we should, and there, there are some practical ways in here that we can avoid doing that.
RHEA 34:05
Evan, I can’t believe it’s been 45 minutes.
We could talk forever. Is there anything that I haven’t asked about that you think folks should know about the book or about servant leadership as it pertains to fundraising?
EVAN 34:16
wonderful. The thing that struck me and why I really got jazzed by this is how obviously, in my view and in my
conversations, the core tenets and behaviors of servant leadership nestled so nicely with the work we do in nonprofits.
And I think I had one person reach out to me on LinkedIn and they’re like a business sales development. For the business development person, not in fundraising, but like his girlfriend gave him the book and he was reading it and he said a lot of these are just applicable sales techniques. And I said, ew, first of all, but also that’s really wonderful.
So it’s applicable across the board. Doing them in this way and what I’m trying to work on at one of the notes you had for me earlier was like the workshop mentality of this what I failed to do in writing the book was think about what happens when people get excited about it and want to know more and want to think about how to activate it with their teams or with their organizations.
So that workshop mentality, that’s what I’ve been working on with Mallory Erickson on how to turn this into a framework. So I’m not trying to sell anything. I have a full time job. The book pays me, not very much.
RHEA 35:10
Pennies on the dollar. I know having written a book, I’m like, Oh, that was basically like a volunteer opportunity.
EVAN 35:16
You would think of someone who. has experience researching this stuff that I would have thought about that before. I would say not necessarily, you know, if it’s, let me ask you a question that we’ll flip this little bit.
EVAN 26:16
I’m always open for a conversation to people reach out if they’ve read through the book or read some of my blog posts and things. Just so they have questions on it. There’s so much in here that. I want to learn more from people, and there needs to be a bit more systemic research done.
In the for profit world, the financial returns on servant led companies are two and a half times greater than those of non servant led companies. There’s not really any or enough research on how servant leadership translates to functional dollar increases. I’ve seen it happen. There’s one of the CEOs that I interviewed in the book is the head of one of the largest social service organizations here in Houston.
And he spoke with a donor who like blatantly told him like, I’ve made seven figure gifts elsewhere. Y’all aren’t on my radar. Just know that up front, but what he ended up doing, because he was, he really liked the person, this person was interested in like senior care, and so he ended up like going with this person to city council meetings, media interviews, and it took a while, but that person said, you know what, you had empathy for me in this notion of being, one of the things they say in servant leadership is there I am also, as opposed to me, myself, and I, and Empathy as a practice.
He just followed like a puppy, followed this person around, learned about what they did, and a seven figure gift came their way over time. So there are these, I would say anecdotes, and I will do more research on this, of when leaned into because it feels like the right thing to do. Through servant leadership translates to dollars.
And one of the things that I said in the book, and I don’t mean for this to be reductive, it’s like all of us who purport to call ourselves fundraisers, whatever your job is, your work connects directly to revenue. If you’re a constituent relations officer, if your job is full time stewardship, you never ever meet with a donor, but you’re writing things that inspire giving or people to feel good.
All of our work up the ladder down the ladder is supposed to encourage donors to feel good about parting with their money. And so this is a way to do that. And we have some early evidence of how revenue grows. And I think that’s the major goal. But if people feel good about their work, if they feel more connected, if they feel part of a built community, it cycles back and then they want to listen more and et cetera, et cetera.
RHEA 37:09
Yeah. Yeah. And I think, it’s so simple and yet we don’t do it, which is how do we think about the work from the standpoint of our donors? Like What’s in it for them? Do I have empathy for their situation? Am I helping them to achieve the thing that they want? It’s interesting. I don’t know if you’re familiar with Never Split the Difference, Chris Voss’s work.
It’s an FBI hostage negotiator. Anyway, not important. But I took his seminar and one of the things that is so interesting to me is As an FBI hostage negotiator, the tactic is not to go in and be like, okay, this is how it’s going to be like da. We’re going to send the SWAT team. It’s to understand the situation that the hostage taker is in.
In order to empathize with their situation, which is not something that you would have imagined I’m going to empathize with the hostage taker, but there it is. So if it works with hostage takers, it’s going to work with donors.
EVAN 37:55
hat makes me think too, about the way that we’re in this country, especially thinking about like criminal justice reform and how we think of, I don’t know why this made me go here, but like, when we think of imprisonment for drug abuse.
When really drug abuse is more of a it’s a larger sort of medical clinical thing that we should Maybe we shouldn’t send police officers as the first thing. And so there’s this empathy of understanding that like, sometimes people who put themselves in that position, don’t do it from a criminal intent.
I think, I don’t know the research, but it would occur to me that people have a different reason for how they get to different places. And if we listen better, if we’re aware. And try and have empathy by being with them on that journey. It doesn’t mean you, if you’re talking with someone about cancer care, you may not have had anyone in your family who suffered from cancer.
My wife and I, unfortunately, everyone who’s deceased in both of our families passed away from cancer. So we have experiential empathy for it. I could talk with the donor till the cows come home about that sort of work. But if you can just be there with people, be present with them, that the basics of servant leadership are super simple.
I think people would read those and say this is what I do anyway. How can you encourage other people to think in that way? And that servant leadership is not a dirty phrase. It’s it’s empathetic. It’s It’s built with conceptualization it’s founded in trust and there are all these things that just they hug the nonprofit sector.
RHEA 39:07
I love that. All right, Evan, our time is up. This has been so fun. I hope we do this again. I will make sure that all the info is in the show notes, including the link here. Really excellent and quick read. So I recommend everyone go out, get this book, Amazon, you can’t afford not to, and I will make sure your LinkedIn is in the show notes so that folks can get in touch with you.
If you’ve liked this podcast, please do me a favor, go on Apple podcasts and rate and review. It helps with folks finding out about the show in the meantime, Evan, thank you for joining us.
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