Are you trudging through the fundraising world, feeling the weight of ‘never enough’? It’s time to drop the scarcity storyline and embrace the abundance that surrounds us.
We’ve all carried baggage into our donor meetings, narratives laced with trauma and social hurdles. But what if I told you, it doesn’t have to be that way?
Let’s talk about the biggest game-changer in fundraising – your mindset.
In today’s episode, we’re exploring how the tales we tell ourselves can make or break our fundraising effectiveness. I dive into the deep end of money narratives, discuss how our brain operates under stress, and reveal how shifting your state of mind from survival to executive mode can transform your fundraising efforts.
You don’t want to miss this journey beyond the numbers, into self-awareness where you’ll find the key to long-term fundraising success isn’t just in the ask—it’s in the attitude. It’s time to cultivate an abundance mindset, and I’m here to guide you.
Your next big ask might just need the SPACE you’ll discover within.
Important Links:
https://go.rheawong.com/big-ask-gifts-program
Episode Transcript
Welcome to Nonprofit Lowdown, I’m your host, Rhea Wong.
Hey, podcast listeners, Rhea Wong with you once again with Nonprofit Lowdown. Happy 2024. If you’re listening to this when it airs, and I wanted to share some really exciting news with you. Some of you may be familiar with the fact that I have the fundraising accelerator, which is my nine week group coaching program.
At this point, I’ve had 10 cohorts go through over a hundred people, and we’ve been seeing some incredible results. People are regularly 4X, 10X, 40X ing their initial. Investment, but it’s not perfect. I’ve gathered all of the feedback and I’m excited to tell you that this year we are relaunching under a new name called Big Ask Fundraising.
It’s bigger, it’s better. I am re recording all of the modules based on new information. all of the research and the feedback that I’ve received. The biggest news is though, that it’s now instead of a nine week program is six month program. The reason being that I got a lot of feedback that nine weeks is just not enough time to get.
Work done. I get it. It’s an intense program. It’s called The Accelerator. However, I think particularly in 2024 so many of us are going to be Feeling stressed and anxious, especially here in the US with the presidential elections coming up the time that we have to six months where you will still get weekly check ins with experts with my co pilot Marvin Villain and with myself And you’ll have more spacious as we’re also adding in a lot more to help with mapping out your progress milestones and road and a roadmap.
If you have been wondering about joining, if this is something that you’ve been thinking about, I think 2024 is absolutely the year to do it. We will be opening the doors. Every 12 weeks, but our very first cohort of 2024 is starting February 1st. Applications are open right now. If you are interested, check it out at rheawong.com
Part of revamping the accelerator, HERETO4 will be known as Big Ass GIFs. I’ve created a framework called the SPACE framework. And the SPACE framework is, our tagline is, Big asks, need SPACE. SPACE is an acronym, and SPACE stands for S. State of mind. P. Process. A. For the next five podcast episodes, I’m going to, I’m going to tackle each one of these acronyms and go a little bit deeper into what I mean by each of them.
Today we’re going to be talking about S, state of mind. Now, for any of you who have been listening to me for any amount of time, you know that I am passionate about money mindset. The reason being that I think as fundraisers, the biggest hurdle that we have to get over is our own stuff about money. What do I mean by stuff about money?
Let’s take a step back. When we think about our relationship in orientation to money and how we’ve learned to be in the world with money, oftentimes that comes from our family life, our parent figures, or in many cases. The ancestral trauma that we’ve inherited, especially for folks of color, the systems that are oppressive, like capitalism, white supremacy, racism, et cetera, it all boils into a soup and we absorb those messages about money.
And unfortunately, for many of us, not something for all of us, but for many of us, the messages that we receive about money are not positive, are not necessarily rooted in abundance. They’re rooted in scarcity. What do I mean by that? In the non profit world, especially I find, and given the fact that our sector is called non profit, it already starts from a negative, I think that so many of us are swimming in this stew of not enough.
We don’t have enough time. We don’t have enough staff. We don’t have enough money. Now when we’re operating from that sense of not enough, we are operating from a scarcity place. And our brains are only ever in one of two states, either executive or survival. Survival state is when our amygdala, which is our lizard brain, is operating from a sense of that we’re actually being threatened, even if no threat occurs.
And this is not Our fault in any way, as I mentioned, much of it is linked to trauma that we have either inherited or trauma that we’ve been brought up with or the trauma that we experience in day to day life and living in a capitalist society. When we are operating from this place of trauma, we are operating in a fear state and that’s when our adrenal glands are going, that’s when our cortisol levels are elevated, that’s when we’re stressed out, when we’re freaking out.
And instead, if we can actually learn how to operate from our executive state, which is where your prefrontal cortex is engaged, and we can operate from a sense of abundance and possibility and creativity. Now the first step, I believe, is understanding our own states of being, our own brains, and being able to manage our own emotional state and our own brains.
Now, as I mentioned, because so many of us experience trauma in our lives or scarcity, or in my case, in my family, there was a story about money where the feedback loop was really based in scarcity. We’re never going to have enough and our money is survival. If we don’t actually unpack all of these narratives, we bring all of that narrative to the practice of fundraising.
I want to be very clear here that sometimes we have this assumption that if somebody has resources or if they’re quote unquote rich, they have no baggage about money. Nothing could be further from the truth. I think we all have baggage about money or trauma. Related to money. In any case, if we haven’t done the work of unpacking this trauma of money, unpacking these unhelpful narratives about money, we bring it to the table.
Imagine a, an invisible pile of baggage that you’re sitting on. Imagine your donor is also sitting on an invisible pile of baggage and in between you is a gap. Both of you are trying to bridge the gap while sitting on two large piles of emotional trauma and baggage. When we do that, we get into unhelpful behaviors like perfectionism or procrastination or believing that a rejection is a reflection of our value as humans or the value of our work.
What would it be like for you if you disconnected the value of your work From the outcome, what if instead the win was the ask, what if instead the win was simply the process and doing what you knew was right in order to get to the ask, because at the end of the day, you have no control over the outcome.
You literally, and believe me, I’ve tried, you literally have no control over whether or not someone says yes or no. All you can control is what you’ve done up to that point and did you get the ask out of your mouth. And so when we disconnect our value as humans, our values as fundraisers, whether or not I’m quote unquote, a good fundraiser or a bad fundraiser from the outcome, we start to be able to live in a space that’s less controlled by the fear and the anxiety and the scarcity about money and more into the creative generative space of, Hey, maybe this was not the right thing for this person.
And that’s okay. So what I’m offering up to you is that in order for us to be good fundraisers, quote unquote, or in order for us to be effective fundraisers over the long term, the first step is managing your mind. It’s like being an athlete. If you are a successful athlete, after a certain threshold of skill level, all of it is just a mind game.
And I like to think of fundraising in the same way. It’s like my sport. I’m not a sporty person, but I guess fundraising is my sport. And I really believe that if we are able to manage our emotional state and manage our mental state, we can then Manage ourselves over the long term. And oftentimes the emotional reactions that we’re having is because our brain is interpreting the circumstances, the external circumstances beyond our control as direct threats to our personhood or direct threats to our livelihood or.
If the narrative that you’re telling yourself is, if I don’t get this gift, my job is on the line and I’m not going to be able to provide for my family. Of course, it’s going to put you in a fear state. One of the things that I think is absolutely fundamental to being an effective fundraiser is to unpack the story that you’re telling yourself and figure out, and part of what we do in the course is that we.
Work on this is we practice ways in getting ourselves into a calm state. We calm our nervous system down. We stimulate our vagus nerve in order for us to teach our bodies and teach our brains to rewire our neural pathways. into getting out of that fear survival state and getting into the executive state where we can operate with a sense of calm and a sense of creativity.
A couple other things that I just want to flag here as well is I would not be surprised, and this is often the case, that members of your staff and members of your board very much operate in that survival mind state. When you’re coming from this survival mind state, that is when you’re white knuckling things.
That is when you’re grinding or hustling. And sure, that can be effective in the short term, but you can’t sprint a marathon. I guess if you’re a Kenyan runner, you can sprint a marathon, but it’s very rare. And over the longterm, it’s not a recipe for sustainability to sprint marathons. Part of the work that I want to help all of us do is to get into a mind state, a state of being, a state of mind that allows us to operate from a sense of abundance and calm rather than a state of being anxious and freaked out.
Part of this is imagining certain things. Take a step back and imagine how might you act differently if there was a world where there was a pile of money. Out there in the world, and it had your name on it, and all you had to do was find it. How does that feel different to you than imagining that there is no money that exists out there for you?
If the story that you have is, there’s not enough for me, what I want does not exist, what I want I can’t have, I don’t belong here. You’re automatically signaling to your brain that it is in a state of survival. That it needs to survive something. And the beauty of being a human is that we have the ability to train our brains to be open, to live in a state of abundance.
Because the truth of the matter is we are now living in the most prosperous time in human history. And for those of us living in the U. S., the wealthiest country in the world. So this is never a question of, is there enough out there? There certainly is enough out there. Now, the issue may be a distribution problem, but the issue as it stands right now is not, is there enough out there for me?
There are certainly enough resources the U. S. Treasury is printing out money as we speak. And so if we can step into a world and heal some of the trauma and understand where some of these narratives are coming from, and then with discernment, with intentionality, choose the stories that we want to tell ourselves and choose the way in which we want to heal ourselves from that trauma that we’ve inherited or the trauma of simply living in this country in 2024, then we can start operating from a sense of possibility and abundance.
A lot of it also has to do with the way that you frame things, the way that you speak to yourself about things, the things that you notice. If I’m in a story loop about how there’s not enough out here for me and fundraising is hard and people aren’t generous, what my brain does, because the brain is really good at filtering things.
So if there’s a story that you’re telling yourself, your brain will automatically find instances in which you are correct. Your brain likes to be right. Your brain likes to be in a state of safety. Safety is predictable.
Let me tell you a story about a tiger. I love this story. There’s this tiger in the Washington DC Zoo named Raja. And Raja the tiger was this beautiful tiger that had a very small cage. And poor Raja would pace back and forth. What they did in the D. C. Zoo is they made this beautiful enclosure where Raja could run around free. The day of the opening, they put the cage in and they opened the door thinking that Roger would bound out of this cage into this beautiful enclosure.
They opened the door and guess what happened? You might guess Raja continued to just pace back and forth for the rest of his days in this little cage because we as human beings, our brains crave predictability, our brains crave consistency. In many cases, our brains would, our brains will choose consistency over liberation.
If the story that you tell yourself and the story that feels familiar to you is one of scarcity of what is of being stressed of is of not having enough, you will find instances in which you are right. The work ahead of us is retraining our brains, retraining our neural pathways in order to experience a different outcome and to experience the world differently.
How might it be different for you? If you came to the space of fundraising from a place of possibility and joy versus anxiety and scarcity, I think it changes everything. I think fundamentally, and this is why this is the first module in the space series is state of mind is everything and everything else can be learned.
But big challenge is that we have to help liberate ourselves internally and liberate ourselves from the narratives that no longer serve us also recognizing I understand, we live in reality, it’s not that inequities don’t exist, it’s not that racism doesn’t exist, it’s not that sexism doesn’t exist, these things all exist.
And I think we have to hold two things in our minds at the same time. These things exist and we can choose to interact with them differently. We can choose to not be victimized by it. We can choose to not operate from a sense of fear and scarcity. And so I think the work of fundraisers is fundamentally that of healing and fundamentally that of being spiritual warriors.
Because if we can heal ourselves and step forward into the world with courage and abundance and possibility, we can be examples to other people of what is possible. If this is resonating for you, I would love to see you in the. I would love to see you in the program. Let me talk about who it’s for.
Generally speaking, I think the executive directors and development directors of organizations of at least I would say a hundred thousand dollars a year with some evidence of an individual gift program and folks who are looking to take their fundraising to the next level and build a major gifts program are people who would most benefit from my program.
Again, it’s a six month program. A big part of it is that you will have a cohort of folks that you can move forward with together because I think the other piece is we crave community. We crave courage together. If this is resonating for you, I definitely recommend that you check it out. rheawong. com.
Click on the big ask gifts tab and hope to see your application. Okay. So next week we’re going to be talking about process, which is the P in the space framework. You’re going to love it. I’ll talk to you soon. Have a good week.
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/nonprofitlowdown/support
