Do your donor relationships feel like transactional nightmares or mutually beneficial partnerships?
Post 2020, many nonprofit executive directors find themselves wrestling with dwindling donor bases, transactional relationships, and the struggle to turn one-time gifts into enduring support. The transactional approach is not only soul-sucking for your staff but also ineffective for fostering long-term donor relationships.
The same old tactics just won’t cut it if you want to attract and nurture the donors of tomorrow.
Today’s guest, Allison Fine of Every.org has dedicated her career to merging technology with social good. From her early days in the nonprofit sector to writing influential books like The Networked Nonprofit and The Smart Nonprofit, Allison has been a thought leader and advocate for ethical, relational fundraising.
Tune in to this episode to hear Allison Fine’s fresh take on turning fundraising from a transactional nightmare into a relational dream.
Trust me, you won’t want to miss this one!
Important Links:
Allison Fine: https://www.linkedin.com/in/allison-fine-a07132/
Governance as Leadership: A Conversation with William Ryan (https://www.bridgespan.org/insights/governance-as-leadership-a-conversation-with-willi)
Episode Transcript
RHEA 00:00
Hey you, it’s Rhea Wong. If you’re listening to Nonprofit Lowdown, I’m pretty sure that you’d love my weekly newsletter. Every Tuesday morning, you get updates on the newest podcast episodes, and then interspersed, we have fun special invitations for newsletter subscribers only, and fun raising inspo, because I know what it feels like to be in the trenches alone.
On top of that, you get cute dog photos. Best of all, it is free, so what are you waiting for? Head over to rheawong. com now to sign up.
Welcome to Nonprofit Lowdown, I’m your host, Rhea Wong.
Hey, podcast listeners, it’s Rhea Wong with you once again with Nonprofit Lowdown. Today I’m so excited because my guest is Alison Fine, the president of Every. org. And today we are talking about relational fundraising and why the old ways are dead. So Alison, welcome to the show. Thank you for having me, Rhea.
So before we jump into it, because we can say so many things, tell us a little bit about yourself and your journey to being the president of Every. org because you were independent for a long time and now you’re at a tech company, which is a little, maybe a little bit unexpected from given your trajectory.
ALLISON 01:12
I think that’s just right. That’s just the right way to put it. I’ve always worked in the nonprofit sector for years, starting in the early 2000s. I worked at the intersection of tech and social good, started to write about it wrote my first book momentum in 2005 and then wrote the network nonprofit with our friend Beth Cantor in 2010.
And then two more books, and it was just fascinating, Ria, with the ways that digital tech can move power from inside of organizations outside to people and communities, and can give us all a voice that we didn’t have before when it was just organizations in the analog world. And then two years ago, the founders of Every.
org came my way. They said they were looking for a president to scale. This beautiful platform that they had built and I was blown away by the platform and so excited at this point in my career to actually be able to lead an organization in all the ways I’ve been talking about building organizations and networks for years and years, Rhea, and it has been.
The most joyful and fulfilling moment in my career being here.
RHEA 02:32
I love that so much. And actually everyone should check out every. org because one of the things I love about every. org is it’s actually built for nonprofits by nonprofits. And I think,
I was just at AFP a couple of weeks ago and there just seemed to be such a disconnect between the tech people and the fundraisers.
ALLISON 02:52
exactly right. That’s exactly right. It’s tech built by commercial companies to make us largely go faster, right? Everything is about efficiency and moving all the wheels internally faster and faster. And you and we’re going to talk about in a second why that doesn’t work, but working for an organization, right?
Who’s fundamental values are so in tune with the nonprofit community because we are a member of the community, right? That we value. We’re deeply human centered. We want organizations to be whole. We want tiny organizations to have the same access to quality tech as large ones. And so there’s no disconnect between who we are and what we’re trying to do and the people that we’re serving.
I love that.
RHEA 03:43
All right. Let’s get into it. We’ve teased this enough. Yeah. Let’s go. So we started this conversation talking about relational fundraising and I think, coming out of the sector, there is a very strong tendency to be in a transactional mindset, right? I do stuff to my donors, I extract something from them and then I lather, rinse, repeat.
And I don’t think it’s a surprise that our donor retention rates are at an all time low. We see very dismal return rates from first time donors. So I’m, so many questions here, but let me start with this. What do you see out in the world?
ALLISON 04:20
So I see a whole bunch of problems out in this field not the least of which, is the incredibly high burnout rate of development staff.
This job is so hard and unless you have been sitting in one of those seats, having the C suite and the boards yelling at you day after day to bring in more money, and to have to stay on that hamster wheel of transactional fundraising, where you’re just trying to find more and faster ways of asking people for money over and over again, even though you, many of them know in their heart of hearts, It doesn’t work and it doesn’t feel good to you internally and to the donors and to have to do that day after day is soul sucking for a lot of people and development people will tell you that in private, they won’t tell you out in the world.
I get that. But in private, how do you. How does it feel, to get up and do your job every day? And the words you will hear is super stressful and not values aligned with us organizationally. And so this has been decades in the making. This is not a brand new problem, right?
Decades and decades of taking the norms. Of selling stuff to people through direct mail, maybe it was a catalog. Maybe it was a magazine. It also became fundraising right in the 1960s and 70s. And that model became email fundraising, online fundraising. And it’s built entirely on that transactional speed.
And when you build a system where things like a 3 percent response rate is considered good, something is fundamentally broken. You did something to the 97 percent that was bad. If you were ignored, you were unsubscribed, or you got an angry email back, right? This isn’t a good model. And if you ask donors, how does it feel to keep getting all of this Spam.
We know how to feel. They’re unsubscribing as fast as they get it. So this is what I call the leaky bucket problem. You put a thousand donors into a system on day one, and it costs you a lot of money to go out and get those a thousand dollars and fewer than a quarter of those donors will come back and give a second gift.
And what’s the response? You do it all over again. Yeah. So you’re caught in this cycle of very expensive acquisition. With no longevity of these donors. And organizations are in an absolute panic about it. Yeah.
RHEA 07:01
it reminds me of the definition of insanity, right? Doing the same thing over and Over and over, that rinse and repeat,
ALLISON 07:06
as you said, right?
RHEA 07:08
Yeah. So what’s interesting about the role of technology and AI is I think often, to your point it’s sold to nonprofits as like a way to do it at scale. So you’re just sending more bad emails faster. What’s the alternative here? Yeah.
ALLISON 07:25
Beth Cantor and I wrote a book in 2021 called the smart nonprofit.
And at the heart of that is this next chapter in technology, AI and AI at its heart, if we do this well, which is a huge question, right? If we do it well, AI is going to do a lot of the administrative tasks for us, not the thinking work, not the feeling work, just the rote tasks that take up 25, 30 percent of every staff person’s time.
It’s going to help. Even out the workflow, you’re going to be able to find information faster. It’s going to do that first cut of communications. It’s going to reconcile the budget and the books. It’s automatically all the time. You don’t need that frantic week before the board meeting, trying to see if the, how the budget numbers look right.
RHEA 08:15
as you’re talking, I’m getting like PTSD. Everybody has that week, right? Or like you send out the board book and no one reads it and then no one reads it.
ALLISON 08:24
It’s Yeah. Okay. Three inches. Counting it in the very second. Yeah. And everything else stops when you have those weeks, right?
You don’t actually get any other work done because everybody is frantically trying to get that information together. AI can. Do all of that for us for the purpose, Rhea, of creating what Beth and I call the dividend of time, right? The end result of this is unlike that last chapter in digital tech, where we just, everything got louder, so much louder and faster.
The point here is to free up human beings to do what we do best, which is build relationships and solve problems and create community together. If we can do that, then development staffs can lift up their heads from their screens, pick up their phones, go out to lunch, go and talk to donors, get to know them, tell their stories.
Now we have a chance of increasing that donor retention rate.
RHEA 09:23
So as you’re talking, that sounds fantastic. And actually I may have coined a friend’s tagline, which is let the robots robot, let the humans human. But it also occurs to me that we have all these technology tools at our fingertips that feel a little bit invasive, feel a little bit icky, right?
You’re, but the cookies following us around and checking what my click rates And so I’m wondering, is that in opposition to this idea of relational fundraising or trust based fundraising.
ALLISON 09:52
So we’ve always. Had marketing approaches to communications and fundraising and not just nonprofits in, in all companies, all organizations, right?
We want to appeal to what’s of interest to that person out there. Now we are going to know an awful lot about people more than we have ever known. And I would love to see Rhea, the nonprofit sector writ large step up to be the most ethical users Of the most powerful technology we’ve ever had instead of copying the corporate rules on privacy and data security, which is what we did last chapter.
For instance we allow people to unsubscribe from our list, but we don’t get rid of their data like they do in Europe. They have a right to be forgotten in Europe. And that’s the kind of standard we ought to set for the nonprofit sector. So now that we’re going to have mountains and mountains, what we call Library of Congress sized data sets at our disposal, we have to be super careful about how we use that and whether and how we’re customizing our appeals to people or manipulating people.
And that’s going to be a very hard line to define. But. Before we get into trouble with it, it would be great to have a sector wide conversation about what that means.
RHEA 11:17
Yeah. And there’s such a tension here too, because you want to be able to use the tools to be effective and to actually deliver value and interest.
To people and at the same time, you don’t want to manipulate them and you don’t want to make them feel like their privacy is invaded because frankly, no one likes that.
ALLISON 11:38
If you can get off of the transaction hamster wheel. Yeah, you can really think about how can I. connect with my donors and supporters in real human ways, aided by this information that I know about what they like or why they came here, right?
If you’d stay on the hamster wheel, then the only thing of interest to you is, did they click? Did they click right now we’re in a bad human place where values go out the window. And I have had conversations with development Directors and ask them, why are you allowing that hamster wheel to continue to churn over there when everything else that you do in your organization, all of your comms, all your programs are so values aligned.
You care so deeply about people. And yet you’ve got this thing churning over here. That’s dreadful. If I didn’t know you as a human being, I would never give to your organization. And I actually had somebody with tears in her eyes say, until this conversation, I never thought about it. It was just on autopilot.
You just let it go. Because the consultants tell me that’s how you do it.
RHEA 12:50
I know. Actually, you and I had this moment where Again, I was at AFP icon, but it just feels like we’re repackaging the same bad advice over and over again. And because we don’t have a new model of what it could be, we just keep telling people the same thing.
So how do we get off the hamster wheel?
ALLISON 13:09
Yeah.
RHEA 13:09
so first we have to know it’s a hamster wheel, right? It’s a little bit like the Matrix, like
ALLISON 13:14
I know! There is no spoon! That’s exactly like the full story we’re gonna take. A big first step, Bria, is to have a reckoning in our sector of This is really bad, even if those retention rates weren’t falling, even if 20 percent fewer people weren’t giving today than they did in 2000.
This model does not reflect our values in our sector and in our organizations, right? Having the default setting within your organization that we are going to ask. Every day in every way because somebody might give, right? That’s what we’re taught. It should be the norm. It’s dreadful. So now we have to say, you know what?
That was last century. It no longer works. It might have worked then. I don’t think it actually ever did work, but okay, it definitely doesn’t work now. It doesn’t work for staff. It doesn’t work for donors. So now we’re going to identify the first step is new measures, right? Because if you don’t measure it, you don’t value it.
So Rhea, if we’re talking about organizational change or the first stop on our journey is the boardroom. So those board members who are saying how much cash in the door, this. Order need to start asking different questions. What’s our donor retention rate? I have been on boards for years and have never had a discussion about donor retention rates.
Not once right on the dashboard. And the second question is, what are our donors telling us? About how we make them feel, which would mean actually asking them.
RHEA 14:49
I know, cause oftentimes, and I’m guilty of this too, cause I just didn’t know any better was just like throwing tennis balls into a vacuum cleaner, right?
We’re going to send them this newsletter. Do they want this newsletter? We’re going to send them this annual report. We’re going to do this. We’re going to do that. And then, there are some series of I’m going to take in order to. Hem them up for a solicitation without ever having once asked the question.
ALLISON 15:15
That’s right.
RHEA 15:15
Why does this matter to you?
ALLISON 15:17
Why did you come here? What brings you here? What’s your story? Did we make you feel like an ATM machine or a human being? What would it take for you to tell three friends? About us and bring them to something with you. What, how do we, how can we empower you to do that?
How can we make you feel like you want to do that? All of these really rich human questions that don’t get asked. If you’re just on that hamster wheel all the time, right? So the reorientation starts in the boardroom with different measures, and then we’re going to have to start with some small experiments within development departments of, for instance, Rhea, what if you looked at your donor base by zip code and invited 10 people in the same zip code to have coffee together?
Not about you, not for you, not as a fundraiser. They have you in common. So they probably have other things in common as well.
you’re talking about building a community, right? Instead of these passive donors that you want to click on something
RHEA 16:19
now we’re human, right? It’s so interesting. You say that because you’re really right in that.
Every other aspect of the organization is focused around relationship building, trust building, community building, except for the development department. Exactly. And they’re treated like witches. I think about, again, like the matrix of we’re just sucking the juice out of people.
ALLISON 16:41
And we are, Deciding what their value is based on their latest check.
Everybody does this, right? If you have a 10, 000 donor, they have a certain value in the organization. And you treat them in a certain way, right? Which is very different than how you treat a 25 donor. Now, all you have is that one data point. About them for your, in your organization coming in that 25 donor could have a lot of money and a lot of friends and a lot of resources, but because you treat them like they have no value.
That’s what you get back. Yeah.
RHEA 17:21
I’m wondering though, again, not to, I agree with you. And I wonder in a world of staff constraints and yeah
ALLISON 17:30
I’m just going to say this. I know it sounds like a lot of work.
RHEA 17:33
It does sound like a lot of work, but I also just wonder how do you do that at scale?
Maybe the answer is AI, but cause it, what it sounds like is setting aside the time and the bandwidth to really treat every single person as a. As a valuable person to the organization and quite frankly, we all know that EDS are running around with their hair on fire. So as a shortcut, I am probably going to treat the 10, 000 donor a bit differently than I treat the 25 donor.
So how do we solve for that?
ALLISON 18:02
So, first we actually have to take some things off of the plate. And there’s something about nonprofit. Maybe it’s because we don’t have a profit margin, Rhea, where we just keep doing the same activities year after year, whether they work or don’t work right like you were saying of the throwing the things against the wall.
So how many organizations insist on producing a newsletter. That no one reads, no one values, right? And that’s a ton of staff time. What else are you doing that you don’t need to do anymore, right? What can AI do administratively? What are the communications you have with donors that are actually working?
Which again, would require you to talk to donors and have them give you feedback. Talk to donors?
That’s so scary, Allison. Why would I do such a thing? We need to get down to the essence. What are the actually most, the most important things you need to do as an organization, right? Do those well, and then you will have time to talk to people in different ways.
So for instance, Rhea, it’s not so much that you should have a personal email communication with every donor. It is about asking for more feedback from your whole, your entire donor base. And welcoming input. I’m always surprised at how reluctant people are to put real email addresses on communications, right?
So that info at. Email up there. That’s not an invitation to a conversation, right? That’s an invitation to a black box somewhere like the suggestion box at the reception desk, right? Have a real person available to answer a question, to engage with somebody. It will not be nearly as many people as you think it’s going to be.
And boy, will you build a relationship with somebody if a real person is in conversation with them?
RHEA 19:54
It really, as you’re talking, I I’m struck by an issue that some of my nonprofit clients and friends have brought up, which is that they have told me they’ve reached out, for emails via email for coffees, et cetera, and they’re not getting any responses back.
So I think there’s sort of two things going on, and I’d be curious about your thoughts. On the one hand, I think As a sector, we have not built trust, right? And and I can understand as a donor, if you’re reaching out to me, my first thought is this is a solicitation and I don’t want to take the meeting because I don’t trust that you won’t ask me for a solicitation before I’m ready.
And the second thing is maybe you’re not going to ask me for a solicitation, but you’re, but it’s a manipulation and you’re preparing to ask me for a solicitation. And then I’ll say the third thing, I think donor behavior has changed in the way that consumer behavior has. So when I go to a store, like I don’t, I actively avoid salespeople.
I buy most of my things online. I don’t want to talk to people unless I have a question, unless I want to talk to someone. So someone offering to help me when I don’t need help is going to be more of an annoyance than help. So I’m curious what your reaction is to those.
ALLISON 21:01
I have a lot of reactions to this.
So Settle down. All right. I’m going to take a second. Go ahead. The number one, it really hurts my soul when I see the drop in trust in nonprofits, right? And now we’re back to grabbing the norms of behavior from the corporate sector and just. laying it on, right? That we’re here to sell people things and to broadcast messages at them.
Until you’re ready to be something different, you can’t do something different. And we don’t talk enough about being something different, right? If you want to be really and truly be relational with people, then think about what you would be when you went out, go out to coffee with a friend. , are you warming yourself up to make a big ask to your friend when you’re going out to coffee with them, or are you genuinely interested in who they are, what they have to offer?
So until we are ready to be something different Rhea people are going to react to us from all of those experiences they have. With all of the solicitations and the asks that we make. And our organizations and our development staffs and our CEOs are going to have to practice. Being something different.
It is not going to happen overnight. It is going to be identify three donors at any level. I don’t care what level they are and get to know them deeply as people for a year. Don’t ask them anything. Don’t ask them for a donation, right? Could you do that as an organization? And I know that sounds risky, but think about this.
The way that you’re doing it now isn’t working. So The risk is actually very low. If you could make genuine friendships with people, ask them for advice, right? One of the things that we learned again from corporate is to wrap everything up neatly before sharing it with the public, right? These donors are smart people.
They have their own experiences and their own expertise and their own social networks. So how about going out there and asking them to really solve a problem with you? Now you’re being different in the world, right? For instance, we’re thinking about providing afterschool care here and there, but we’re a little worried that we don’t have the staffing to do blah, blah, blah, or whatever the issue is.
What do you think? Why don’t you help us? Now we’re different.
RHEA 23:32
It’s funny as you’re saying this, cause I can both think about Experiences I’ve had with donors where I engage them in these sorts of conversations, and I can hear the pushback being, I don’t want to let these donors think that because they write this check that they get to be involved in program.
And so I think really fundamentally shifting our relationship with our donors as stakeholders as a part of the community versus something that I have to protect myself against.
ALLISON 24:02
See, in addition. I think because we haven’t had honest conversations, honest relationships with donors, right? We’re accustomed to just being in that yes mode with donors, right?
A large donor wants something sure, in the hopes that they’ll write another check. Look, you may not get a large contribution from somebody that you go back to and say, let me tell you why that’s really hard for us to do, right? But you’ll get another donor that really gets that and really appreciates that.
And part of your job as the organization is to educate people, regardless of what they do, who they are, how big their checkbook is, right? Your job is to tell them how hard this work is why you’re approaching it this way. And You know what? There are going to be some people that don’t appreciate that, but there are going to be a lot of people who do.
You can’t be afraid of losing a donor. That puts you in a terrible position.
RHEA 24:56
Allison, you’re speaking my language because when we’re in scarcity, we get ourselves into situations where, we may take money that we shouldn’t have taken and it doesn’t feel good.
ALLISON 25:07
It doesn’t feel good. And you know that, right?
Yeah. Yeah. There are lots of donors out there. Literally, unless this donor is writing you a check, I’m going to put the floor, Rhea, unless that donor is writing you a 10 million check, you should feel free to disagree with them.
RHEA 25:23
And I think that also comes from the this mindset that we’ve had for a long time, which is that we just have to grab as many donors as we can for as long as we could.
And we’re going to help them with all of the solicitations until they stop giving. And to your point, it just doesn’t work. And, I think the thing that I want to lift up here is that the person on the other end of the zoom line or the phone call, or the coffee table is a person who has hopes and dreams and values.
And I like to say philanthropic dreams, right? They’re giving you a gift because they want something to happen in the world. And so if we can position ourselves as facilitators of that thing happening and The work that we do with their hopes and dreams, that’s when we get partnership.
ALLISON 26:09
I think that’s just right.
But let’s go back into the boardroom, Rhea, right? I’m sure, like me, you have sat on those boards where it was all window dressing. Right when the staff come in and everything is fantastic and there are no problems here and it’s not an honest conversation at all. And the board’s expertise is not really to use for the organization.
And so you get this. This mismatch, right? The board saying keep growing, right? Keep growing, grow more. You were 20 percent last year. Let’s make it 25 percent because they’re not hearing how hard it is. They’re not hearing about the real stress and the real difficulties. And this again is about back to measurement with boards.
RHEA 26:53
o I have so many questions. What’s your perspective about wealth screens? I have some mixed feelings about wealth screens, but I’d be curious about your perspective.
ALLISON 27:01
Historically, wealth screenings have been racially biased right? They don’t measure communities of color at all. And I think they look like an, a shortcut for development staffs, right?
You’re just going to cream these people who have shown by what houses they’ve bought how much wealth they have and it skews how you treat people. I think it really does. I am not a fan at all. I think that I think we need to look at every individual as A potential supporter, they will come with all the different kinds of gifts that they have, and the wealth screening is skewing the development to the large donors, and this is part.
Of that 20 percent drop off in donors, Rhea, that is being masked by the larger donors. The overall number still looks like it’s holding up but it’s not. And I hear tiny organizations saying, if we could just find a billionaire.
RHEA 28:04
I know. If we just knew Oprah or Mackenzie Scott, everything would be fine.
ALLISON 28:07
They could just solve all of our problems. That’s not how this works.
RHEA 28:11
Yeah. The nonprofit equivalent to like when we win the lottery, it’s that’s not actually a strategy. It’d be great if it happened for you, but let’s be honest.
Yeah. So let’s talk about boards because I do think.
You correctly identify that boards and C suite can be the appliers of pressure in ways that aren’t in service of our donors. And I think about donor velocity, right? Like I’m not going to give a gift until I’m ready to make a gift. I, until I’ve established in my mind the trust or my faith in the leadership or whatever it may be, or, I know what the impact is going to be.
And yet when I’m being pressured by, people who are not me, who don’t control my philanthropic giving, it does not feel good. And so often what I see is because we rush to the solicitation, because we pressure people before we’re ready, because we haven’t properly established the trust. If we do get a gift, it’s probably less than we would have if we actually took the time to get to know them, or it’s a one time gift.
So I’m just curious, how do we balance? In absence of boards really questioning themselves and asking how they want to be in the world, what’s a poor ED to do?
ALLISON 29:22
I was shaking my head initially that your listeners can’t see me shaking my head all the while you were saying that because the boards are such a, I think, a source spot in the entire sector, they were created to manage organizations that didn’t have staff in the 19th century.
That model hasn’t translated well to staffed organizations. And most often you have this disconnect between board members not really knowing what their jobs are and EDs desperately wanting help, but either not having the right people on the board to do that or not knowing how to orient them to that work.
Urban Institute did a study years ago of the desire of non profit EDs to have wealthy people on boards, which tend to be finance people and lawyers. The fact that those people tend to not like fundraising. So you’ve now stuffed these boards with people who probably don’t reflect your community, who don’t know what their job is, who don’t help you fundraise and you’re drowning, right?
There’s a great book, which I now can’t, I can see it in my bookshelf. I will send you the link later. You will share it with your listeners. About boards needing to focus on the adaptive strategic issues, right? Get out of the weeds of day to day management. Again, we’re back to measures, right?
What is your dashboard? And really be helping the organization. Be healthy for the next 1020 years, right? And you have to be able to make some big, tough strategic decisions to do that. And you have to help the organization to be fully resourced to do that. And the have to help these boards to have very different measures.
And yes, to connect you with people who want to be donors. That is part of the job.
RHEA 31:15
Is it by chance um, what is it? Uh, Strategy is governance. Yes. Bill Ryan. Yes. From Harvard. O’Brien was on the podcast.
ALLISON 31:25
He’s brilliant. He’s brilliant. Right. So the difference between technical problems, which have solutions, which is where most boards stay and adaptive problems, those big strategic issues that don’t have easy answers is where boards are supposed to be.
RHEA 31:43
Yeah. Yeah. And that’s hard. I think it’s hard because, again, we haven’t really taught people, not just boards, but EDs, how to do their jobs. And so we just repeat what other people are doing and whether it’s working or not. And it took me A long time, probably too long to figure out that actually my board meetings should be structured so that my board members talk because I already know what I know.
I don’t know what they know. And more importantly, how am I going to give them a big meaty issue to wrestle with that I’ve been thinking about versus recounting the board book that I sent to them a week before.
ALLISON 32:19
Every board meeting should be centered on a pain point that the ED can’t solve alone. That’s what they’re there to do, right?
The ED isn’t supposed to come with the answers. You have these very smart people around a table, put their brains to work, right? Get to the pain of the organization. We’re not growing fast enough. We have trouble falling, finding quality staff in these areas. Whatever that bottleneck is in your organization is what the board is supposed to be focused on, and that requires strategic vision on the part of the ED, and confidence on the part of the ED that you can bring a problem and you won’t have your head handed to you.
RHEA 33:01
Oh, that’s so true. I, and I think that comes from experience. Certainly in the early years of being an idiot. And again, I was a 26 year old idiot. So I didn’t really didn’t know anything, but I was so afraid to admit what I didn’t know for fear of exactly your point. Oh, they’re going to find out I’m going to be fired.
Da. And as I grew as a professional, as I grew as a person, I had more security in myself and more confidence to be able to admit that I didn’t know what I didn’t know.
ALLISON 33:32
You’re also picking up, I was a young AD as well, and we were also picking up all of these societal messages. About what leadership looks like.
So the world is telling us leadership looks like a white man who walks in with all the answers. And we, you and I have learned that is not leadership. Leadership is building community that gets us to the answers. And that’s a different way of engaging with the world. That’s that being part I was talking about earlier.
RHEA 34:02
I love that. In order to do different, you have to be different. So as we wrap up here, you’ve given us a lot to think about. So having conversations at the level of the board around what does it mean to be a human centered organization, thinking about our staff and asking the same questions and the other key takeaways that we can think about and implement in order to get us off this hamster wheel, which honestly feels terrible to everybody.
ALLISON 34:29
I think it’s important, Rhea, to understand where your time is being used as an organization, right? And where some of that time can now be replaced by AA, by AI in, in responsible ways, right? And you want to start that with some small experiments. But if you could take, for instance, your communications drafting time, that’s taking you five hours a week down to an hour a week.
Okay. Now you’re looking at some significant time savings. So where can we start to save some time? Where can we take some activities off the table that we’ve done because we’ve always done them? And how can we now start to use our time in deeply human relational ways? That’s the starting point.
RHEA 35:16
As you’re talking, Allison, it actually occurs to me, I’m putting my ED hat on, and I think it’s also really tempting to not figure out how to use my time strategically because if I’m busy, that is my value to the organization, right? So I’m busy responding to emails and I’m busy, doing other things because I’m actually afraid to pick up the phone to call my donors.
ALLISON 35:40
And I think that’s exactly right. And that’s where organizational leadership comes in, right? If we’re going to make this pivot, we’re going to find some things that are uncomfortable, right? If we’re going to really value, for instance, donor retention, then we have to find out why we’re not retaining donors.
is going to be uncomfortable. And the staff are going to need to know that C suite and boards have their backs, right? That we are going to figure this out for a year. We’re going to hear some things that are uncomfortable about the way we work or who we are. And that’s the only way to get better. Yeah.
But we do, we, what we really need to do is any time savings we have to be willing to invest in relationship building because if you just put it back on the hamster wheel, you’ve done nothing.
RHEA 36:28
And I’m also going to plug here that this is actually the value of coaching. So folks like you and me who’ve been in the sector can help hold your hand and hold you accountable for actually.
Involving yourself in activities that move the needle versus busy work, I think is really key.
ALLISON 36:43
Now, I’ll equal your plug as well at Every. org. We’re beginning to work with small groups of nonprofits. We want to really find out how exactly how we can help people. Make that pivot from transactional to relational fundraising.
We want to build more storytelling tools on our site. We want to encourage people to communicate with donors with fewer asks in it to try to get that retention rate up.
RHEA 37:11
Wonderful. So we will make sure to put all of your information in the show notes along with all the books that you’ve written with Beth, which are all fantastic.
Anything else that we should that you’d like us to know as we sign off?
ALLISON 37:23
Just come on over to every. org, take a look. It’s all free. We don’t sell your data. We don’t charge you any setup or transaction fees. We want you to be great fundraisers.
RHEA 37:35
I love that. So nothing to lose folks. Check out every. org and Allison, thank you for the work that you’re doing.
ALLISON 37:51
I think you beating the drum. There are a couple of us out here talking about the value of relational, not transactional fundraising. And I think the more of us are out here singing from the same songbook, perhaps we’ll see more change. Thank you for having me.
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/nonprofitlowdown/support
