Your Fundraising Mindset with Someone Whose Been There
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Fundraising is all about mindset. And if you don't believe that, chances are actually that you need to work on your mindset. If you've heard me speak about my fundraising origin story, you’ll know that I have loved fundraising right out of the gate, but I know that that's not the case for everyone. And so today you're going to hear from someone who hated fundraising and learned to love it by focusing on changing the mindset.
Mallory Erickson, CEO & Creator of the Power Partners Formula, joins us in the podcast to discuss how you can change your mindset about fundraising and raise more money for your nonprofit.
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Myths that Mallory wants us to walk away from:
Mindset has nothing to do with fundraising. How we feel and think about fundraising ultimately impacts how we show up and the results that we see. We can overcome the barriers to fundraising success by reframing our mindset and developing new habits.
Great fundraisers don’t get rejected. Good fundraising is a job that involves regular rejection and it takes a lot of intentional building of resilience to be able to not internalize that rejection or make it about you, or have it relate to your stories about yourself that get in the way and keep you in a paralysis and perfectionist state.
GAIL: Four primary types of thoughts that hold you back from successful fundraising
Gremlin or self-critic is the voice in your head that says “I am not good enough. I am not smart enough. I am not pretty enough. I am not enough” which plagues all of us. It gets triggered in fundraising because fundraising is a job that involves regular rejections and it takes a lot of work to build up your resilience so that you don't take them personally.
Assumptions. This is the result of our belief that when something has happened before, we believe it's going to happen again. For example, one donor didn't give last year, now we think that they're not going to give this year. But in reality, the data shows the exact opposite.
Interpretations are the stories that we make up about someone’s behavior that is not based on facts. For instance, a donor does not respond to your email in 48 hours, and you make up an entire story about what is happening, how they feel about you, what they think about you, and if they're ever going to donate to your cause. We make these stories and hold on to them as if they were true, but in reality, they are not based on facts.
Limiting beliefs are things that society puts on us that restrict our ability to think outside the box. The hundred percent model is a great example of a limiting belief, where we have been trained to think that there’s too much money to overhead. This is simply the limiting belief that we are all continuing to perpetuate, even as fundraisers. However, once you begin to challenge these beliefs, they disappear.
Favourite Quotes from Today’s Episode
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“Good fundraising is a job that involves regular rejection and it takes a lot of intentional building of resilience to be able to not internalize that rejection or make it about you, or have it relate to your, um, stories about self, um, that that often sort of get in the way and keep us in a sort of paralysis and perfectionist state. ”
“And one of the fundamental things that really needs to be changed is celebrating the actions that people are taking to fundraise if we intentionally, we know that celebration builds habits. So if we do a better job celebrating, making that phone call right, going to that meeting, parking your car in front of that foundation, like give yourself a high five, you know, like if we're starting to build in celebration around the actions, it's going to continue to help us build healthy fundraising habits, feel a lot better about our work. Um, and then have more resilience when people do say no, cause that's the, that's it, man.”
Resources from this Episode
