Facing the "Fundraising Fear."

I would be a rich person if I paid myself for every time I heard nonprofit board members say, “I don’t like fundraising. I just don’t like asking for money.” I can hear myself saying similar things: “I am not a fundraiser. That is just not my skill set.” And yet…..

I have had to face this issue personally in recent weeks and the fear was real. In 2019 I was diagnosed with Multiple Myeloma, a cancer of the blood. With treatment at the Huntsman Cancer Institute at the same time as the covid 19 pandemic, one of the things that helped me so much was coming home to a painting on my wall that I have been storing for a wonderful artist friend of mine. I would look at it, take a deep breath and say, “It’s going to be OK.”

I then had this brainwave. The Huntsman hospital has this program for artists to donate their work to be hung on the walls of the hospital, to make it less sterile and more welcoming. I had this vision that this painting could help so many other women as they were in the depths of feeling “black” as I did.

And so, this project was born, to raise $8,000 to pay my friend the artist and to donate the painting to the Huntsman. Enter the fear! “How was I going to ask for money? What happens if I don’t raise enough? Remember, this is not my forte.” It was then I had to confront the reality that I was making this all about myself. My principal fear was about what potential donors might think about me. I finally looked at this honestly and I began to walk through the fear because my belief in the cause was much greater. I am still on this journey, but I am becoming bolder by the minute.

What does this mean for nonprofit board members? I have frequently been asked by CEOs for help to get their board members more engaged in fundraising, and I have tended to help them to skirt around the issues. Let’s find a way to engage them without them needing to discuss money. Certainly, having board members bear testimony of the value of an organization while the CEO does the ask for funding is a common theme in engaging board members. Or getting board members to write the personal thank you notes, to hold small soirees for donors in their homes and to attend fetes are equally valid methods for engagement.

But in this blog, I would like to ask some key questions that are not about board members side-stepping our fears but facing them front and center.

1. How passionate am I about the cause? Can I get that passion to outweigh my personal fears?

2. If I believe in this cause, how can I increase my messaging so that it is the worthiness of the cause donors are hearing and not from me?

3. When I ask myself honestly, how much do I make this about myself?

4. When my request for funding is a “no”, how much do I take this personally?

For CEOs, do you give your board members a pass on fundraising because they have articulated very clearly that they just don’t like asking for money. Rather than sidestep the issue, begin with connecting them more intently to your mission. I was in a training session with a board a few months ago and they acknowledged that the closer they felt connected to the mission, the bolder they felt about asking others for assistance, whatever that looked like. In this instance, those board members who had direct contact with the clients of the organization as volunteers scored more highly on the “I could ask for assistance from donors” scale.

If you would like some help in working with your board on this issue, feel free to give me a call.